Hey everybody, this is Andy Wood, and I'm the pastor here at Saddleback Church, and this is our podcast.

Be sure to subscribe so we can get you these new messages every week, and I hope you enjoy today's message.

Let's dive in.

Welcome to Good Friday.

Great to have all of you here.

If you want to take out your message notes,

I'm not going to assume that we're all on the same page because on a Good Friday service,

there may be some people you've never been here before. Some of you might be wondering, what is this even all about? You're just here because you're curious. And what are we talking about? Why do we even call it Good Friday? What's so good about Good Friday? And why does this have to happen to begin with? This whole thing about the cross and the resurrection and the blood that we've been singing about. So I don't want to assume that everybody's on the same page and that we all know the same things. But I don't have the time to tell the whole story. So let me just tell you for a moment what I'm not going to talk about. Can I do that? I'll tell you just for a minute what I'm not going to talk about. I'm not going to talk about is that God created humanity to be in perfect relationship with him.

But then humanity rebelled against God and we gave ourselves over to sin. We became, the Bible says,

we became slaves to sin. And our relationship with God was broken. Well, the Bible says, we became slaves to sin, and our relationship with God was broken.

Well, the Bible says that the penalty for that sin, the penalty for our rebellion against God,

is death, and that the blood of a sinless person had to be shed in order to pay for the sins of the rest of us.

Well, God knew that we couldn't do that ourselves, so he did it himself.

He took on flesh, became a man, came in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus lived a sinless life, died on the cross, was crucified, shed his blood for us.

Three days later, he rose from the grave to prove that he is who he says he is and reconciled

and restored our relationship with God.

That's what we celebrate this weekend.

In churches, gatherings of God's people all over the globe, billions of followers of Christ

celebrating these truths this weekend.

But the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is not just an insurance policy for the,

you know, for the future. It's not just a sort of a get out of jail free card so you don't

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