Pathway to Victory

Guest (Male): Hello podcast listeners. Thanks for streaming today's podcast from Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory is a nonprofit ministry featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. Robert Jeffress. Our mission is to pierce the darkness with the light of God's word through the most effective media available, like this podcast.

To support Pathway to Victory, go to ptv.org/donate or follow the link in our show notes. Now, here's today's podcast from Pathway to Victory.

Robert Jeffress: Hi, this is Robert Jeffress, and I'm glad to study God's word with you every day on this Bible teaching program. On today's edition of Pathway to Victory, abandoned by God. Maybe you know that feeling as well. You've asked God to intervene, but heaven remains silent. You begin to doubt God's goodness or even God's existence. If you've ever felt that way before, today's message from the cross ought to be an encouragement to you.

David J. Mullins: Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor Dr. Robert Jeffress. Have you ever noticed that suffering and loneliness tend to be a package deal? When you're going through a tough time, it can often feel like you're facing the battle alone. And that's exactly how Jesus felt in the hours before his death. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress examines our Savior's final moments on the cross. But first, let's take a moment to hear some important ministry updates.

Robert Jeffress: Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. In just a matter of days, Christians around the world will celebrate Resurrection Sunday. The miracle of Easter morning has reverberated through time and brought redemption to all who place their trust in Jesus Christ. But today I'm going to bring a message that might surprise you. I want to describe a moment in the Easter story that's often glossed over.

I'm referring to the crucifixion of Christ, when Jesus experienced the wrath and even the abandonment of God the Father. The storyline of the gospel, of course, has a happy ending. But it's not a happy one until we face the realities of our sinfulness. So, please be prepared to study from Matthew chapter 27 with me. At Pathway to Victory, we make it our mission to teach the truth, even when it's unpopular.

When you partner with Pathway to Victory, your investment flows into a proven method for broadcasting the truth without apology to millions around the world. Your generous gifts empower us to pierce the darkness with the light of God's word. Okay, let's turn in our Bibles now to Matthew chapter 27. I titled today's message, "When You Feel Abandoned by God."

We are entering into the most holy week on the Christian calendar, in which we remember the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most preaching around this time of the year either centers on the adoration of Christ on Palm Sunday or on the resurrection of Christ the following Sunday. Fewer sermons deal with what happened on that Good Friday, the death of Jesus Christ.

If people do tackle that topic, preachers might center on the physical agony of the cross. No torture has been invented that was as severe as death by crucifixion. Sometimes a message about Good Friday will center on the theology of the cross. What does the death of Christ mean to us? We just sang about it. On that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.

On the cross, the greatest exchange in human history took place. God took the righteousness of his Son, Jesus Christ, and wrapped it around us who are sinners. And he took our sin and he wrapped it around Jesus Christ. Paul said it this way in 2 Corinthians 5:21, "On the cross, God made Him, Jesus, who knew no sin to become sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him."

On that cross, Jesus became sin. He didn't become a sinner; that would have been impossible. But he took our sin. He experienced and tasted death, separation from God, so that we could experience eternal life. But instead of talking about the physical horror or even the theological significance of the death of Christ, I want to talk about something we don't often talk about.

That is the emotional agony that Jesus experienced on the cross. It's a feeling you've probably had in your life as well. It's described in the final moments of Jesus' life, described in Matthew 27 beginning with verse 45. Matthew writes, "Now from the sixth hour," that would have been noon, "darkness fell upon all the land until the ninth hour," that is 3:00 PM.

And it was about the ninth hour that Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani," which being translated says, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" And some of those who were standing there, when they heard it, began saying, "This man is calling for Elijah." Immediately one of them ran and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed and gave Him a drink.

But the rest of them said, "Let us see whether Elijah will come and save him." And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. Today, for the few moments we have, I want to concentrate on those words from the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Those words are the honest expression of a man who feels disappointed with, abandoned by God.

Maybe you know that feeling as well. You've cried out for God to intervene in your situation. You're in a season of loneliness in your life, physical pain, emotional pain. You've asked God to intervene, but heaven remains silent. You begin to doubt God's goodness or even God's existence. If you've ever felt that way before, today's message from the cross ought to be an encouragement to you.

