Focus On Praise & Worship Series

LET’S PRAY

Father we ask for Your anointing on us today. Place Your anointing on me as Your messenger today. God move in our lives. Rip open the heavens and visit Your people today.

Open our eyes so that we may see Your Word. Open our ears so that we may hear Your Word. Open our minds so that we may understand Your Word. Open our hearts so that we may receive Your Word today. AMEN

“The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” Romans 13:11

What an awesome day to finish looking at our updated mission statement for our church and our plan to carry it out.

Winfield Open Bible a place that brings Transformation, Healing, Equipping. Those words sum up our mission statement and once we understand the mission we need a plan to carry it out. That plan is based upon focusing on five areas; Invest and Invite, Word of God and Prayer, Meaningful Relationships, Serving Each Other, and Praise and Worship.

Last week we looked at Serving Each Other.

Serving Each Other goes deeper than love. This is helping others so that we can make a difference in their life. We need to make a habit of serving others so that we can demonstrate God’s way of loving.

We looked at one of greatest examples of serving each other in God’s Word in John 13:1-17 when Jesus took upon Himself the position of a servant and washed His disciple’s feet.

The other example of serving each other that Christ gave us is found in His death. Jesus took His love for mankind to a higher level, when He laid His life down for us.

Jesus’ death on the cross was the greatest act of servant hood that has ever been recorded in history!

Jesus summed up the extent of His love and the extent to his servant hood by saying this, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13

This was a new concept for the disciples. Jesus had spoke of this kind of love but they had never seen it demonstrated in such a way as these.

He was their teacher as well as their friend and now He was washing their feet, and then getting arrested, and going to trial.

He went to trial and the judgment was guilty. Guilty of what? Guilty of being the King of the Jews. So the punishment was crucifixion.

“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13

As you may already know, death by crucifixion was the worst type of punishment that mankind could have ever dreamt up.

If the crucifixion was not enough, before they led Jesus to the place where they nailed them to the cross, the soldiers had beaten Him, whipped Him with a whip called a cat of nine, pulled His hair out, spat upon Him, made fun of Him, and placed a crown of sharp thorns upon His head.

All this before He was nailed to the cross.

And if the beating and whipping was not enough and being nailed to the cross was not enough they made Jesus carry the very cross He was to be nailed on.

Roman crucifixion was a gruesome form of capital punishment. The victim suffered excruciating pain for hours, even days, before the rigors of the cross finally snuffed out his life.

In its most common form, the cross consisted of two pieces of wood. The upright, called the stipes, was permanently fixed in the ground and the crosspiece, called the patibulum, was carried to the site of execution by the condemned man.

This task was in itself an ordeal, since the patibulum was a stout beam weighing more than a hundred pounds.

The crosspiece rested on the upright and probably had the shape of a capital "T".

I read in an article on the Internet that in 1968, archaeologists discovered the remains of a Jew who had been crucified during the era of Christ. It was possible from the skeletal evidence to determine exactly how the man had been fastened to a cross. The information left no doubt that this form of punishment was hideously and cruelly efficient.

A crude iron spike from five to seven inches long had been driven through each wrist. Also, after both feet with heels and toes together had been turned sideways against the cross, a third spike had been driven through a board and then through both heels.

When the man hung on his cross, the lower part of his body must have been twisted to one side.

During crucifixion, the victim was provided with a partial seat, called a sedile, a simple board nailed to the cross. But he could use the sedile only by allowing his torso to slump, with painful results. The weight of his sinking body forced his knees to bend sharply and stretched out his upraised arms to an unnatural extent.