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 Palm Sunday at Saddleback Church. So glad you're with us. If you want to take out your message notes, I want to try to unpack Palm Sunday for some of you today and help us to find

our place in the story of Palm Sunday. And why it's important for us? Because many of you know my story.

I grew up in church. And so as a kid, all I knew about Palm Sunday was it was that one Sunday

a year where the same deacon put on a Jesus wig and a bathrobe. And he got on a donkey and rode the donkey down the center aisle of the

church, and all these little kids were behind him with palm branches, waving their palm

branches, and they were singing a song to some girl named Rosanna. And that's all I knew about

Palm Sunday and who cared and why was it important.

So what I wanna do today is dig into the meaning

and the significance of what happened on Palm Sunday.

Maybe give us a new way to see it

because it is the beginning, after all,

the beginning of what we call Holy Week.

So to understand the first Palm Sunday, we have to go all the way back in the Old Testament

to the first Passover. It happens back in the book of Exodus. And the context of Passover was slavery

and oppression.

Where God's people, the Israelites, were slaves in Egypt.

They had been slaves there for 430 years, generation after generation after generation.

And they were living under the heavy hand, the oppressive hand of the Egyptians. They had no control over their

future, over their dreams, no control over their freedom. And so they called out to God to set them

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