Tears of joy after the final pitch on Sunday! We were blessed to be there to see our Rebels win their first National Championship! @CoachMikeBianco@OleMissBSB@RebVoice Hotty Toddy!
@LyndaniM Have you ever considered that the “church” needs you? Christ is the cornerstone of the church. I certainly want to be a part of anything that Christ has ordained and built on himself!
It was Monday morning, and Jesus was hungry.
The Son of God. The one who spoke oceans into existence. Walking a dirt road outside Jerusalem with His stomach growling like a stray dog.
He'd slept outside the night before. No pillow. No roof. The God who made the cedars of Lebanon didn't own a bed.
He saw a fig tree. Full of leaves. Looked alive from a distance.
He walked up to it.
Nothing. All leaf. No fruit. Beautiful from the road. Barren up close.
He cursed it dead where it stood.
Israel. That's what happened. A nation that looked alive from the road — the temple, the priests, the long prayers. Get close, and there's nothing there.
He kept walking. Stomach still empty. Fig tree dead behind Him. Cross two days ahead.
He went into the temple. His Father's house.
He'd been there the night before. Walked in. Looked around. Said nothing. Just observed. The money changers. The rigged scales. The dove sellers gouging poor women.
He saw it all. Left. Slept on it.
Came back Monday morning and started flipping tables.
Not a tantrum. Cold. Calculated. Righteous violence.
Coins scattering across stone like teeth knocked out of a mouth.
"My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves." — Mark 11:17
48 hours earlier, the same crowd screaming Hosanna was about to scream Crucify Him.
Same mouths. Same voices. Sunday worship to Wednesday murder.
That's your comment section. That's your mentions tab. That's the guy who retweeted you last week, calling you a fraud this week.
The crowd was never yours. It was never His either.
He stopped outside the walls. Looked at Jerusalem.
And wept.
Not for Himself. For them. For a city that chose war when it could have had peace.
He knew Psalm 22. Knew Isaiah 53. Knew every spit, every nail, every thorn before it happened.
And He set His face like a flint and walked into it anyway.
With the cross in His sightline He still stopped for a blind man. Still ate with a crook named Zacchaeus. Still, let a woman pour a year's salary on His feet.
Judas called it a waste.
The Bible says Judas didn't care about the poor. He was a thief with his hand in the bag.
Religious outrage always sounds holy on the surface.
Peel it back, and there's a thief underneath counting coins.
Two days from the nails, He gave the Pharisees both barrels. Matthew 23. Seven woes.
Blind guides. Whitewashed tombs. Full of dead men's bones.
His last public sermon. And He spent it telling the truth about the religious establishment.
It didn't make them repent. It moved up the timeline to kill Him.
The truth does that.
Then He washed Judas's feet. Broke bread with the man who'd sell Him for thirty silver. Prayed in a garden until sweat fell like blood.
By nine the next morning, He was hanging on the cross.
At noon, God snuffed the sun like a candle.
At three, He screamed: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Then He gave up the ghost.
The veil ripped. Top to bottom. God tore it Himself.
A Roman centurion — a pagan who'd watched hundreds die — looked up and said the only thing that makes sense:
"Truly, this man was the Son of God."
What a week.
You've had a bad one. I've had a bad one.
It was nothing like His.
And He knew it was coming. Every step. Every nail.
And He went anyway.
"For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds." — Hebrews 12:3
Consider Him. Then tell me you can't go one more week...