Oh, Lord, You are our portion. We promise to keep Your words. We entreat Your favor with all our hearts. Be gracious to us according to Your promise. The earth, O Lord, is full of Your steadfast love. You are good and You do good. Teach us Your rules. We say with the psalmist, it is good for us that we are afflicted, that we might learn Your statutes. The word of Your mouth is better to us than thousands of pieces of gold and silver. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

I hope you have a Bible and you can turn with me to John, chapter 19. It’s important to follow along. What we do here at Christ Covenant is preach through usually books of the Bible, verse by verse. We have been in the Gospel of John, well, I started soon after I came here, so we’ve been in this series for coming up on three years with breaks along the way, but we are coming now to the crucifixion to resurrection and to the end of the book. And this morning we are in chapter 19. We missed chapter 18 because of the last two weeks looking at the armor of God in Ephesians chapter 6, and so we will pick up with John chapter 19. Follow along as I read the first 16 verses.

“Then Pilate took Jesus and flogged him. And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on His head and arrayed Him in a purple robe. They came up to Him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ and struck Him with their hands. Pilate went out again and said to them, ‘See, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no guilt in Him.’ So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, ‘Behold the man!’ When the chief priests and the officers saw Him, they cried out, ‘Crucify Him, crucify Him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Take Him yourselves and crucify Him, for I find no guilt in Him.’ The Jews answered him, ‘We have a law, and according to that law He ought to die because He has made Himself the Son of God.’ When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, ‘Where are you from?’ But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to Him, ‘You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release You and authority to crucify You?’ Jesus answered him, ‘You would have no authority over Me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.'”

“From then on Pilate sought to release Him, but the Jews cried out, ‘If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.’ So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha. Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, ‘Behold your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with Him, away with Him, crucify Him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’ So he delivered Him over to them to be crucified.”

On March 30, 1981 Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, Jr., in an attempt to assassinate the President. No one knew at the time just how seriously injured and close to death Reagan was. Not surprisingly, behind the scenes the White House was in chaos. The Vice President was on a plane flying back from Texas, the President was heading into surgery. People wanted to know who was in charge. Al Haig, Reagan’s Secretary of State, rushed over to the White House, convened a meeting with a number of advisers, and then he entered the press room, he announced to the press and to the world, “I am in control here.”

Looking back,