“The Final Stone”

The 6^th Part of a Sermon Series Entitled “The Journey of Stones”

Key Scripture References:

Isaiah 53:1-9, Matthew 26:36-27:61, Mark 14:32-15:47, Luke 22:39-23:56, and John 18:1-19:42.

 

⁵⁹ And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, ⁶⁰ and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away. - Matthew 27:59-60 (NASB)

 

Good Friday" is not misnamed. Good Friday is not Success Friday. Good Friday stands as a solemn reminder that the true winning side is not the side of success, but the side of righteousness. Whether someone is “successful” is of less consequence than whether someone, or something, is good, true, and beautiful. You don’t back a winner. You back the truth, whether it’s winning or not. The measure of a person, or a mission, is not found in temporal consequences or apparent success, but in adherence to goodness, beauty, and truth. Worth and winning do not always align. – Leonard Sweet 

 

The final stone is the most painful of them all.

 

“Scourging produced deep stripes like lacerations and appreciable blood loss, and it probably set the stage for hypovolemic shock, as evidenced by the fact that Jesus was too weak to carry his own crossbar to Golgotha.  Accordingly, death resulted primarily from shock and exhaustion asphyxia.  Jesus’ death was ensured by the thrust of a soldier’s spear into His side.” - The Journal of the American Medical Association

 

As hard as we may try, we cannot remove the stone ourselves.

 

The final stone represents the stone that sealed the tomb of Jesus on that first Good Friday.

 

This stone represents the stone that stands between us and a Savior.

 

May we never forget the final stone that changed the course of human history.