Absorbed
Chris Holm | JUN 14, 2026
Scripture: The Whole Story #9
Series: The Whole Story
Categories: The Gospel and Salvation, Easter and the Resurrection, Healing and Wholeness
Sermon summary
We are in week nine of our series, The Whole Story, and this week we landed in the middle of the most pivotal moment in history. After four hundred years of silence, after Babylon and Persia and Greece and Rome had all taken their turns crushing God's people, something finally happened. And it happened in the way nobody anticipated.
We looked at the four main groups who were waiting for God to move. The Pharisees believed that stricter rule-following would eventually force God's hand. The Sadducees worked the political system from the inside and kept the institution running smoothly. The Zealots wanted a military revolution. The Essenes gave up entirely and moved to the desert to wait it out. Every single group had a diagnosis of the problem and a human strategy to fix it.
Then Jesus walked in and disappointed every last one of them.
We traced a consistent pattern through His ministry. In the ancient purity system, contamination only moved one direction, from the unclean to the clean. Nobody touched a leper. Jesus touched the leper, and the direction reversed. Wholeness moved from Him into the broken person. That same pattern ran through every healing, every dinner party with the wrong crowd, every conversation at the wrong table.
We looked at the cross through that same lens. Every dark, broken, violent force in human experience showed up at once and threw everything it had at Jesus. And He absorbed it. He held the betrayal, the rigged trial, the whip, the nails, the mockery, and He did not pass a single ounce of it back. Evil ran out of power.
And then the tomb was empty.
The resurrection confirmed what the cross accomplished. And forty days later, Jesus ascended, not into retirement, but into the throne room. He is ruling right now.
His strategy was never a political movement or a religious system. It was a vine and its branches. Stay connected, and the life flows through you naturally. That life is still moving, right here, this week.