Lent is meant to be an experience that helps us to walk and live as Jesus did.

When people in the church long ago created the seasons of the church year, they didn’t intend that we just know the story of Jesus…they intended for us to live like him.

This beautiful passage in Philippians 2 is also one of the most difficult challenges in the whole bible. We are to have the same attitude that Jesus did. We are to imitate Christ. We are to make choices in our lives that are shaped by the choices that Jesus made.

And the choices Paul highlights, the way Jesus’ entire life is framed, is as a life of emptying, suffering, and service.

Last week, I raised a question: what if our God still today can bring old, dry bones back to life? What if God still today is in the business of bringing to life his plans and dreams for our lives, ones that we thought were dead?

This week, we add to that question: What if God’s power is released only after we give up control and power? Are we willing to serve and sacrifice because obedience to God is our highest calling and desire?

What we’re continuing to do is take Lent seriously.

We’ve got one week left, and we’re choosing to not just know about Jesus and about his choice to submit to death on a cross. We’re choosing ourselves to give up, dig in, and look deep, to see if we can do what Jesus did.

We’re choosing to look at the choices Jesus made, and ask God’s Holy Spirit to help us see our lives and our choices with new eyes. We want to know what Jesus did so it can shape the decisions we face right now: the big decisions about how we will spend our lives, what we’ll do for work, where we will focus our time and energies…as well as the little day-to-day decisions about how to treat the people we live with and what to do when we see a neighbor in need.

Jesus didn’t let the laughter and joy of Palm Sunday change his actions or go to his head.

The truth of what Jesus did–and this is what Paul says we are to take as a model for our lives–the truth is Jesus didn’t strike while the iron was hot. He didn’t allow his success to change how he viewed his mission.

Just as he rightly rejected the temptations at the beginning of his ministry, he now puts his money where his mouth has been. Jesus sees his mission in light of some of the harder words in the book of Isaiah, places like Isaiah 50. Turn there with me, and listen as I read verses 4-9. [READ Isa 50: 4-9a]

The bible shaped Jesus’ mission. Jesus didn’t choose to go through suffering and the cross because he enjoys suffering. His choice came from knowing the heart of God, knowing that God is on his side and has the power to make things right.

Jesus chose suffering in order to identify with us–with the weary, with the ones who are beaten down. Out of obedience to God, he conquered suffering and redeemed it by submitting to it, trusting in the Sovereign Lord to help him.

There’s a sense of total abandonment for the sake of someone else…for our sake.

It’s an utter trust in God’s goodness and God’s power, an utter trust that is foreign to us and contrary to everything the world teaches us.

Jesus’ journey to death is an example for us, an example to show us that this kind of selfless abandonment to obedience is worth it, because it ends in God’s redemption and power.

It took God himself becoming human to make that example possible in such a cruel world.

And as we’ll see over the next two weeks, it is more than just an example we follow. Somehow, in the mystery and the love of God, Jesus’ death and resurrection make a new way of living possible, a kind of living for you and me where God’s Spirit truly lives in us.

But the new life comes after a death. The miracle of rebirth comes after the bones. The power of God comes not on the celebration of Palm Sunday, but after the obedience of Good Friday.

I wonder how many times we try to short circuit the process in our own lives?

How many times do I get to a Palm Sunday experience, where all the lights are green, where everything seems to be a go…and I forget about listening for the path God has for me, because everybody else’s voice seem to be saying so loudly “go THIS way”?

I remember a difficult time in my life, about 6 months before I turned 30. Leading up to this, all the lights were green: we were living in our first house, we just had our second baby, I was enjoying work. But our finances were tight and I was stressed, juggling credit card debt, feeling guilty, wanting to hide from our true financial situation. How would we get out? Why was God silent? Why did things seem so stressful at home?

The reality was I’d been going my own way, finding my own financial solutions. I’d been ignoring Elaine’s questions about money, ignoring the truth even myself. I thought God wasn’t coming through. I wanted Easter Sunday, but I hadn’t been willing to listen to what God said. I’ve gotten a little better at this as the years have gone by, but my natural tendency when things are difficult is to ignore them and not face them. This was one of those times when the way forward was to go through the way of the cross. I had to apologize to Elaine, be honest with her about my mistakes, and make things right. It was only then that God’s direction started to show, when I was honest with myself and Elaine.

They say that it is easiest for us to see in others what we also struggle with.

I know that I am not alone in the way I sometimes ignore the hard things in life, the way I want God to bail me out and complain when he doesn’t.

Often people get to a hard place in life, and they want help with discernment, wanting to know God’s direction or how God will get them out. If we use Jesus’ life as an analogy, sometimes it isn’t until we get to Thursday or Friday and things are looking pretty ugly that we ask God for help.

But Jesus was asking God for direction before his public ministry even started. He set the course out in the desert, as he sought God. He re-affirmed it countless times as he took time away by himself. And when the crowds were shouting his name on Palm Sunday, he didn’t let that change his course: he held obediently firm to his choice to suffer and serve.

We can come to God any time for wisdom, even in a crisis, even on Thursday or Friday of passion week. But we also need to come to God for wisdom and direction when all the lights are green, when it’s Palm Sunday in our lives as well.

We need to ask God for direction before we automatically take out a bigger mortgage because we got a raise, not just when we get laid off and struggle to make the payment.

We need to seek to live in obedience to God before we commit to marriage when everyone thinks we’re such a cute couple, not just when things are hard and we want to know if it’s time to divorce.

What Jesus modeled for us is a lifestyle of obedience.

Life is much more complicated with a mortgage and a car payment and braces and aging parents and saving for retirement or living on a fixed income. If we let those choices be made simply because the lights are green, because things are going well at the time, our later choices are constrained and confined by what we decide now.

Our ability to follow God in the future is affected, positively and negatively, by our choices now.

God’s seeming silence now may be because we didn’t ask for direction earlier.

Let me say it this way: bad circumstances in our lives are not the only criteria to help us decide if we have been obedient to God or not. Sometimes, as was the case with Jesus, our obedience leads us to suffer and go through hard times.

Sometimes, hard times come because we got ourselves there. We made the bed, now we have to sleep in it. How do we tell which is which?

By developing a lifestyle of obedience, where we are willing to say “no” to others when it goes against what God has for us. Palm Sunday for Jesus could have been a time to say “no” to God and “yes” to the crowd…but he didn’t let that happen.

What choices do you make when the crowd says “go”, when everything is going well?

A life of obedience is our call.

That’s the key thing to take from our journey through Lent and from the choices Jesus made in the last week of his life. Our call is to obey God, rather than people.

It’s not a call to suffering for suffering’s sake. It is a call to obedience to God…even if it involves suffering, even if it costs, even if we must sacrifice.

To walk as Jesus walked means to obey and serve.

In this last week of Lent, this passion week that marks the end of Jesus’ earthly life…keep giving up. It helps us see and hear God more clearly when we are willing to set things aside and listen. Keep digging in. Read the bible this week, each day, look and listen for what Jesus did, the choices of obedience he made, which led to the cross.

Keep looking deep into yourself. Think of the choices you make this week, and see if they are modeled after Christ’s example. Check your motives, the times when you are more swayed by Palm Sunday voices which affirm and speak positively than by the voice of God himself.