God on the Go: Against the Crowd – Jesus Coming Into Jerusalem

Julie Lyles Carr shares a personal story about losing a high school election to a more popular candidate, highlighting how quickly people can change their opinions. Research shows that people tend to follow larger crowds and are influenced by more numbers to base their judgment on something. Resist the impulse to rely on crowds for your decisions and instead stand up for your beliefs, regardless of popular opinion. 

What’s New!

Monday Story:

• When I was in high school, I ran for student body president. It was going well…until the football star decided at the last minute to run. Sometimes the crowd is with you. And sometimes it turns on you.

Tuesday Key Verse:

• Matthew 17: 17 & 20 – So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”…But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.

Wednesday Prayer:

• God, remind me that You love me so much, no matter what the crowd says. Remind me that the crowd changes their mind over and over. Thank you for loving me. In the name of Jesus, amen.

Thursday Question:

• What is a time that you’ve seen someone go from being really popular to not? What happened?

Friday Fun Fact:

• Q: What makes more people go with the opinions of a crowd?
• A: The bigger the crowd, the more likely you’re going to follow them. People in a group of 10 or less find it easier to resist going along than people do in a much larger group.

Special thanks to George Fox University for sponsoring the God on the Go Podcast!

Show Notes:

To get this week’s episode and daily text prompts, text the word Go to 89419.
If you are in Canada, text GodOnTheGo to 866-729-1065

Transcription:

I told you before that I wasn’t the most popular kid when I was going to school. I got made fun of. I got beat up a couple of times. I had a big mouth on me and I was really little for my age. We’ve talked about this, but when I got to high school, I started making a few more friends. Now, I was by no means popular. I was not one of the popular kids, but my first year in high school, there came along an election for class officers. Now at first, nobody was really running. Just a handful of people and none of us were really popular at all. And I thought, you know what? I want to run for class president. That is something I would really like to do and nobody’s really running, so I can run and maybe I can win and I could really help my class. I could do all kinds of cool things if I became class president. I had a few friends around me who were all like, that’s a great idea and you’ll win. It’ll be so great. And then more and more people were like, yeah, we would love it if you would be our class president. And I thought, oh man, the crowd is with me. I’ve got this in the bag. I’m going to be class president, until just a couple, three days before the election was supposed to be held. And guess what? The guy who was the big man on campus, on the football team, captain of all the things, super popular, handsome, all the stuff… he decided at the last minute that he would run for class president. And so, all those people that I thought were going to vote for me to be class president, when it came election day, that crowd changed. They went a completely different direction. And this guy who hadn’t seemed all that interested in being class president, well, you guessed it. He was elected in by a landslide.

This is God on the Go. I’m Julie Lyles Carr, and we love to help you make the minutes matter. We’ve been talking about going against the crowd, and lemme tell you, there are times that you have to be really intentional to go against the crowd, and then there are times that the crowd goes against you. And the crowd can change its mind really, really fast. Maybe you’ve experienced this before where you really thought something was going to be fun or everybody wanted to do a particular thing, and you turn around twice and everybody is going a different direction.

Now, I thought this was really interesting. What makes more people go with the opinions of a crowd? What changes their mind? Well, as it turns out, researchers say that the bigger the crowd, the more likely that you’re going to follow them. People in a group of 10 or less, they find it easier to say, oh, I’m not going to go along with that than they do when they’re in a bigger crowd. There’s something about a bigger crowd, about popular opinion, about a whole lot of people saying, oh yeah, yeah, that’s what I want to do, or that’s who I want to vote for, or that’s where I want to go. It makes it harder at times for us to then turn our opinion.

Jesus experienced this and experienced it in a really dramatic way. At the events of Easter. Jesus came into the city of Jerusalem. Now, Jesus was not originally from that area. He was originally from an area further up north, but he came into Jerusalem for the Passover. He had become known as a teacher. He had become known for healing the sick. And so, when he came into Jerusalem on this Passover week, this celebration in the Jewish calendar, people they threw a parade. They were so excited that Jesus was there. They cut palm fronds and waved them in the air, and they were so excited to see him come into the city. In less than a week, the crowd turned against Jesus. He was arrested, he was taken in for questioning. He was shuttled back and forth between the high priest and the person from Rome, who was over the area, a man named Pontius Pilate.

And listened to what happens. Matthew says in chapter 27, verses 17 and 20.

So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you:

Pilate had two people that he was asking the crowd to choose between. One was a guy named Barabbas, who was known to be a really bad guy and the other one was Jesus. So he asks the crowd,

“Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” 20 But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.

Wow. That’s how fast that crowd turned from throwing Jesus a parade as he came into Jerusalem, to just a handful of days later demanding that he be executed. So, what does this mean for you and me? We can’t rely on the crowd to make our decisions for us. We can’t always trust that what the crowd is doing is the right thing. We have to know that crowds can turn, people’s opinions can turn very fast. The thing that makes you popular today could be the very thing that turns the crowd against you tomorrow. And the better we can get at deciding that we won’t let the crowd control us, the better things we can do for God. The more fulfilled we can be in our life, the more we can be ourselves and the more we can stand up for what we know is right.

Text the word go, GO to 89419 and I’ll send you memory versus discussion questions, the trivia that we’ve talked about today. All kinds of things to help you keep this conversation going about what it means to go against the crowd. God on the Go is sponsored by George Fox University, where each student will be known personally, academically, and spiritually. I’ll see you next week.