What does First B Jackson teach about fickle faith?

At First B Jackson, the teaching on fickle faith starts with the crowd on Palm Sunday and refuses to let that crowd stay safely in the past. Across multiple messages, the same observation surfaces: the people who waved palm branches and shouted "Hosanna" were not hypocrites in some unusual sense. They were doing what people reliably do. They celebrated Jesus when he looked like the deliverer they wanted, a miracle-worker who might finally deal with Rome, and they turned on him within a week when it became clear he was not coming to fight that war. Pilate knew Jesus was innocent and said so three times. His own wife warned him away from it. He handed Jesus over anyway because the politics frightened him. The word the preaching kept returning to was fickle, and it was applied not as an insult to first-century Jerusalem but as a description of human nature across every century.

Pastor Nathan drew that same picture from Galatians, where Paul is astonished that the churches in Galatia are turning away from the grace of Christ so quickly, reaching back for the law after they had already received freedom. The Nazareth synagogue crowd praised Jesus right up until the moment he said something they did not want to hear about Gentiles, and then the mood turned murderous in an instant. Nathan pointed to that pattern, from Nazareth to Galatia to the present, as evidence that fickle faith is not a relic. Adding anything to the finished work of Jesus, whether law, works, or any other requirement, is the same old move: applauding a Jesus who fits our expectations, and walking away from the one who actually came.

What holds the teaching together is the contrast between human fickleness and God's faithfulness. The Zechariah prophecy about a king arriving humble on a donkey was already in the text. The plan to include the Gentiles as fellow heirs was hidden for ages but always there. The disciples themselves did not understand what they had witnessed until after the resurrection, and they had to look back to see what had been in front of them the whole time. The crowd missed it because they wanted something else. The teaching at First B presses the question of whether a congregation today is any different, and whether the faith we hold is in the Jesus who actually came or in a version of him we have constructed to meet our own expectations.

Taught from John 12 · John 19 · Psalm 118:25-26 · Galatians 1:6-7 · Ephesians 3