First of all, that Friday afternoon experience on the cross reminds us that life is unfair. Life is unfair, even with godly people. Secondly, the cross reminds us that God does not always deliver us out of our problems. He doesn't deliver us always out of our problems. Again, we think, well, maybe if something horrible happens, there'll be a quick resolve to it like those one-hour dramas are on TV.

Something terrible happens, but the end of the 60 minutes, everything is reconciled. The fact is God doesn't always deliver us from the evil things that happen to us. Jesus, when He said, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" was actually quoting Psalm 22 that had been written a thousand years before Christ. In that Psalm, the first two verses, David cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning. O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but I have no rest."

David was struggling with a problem that Jesus had to wrestle with, Paul had to wrestle with, and probably you have wrestled with as well. And that is unanswered prayer. We like to talk about the miraculous answers to prayers. That's what encourages everybody, makes everybody feel good. But I think if we were all honest today, we would say more of our prayers go unanswered than answered. We don't want to admit to it, but it's true.

Why is that? Why do our prayers for deliverance rarely get answered? In an essay on prayer, C.S. Lewis suggested that God treats new Christians with a special kind of tenderness, such as a parent dotes on a newborn. He quotes one experienced Christian who said, "I have seen many striking answers to prayer, and more than one that I would call miraculous. But they usually come at the beginning of a person's life before conversion or soon after conversion."

As the Christian life proceeds, those dramatic answers tend to be rarer. The refusals too are not only more frequent, they become more unmistakable, more emphatic. In other words, Lewis is saying God's plan for us as Christians is to grow in such a way as we can be weaned off the need for immediate answers to prayers. That our faith deepens in God, so that like Job said in the midst of his heartache, he said, "Though God slay me, yet will I continue to trust in him."

That's the kind of mature faith God is trying to build in each of us. A third truth that comes from the cross is this: God rarely explains the reason for our suffering. Now, Jesus was the exception. He was God. He understood why he came to earth. His purpose in coming wasn't to be a good example or a great teacher. He came to be the ransom, the sacrifice for our sins.

Jesus said, "For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, to give his life as a ransom for many." In Matthew 16:21, the gospel says, "From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and raised up on the third day." Listen, what happened this coming Friday, Good Friday, was no accident.

It wasn't a case of some really bad men doing something really bad to the perfect Son of God. No, Jesus willingly gave his life. He understood that. Unfortunately, many of us don't understand God's reason for the heartache he brings into our life. Why doesn't God tell us like he told Jesus? Well, maybe God knows even if he told us, it wouldn't lessen the pain.

Jesus understood the purpose, and yet in the Garden of Gethsemane, remember, he prayed to be delivered from the experience of the cross. He prayed until he sweated great drops of blood. On the cross, he understood, but he nevertheless said, "My God, my God, why have you deserted me? Why have you forsaken me?" Another reason God doesn't explain is maybe he just realizes we can't understand.

You know, as finite human beings, at least in this world, when you're trapped by time and space, it's sometimes impossible to understand an omniscient God and see what God sees. There's a great analogy that's often used to explain the mystery of suffering. It's called the Hunter. A hunter goes into the woods and he sees a bear caught in a bear trap.

The bear is in agony, and the hunter feeling compassion for the bear wants to deliver him out of the trap. But the bear won't allow the hunter anywhere near him, fearing he'll do him harm. And so the hunter, not giving up, takes a dart gun and shoots the bear with darts filled with drugs. The bear is in a semiconscious and drugged state when the hunter approaches and, to the bear's horror, the hunter takes the bear's paw caught in the trap and actually pushes it further into the trap in order to release it.

But again, the bear doesn't understand, and he thinks now the hunter is trying to inflict as much pain as possible. But the bear has arrived at its conclusion prematurely. If it will wait just a little bit longer, it will see what the hunter is up to. You know, that's like us and God's dealings with us. Every dart of adversity that stings us, every push by the hunter deeper into the jaws of suffering convinces us that God is up to no good. He can't be trusted.

But we make our judgment prematurely. We don't understand many times the specific reason God allows us to go through what we may be experiencing. But there's some truths we can hang onto, even when we find ourselves in the jaws of suffering. I want you to write these three truths down so that you can remember them. Number one, God's purpose for our lives is good.

