For the last 2 weeks I have had the privilege of preaching to the people at our church. I’ve loved doing back to back sermons over two weeks, it has given me a rare opportunity as a student minister to prepare two sermons in short succession. Over the two weeks, I worked through Matthew 27, as part of a wider series on the last 24 hours of Jesus life. A series we are doing specifically in the run up to easter.

Matthew 27 can be summed up pretty well by a poem that I discovered by a dude called Albert Midlane. He lived from 1825 to 1909. He wrote heaps of good stuff over the course of his life. But this short verse caught my attention as I was preparing.

Himself He could not save,
He on the cross must die,
Or mercy cannot come
To ruined sinners nigh;
Yes, Christ the Son of God must bleed,
That sinners might from sin be freed.

My main job in preaching these two weeks was to make sense of what Jesus was going to the cross to do, and why he didn’t just pull out and save himself when the beatings and the verbal abuse got too hard. This poem helped me articulate that well.