I remember coaching high school football—undefeated one year, 5–0 the next, heading into a game against the number‑one team. I gave the best pregame speech of my life, even cried a little… and then we got crushed. Passion and confidence weren’t enough to overcome our weaknesses. That’s how many Christians follow Jesus—sincerely passionate, deeply confident, but spiritually overmatched. We imagine heroic scenarios where we’d die for our faith, yet the truth is we often run from Jesus over far smaller things. Today we see people who failed a test they never imagined failing, and we discover how much we have in common with them. In this week’s Palm Sunday sermon from Mark, we study what drove Judas to betray Jesus and what led Peter and the disciples to abandon Him—and in their stories, we learn we aren’t much different from them.