Whatever you're going through right now, never forget that God's purpose for your life is good, not evil. Romans 8:28 does say, "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose." The problem is we stop with that verse and we limit good to a very superficial meaning. We think the good that all things are working out together for are a full bank account, or a satisfying marriage, or a disaster-proof life.

No. No, the good God is causing everything in your life to work toward is found in verse 29, "For those whom God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brethren." God so loved his Son Jesus, he said, "Instead of just having one child, I want to have many children. Men and women who look and act just like my Son Jesus."

And that's what he's doing in your life. He's not just saving you from hell; he is molding you, shaping you into the image of his Son. And everything that happens in your life is for that purpose. I don't know about you, but I tend to learn more about God during the difficult times in my life, not the easy times. By the way, I'm not alone in that, you're not, it was even true for Jesus.

One of the verses I do not understand at all in the Bible is Hebrews 5:8 that says about Jesus, "Though he was a Son, he learned obedience by the things that he suffered." I don't understand how Jesus, the perfect Son of God, needed to learn anything, but apparently he did. He learned obedience by the hard things in his life, the things he suffered. Now, here's the obvious point.

If God's plan for his own Son included horrific suffering, why are we surprised when God's plan for us requires suffering as well? And that leads to the second truth: God's purpose does require discomfort. Right now God is molding, he is hammering, he is shaping your life to resemble that of Jesus Christ. He is renovating your life, if you will, renovating your heart.

And that's not always an easy process. Sometimes it requires discomfort. C.S. Lewis uses this analogy. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, you can understand what he's doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. But then he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably.

What on earth is God up to? The explanation is that he is building a quite different house from the one you thought of. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace. God's purpose for your life is good, sometimes it requires discomfort, and thirdly, God's purpose for our lives will be ultimately realized, ultimately understood.

Occasionally, we get a glimpse into the purpose of our suffering. Joseph did. Remember the story, Joseph sold into slavery, falsely accused of rape, had so many problems. But at the end, he saw how it worked and he said to his brothers, when he was reunited with them, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God used it for good to bring about this present circumstance to preserve many people alive."

But I want to suggest to you that's the exception, not the rule. Most of the time we live and die without seeing the purpose of what God is doing in our life. But it doesn't mean we won't ever see it. In 1 Peter 4:12 and 13, Peter writes, "Beloved, don't be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you which is come upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing, so that when at the revelation of his glory, you may rejoice with exultation."

When are you going to rejoice? When are you going to be filled with laughter as you look back over your life? Not now. It will be at the revelation of his glory, the second coming of Christ. Then it will all make sense. Life is unfair. God rarely delivers us out of our suffering. God rarely explains the reason for our suffering. But there's a final truth, and that is for all Christians, all disappointment is temporary.

For a Christian, all disappointment in God, all suffering is temporary. Look at verse 50 of Matthew 27, "And Jesus cried out with a loud voice and he yielded up his spirit." From a human perspective, for the disciples, it was all over that Friday afternoon. Their hope, their dream of a new kingdom and a new king to preside over that kingdom, those hopes were dashed. In the war between good and evil, evil had won hands down.

But three days later, everything changed. As we'll see next week from the perspective of an empty tomb, everything changed, everything. We're seeing horrific images coming out of Ukraine, inexplicable evil and suffering. That suffering is very real, but it's also very temporary. The Bible says it is the light of the resurrection that will eclipse the evil forever and ever.

All suffering is temporary. You know, occasionally somebody will ask me, "Pastor, what's the hardest thing you ever had to do in your ministry?" I don't even have to think about the answer to that. It's an experience I had that is so seared into my consciousness, I'll never forget it. It happened more than 20 years ago, and it happened to be a Palm Sunday.

We had finished the morning service, I went back home to eat lunch and get ready for the evening choir presentation. And while I was home, I received a telephone call that a young couple in our church had been killed in an accident, a traffic accident. They both were dead and they left two little girls behind at home. And the family member who called me asked if I would go over to the house and tell those two little girls what had happened to their parents.

