This coming Lord’s Day begins our 2019 celebration of Easter, which will take us from Palm Sunday, to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and then to Easter Sunday.

At each of our worship services this week we will be preaching a series of message entitled, “On the Way to the Cross.” In these sermons, we will take a close look at some of the things that our Lord both did and said as He made His journey toward Jerusalem where He would die upon the cross, and then be raised from the dead on the third day.

This Sunday our sermon text will be Matthew 16:21-23. The event recorded here occurred just after that most important episode where Peter confessed Jesus as the Messiah. And, of course, Peter’s confession came in response to our Lord’s direct question posed to the Twelve: “But who do you say that I am?” (v. 15). The answer given by Peter, was that Jesus is, “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16). And then, our Lord Jesus declared that upon the basis of that Apostolic confession of His Lordship, Jesus would establish His Church, His New Covenant people, called by grace out of the world of darkness, sin, and spiritual death, and into the radiant light of eternal life in Him!

However, in our passage for Palm Sunday we will encounter the incident that took place immediately after this confession of faith. Here, we will discover how our Lord further clarified for His disciples, and for the whole world, what it actually means that He is “the Christ,” God’s Messiah! This is, for all intents and purposes, the deeper answer the Lord Himself gives to the question He first posed to His disciples!