"How To Share The Joy Of Easter”

“How to Share the Joy of Easter”

“They took palm branches and went out to meet Him, shouting, ‘Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel.’" John 12:13.

Intro: Today is Happy Palm Sunday.

We remember, this day because it is the first day of the week

The last week when Jesus came to Jerusalem before his crucifixion.

Everybody celebrated him.

but by the end of the week,

He is going to be giving his life on the cross and being resurrected.

Palm Sunday really helps to deal with the question of, "Who am I going to follow in life?

Who's going to tell me what's the best direction to take in life?

Am I going to follow the crowd,

am I going to follow my conscience,

am I going to follow Christ?"

Am I going to follow the crowd?

The crowd actually got it right on that Palm Sunday.

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“They took palm branches and went out to meet Him,

shouting, ‘Hosanna!

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the King of Israel.’" John 12:13.

So they were doing great that day,

but less than a week later they're saying, "Crucify him! Crucify him! Crucify him!"

So that's what you get when you follow the crowd.

There's lots of ups and downs.

You're never going to know what direction the crowd is going

so you are going here and there

Wherever the crowds leads you.

You never know where you're going to go.

You can try to follow your conscience.

The problem with that is a lot of times your conscience you know the right thing to do,

but you can't quite seem to do it.

Anybody here struggle with that one?

Even more scary, you come to these moments where you realize,

"My conscience is telling me the wrong thing,"

because maybe you were not brought up in home with clear values.

Maybe you stopped going to Sunday School and bible study and have forgotten some of lessons and morals

So who do you follow?

You follow Christ because he's the way.

He's the truth.

He's the life.

That's really in a lot of ways what Palm Sunday is all about,

Today I want us to think about how do you really feel the joy of Easter this week.

In order to feel the joy of Easter, you have to share the joy of Easter.

You have to let other people know about it.

This is the best time of the year for sharing this greatest joy that we have.

So we're going to focus in together on what does it take

to really have a conversation about faith

and to share the joy of Easter.

If you have been a Christian for many years

Or maybe you don’t think yourself of as strong Christian

I think it is pretty safe to say that most people here still feel awkward

and have a difficult time sharing your faith.

Those of you who aren't yet followers of Christ,

you should appreciate that we're talking about this because you know we need to get better at this.

Sometimes we tend to not share very well.

We stumble over words to say.

We don't say what we want to say.

So as a result so many times we don’t say anything at all.

To the point that we just stop looking for the opportunities to share our faith.

So how do we get better at this?

Well, the way is to look at how Jesus Christ shared his faith.

Jesus is our model.

Jesus had a lot of conversations with people about faith.

So we're going to look at one of those conversations that he had.

We're going to learn from him how can you and I do a better job of sharing the joy of Easter

so that we can feel,

so that we can experience the joy of Easter in our own everyday lives.

The conversation we're going to look at is one that he had with a woman in John 4.

Here are some things you can do to have a conversation about faith

that creates a new kind of joy,

creates a new kind of understanding of what Easter is really all about.

1. Start

This is a tough one.

In fact this might be the most difficult one for many of you.

Start a conversation about your faith.

Why don't we have conversations about our faith?

Because we don’t start conversations about our faith.

You have got to want to share your faith.

Don’t tell me you are too shy, or too timid.

There is no one in this church that I haven’t heard talk about ball games, recipes,

You not too shy to let your complaints be known.