I'll live to be a hundred, I'll never forget that experience of sitting there and watching those little girls cry their eyes out, realizing they would never see their parents in this life again. What do you say to children? What do you say to anybody who goes through something like that? The only light that will eclipse that kind of darkness is the light, the hope of the resurrection that comes from the one who said, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live again."

There's some of you right now who are trapped in disappointment, loneliness, hurt. You feel like God has forgotten about you. You think that God has abandoned you. No. The Bible never diminishes, it never belittles the reality of suffering, but it does add one word: temporary.

You know, there's a reason that feeling never goes away, that longing, that homesickness. It's because you were made for more than this. And somewhere deep in your soul, you already know it. The disciples knew that feeling too. On that first Good Friday, when the sky went dark and Jesus breathed his last, they didn't just feel disappointment.

They felt the end of everything they had hoped for. The one they believed in was gone, and with him it seems went every promise he had ever made. But here's what I want you to hold onto today. Good Friday was never the final word. It was never meant to be. That tomb could not hold him. Death itself could not hold him.

And on the third day, he walked out of that grave under his own power, and he changed the course of human history forever. My friend, Pathway to Victory has one purpose: to tell the world about Jesus Christ. His death on that cross for your sins and mine, his burial, and his glorious, miraculous, bodily resurrection from the dead.

A resurrection that is not just ancient history, but living hope for anyone who feels trapped in that Saturday between the cross and the empty tomb. The world needs to hear this message. The time is short, the stakes are high, and now's the time to amplify the good news about Easter Sunday. The fact is, you're the one who gives flight to Pathway to Victory. Your gift today will make all the difference. So, thanks from the bottom of my heart for responding today. Here's David to tell you about the resources you'll receive when you support Pathway to Victory today.

David J. Mullins: Today when you support the ministry of Pathway to Victory by giving a generous gift, we'll say thanks by sending you "The Divine Defense." That's Dr. Jeffress' bestselling book on spiritual warfare. You'll get that along with the "Equipped for Battle" brochure. 866-999-2965 is the number to call or visit online at ptv.org.

You can also support this ministry by texting PTV to 78800. And when your gift is $100 or more, you're also going to get the new "Divine Defense" teaching series on audio and video discs, the companion study guide, and the children's book titled "Suit Up for Kids." This book is a fun, interactive way to teach kids how to put on the armor of God and stand strong against the enemy.

To request the complete package of resources, call 866-999-2965 or visit ptv.org. You could write to us at P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. Again, that's P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins. Have you ever wondered why Christians call the day of Jesus' crucifixion Good Friday? After all, what could possibly be good about the brutal torture and execution of an innocent man? Join us for the message "What's So Good About Good Friday?" That's Tuesday on Pathway to Victory.

Robert Jeffress: Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Join us on the Pathway to Victory cruise to Alaska! Let me paint a picture for you. You're standing on the deck of a beautiful cruise ship, coffee in hand, watching a glacier calve into pristine waters while bald eagles circle overhead. You've got to see Alaska with your own eyes. Refresh your soul in God's cathedral of natural wonders, Alaska. Call 888-280-6747 or visit ptv.org.

Guest (Male): You made it to the end of today's podcast from Pathway to Victory, and we're so glad you're here. Pathway to Victory relies on the generosity of loyal listeners like you to make this podcast possible. One of the most impactful ways you can give is by becoming a pathway partner. Your monthly gift will empower Pathway to Victory to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and help others become rooted more firmly in his word.

To become a pathway partner, go to ptv.org/donate or you can follow the link in our show notes. We hope you've been blessed by today's podcast from Pathway to Victory. Oh, and one last thing before we go. Have you reserved your spot yet for the 2026 Pathway to Victory cruise to Alaska? You've been hearing me and Dr. Jeffress mention it, so what are you waiting for?

Just picture yourself on the deck of Holland America's elegant Koningsdam and stepping out on deck to witness nature's grandeur. It's beautiful. These moments in God's creation will deepen your faith in powerful ways, it really will. Experience five-star dining, luxurious staterooms, and visiting iconic ports like Juneau, Ketchikan, and Skagway. We're also bringing along our own Christian entertainment, you'll love it. Seats are filling up, so book your spot today at ptv.org.