Hi there and welcome.

Thank you for joining.

Today is Good Friday.

And you may be not in a place where you can attend an actual service.

And so what I wanted to do was not really give you a service here,

but just give an opportunity for all of us to reflect on the grand display of love

and depth of affection that the father has for us by sending his son to die for us on a cross,

to suffer so that we wouldn't have to.

And so I want to pray for you where you are and us to just enter into this space of really feeling the depth of sacrifice he made for us.

Before I do that, I wanted to share that. I'm in a culture right now where they do a full

reenactment of the entire story of the crucifixion.

And so last night we walked the dirt road following somebody playing the role of Jesus and the apostles

and went up the hill to the mountain of, I guess, the Garden of Gathemeni,

and watch Jesus pray and watch the guards come and take him away,

and the whipping and the pain that Jesus endured for no fault of his own.

And at any moment he could have called his angels to come and rescue him to respond to the

unfair treatment in the way that they deserved.

But Jesus didn't do that.

The humiliation he experienced that these people who expected him to overthrow the government

and become the king and the natural,

and now they're watching him be humiliated and spit on and tortured and beaten.

And yet he endured that.

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