Easter 2018: The Resurrected Jesus

Good morning and happy Easter.

Welcome to Orchard Hill.

A special welcome to those of you in the lobby overflow in the liturgical worship service in the chapel in the Strip District.

This weekend we've had 11 different services, counting Good Friday in Butler County, the Strip, Wexford.

And it's great to be together to celebrate what millions of people all over the world are joined together to celebrate, which is Jesus' resurrection.

Let me take a moment and pray, and then we'll jump into our teaching.

Father, we thank you that we can be gathered in three locations and have a chance just to explore the significance of what this day means.

Father, I pray that you would speak to each of us in this time, that my words would reflect your word in content and in tone and in emphasis.

And we pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So how many of you have heard of the name Eddie Tipton?

Well, let's see your hands if you've heard of the name.

All right, that's very few, which is what I suspected.

This is a picture of Eddie Tipton.

Eddie Tipton is a man who worked for the Interstate Gambling Commission or Gaming Commission, and he oversaw the lottery.

So if you've ever played the lottery, he's one of the people who helped to make sure that everything was fair.

The problem is Eddie Tipton was just convicted of scamming the lottery out of$24 million.

And as he tells the story, he began working for the lottery in 2005, and he was one of the people who would program the numbers so that it was random enough so that when you put a number in and chose a number, you wouldn't have a chance of cracking the code in terms of how that works.

And the odds of winning the lottery are about 5 million to 1.

Now, if you play the lottery just for perspective, statistically speaking, I'm just talking statistics, you have a better chance of being kicked to death by a goat than winning the lottery.

And Eddie evidently didn't like these odds.

And so he began, since he had control of the programming, to create some numbers that would have a better chance of winning.

And he fiddled with it and fiddled with it until he got the odds down to 200 to 1.

But he realized it would be too obvious if he was too close to himself, so he would call friends in other states and have them buy tickets with these numbers.

And he won five different payouts that totaled over$24 million.

And when he was convicted, he said, you know, I never set out to scam the gaming commissioner people.

He said, but I felt really underappreciated and overworked by the gaming commission.

He has a salary of over$100,000.

And he said, but it was that they didn't do enough for me that I felt justified in doing this.

Now, the reason I tell you about Eddie Tipton is because spiritually, probably some of us think about Easter and Jesus and say the odds are like 500 million to one or five million to one.

And I might have a better chance of being kicked to death by a goat than that this is true.

Or some of us might say, it might be true, but my chances are small.

I need to do things to arrange my life so that I get an increase in my chances.

Or some of us might say, you know what?

I've been good, I've done right things.

God owes me.

Just recently, in fact, last weekend on the broadcast of the NCAA tournament, Charles Barclay was talking about life.

And he said that he thought he had about an 80% chance of making it to heaven when he died.

He said, about 20% that I don't.

And what he was saying was, I'm pretty good.

I haven't been perfect, but I'm pretty good.

80%.

And one of his co-hosts said, Charles, it doesn't work that way.

You can have a 100% guarantee because it isn't about what you've done, it's about what Jesus has done and your faith in Jesus.

And yet I wonder how many of us come here and say, Well, my chances are good because I'm a good person.

Well, 1 Corinthians 15, which is one of the great chapters in the Bible about the resurrection and about Jesus, says this in verse 34.

It says, Don't be misled.

This is verse 33.

Bad company corrupts good character.

Verse 34, come back to your senses as you ought and stop sinning, for there are some who are ignorant of God.

And I say this to your shame.

And the ESV says, there are some who don't know God.

You know, some of us we come here today because we believe the resurrection and we're here to worship.

Some of us come uncertain.

Some of us come and we came because we wanted to appease somebody.

Or somebody promised us lunch later.

And we said, if if I'm here, I'm not sure exactly what I what I think or believe, but here's what I think 1 Corinthians 15 does is it tells us about the resurrected Christ.

And I think the resurrected Christ counters some of our false notions of Christ that can actually take us away from belief and away from knowing the real God.

I was out to lunch with some of our staff last week and we went to a burger place.

And the burger place we went to on the menu, if I remember correctly, said there are over 108 different ways to get your burger at our burger place.

You know, it used to be when you'd go for a burger, you'd have this burger or that burger.

You'd just get a burger.

Now, 108 different ways because as a culture, we love to be able to say, my way is the way that I want it.

I want it all customized.

And I think that's bled into our spiritual lives, where we all have different versions of God that we say that we worship, but what the resurrected Jesus does is he counters some of the most common ways that we customize Jesus.

And so what I want to do this morning with you is just point out some of these and point out how 1 Corinthians 15 counters those.

So here's the first one.

I'm just going to say the first one is a life coach or like life coach Jesus.

And my idea here when I say this is that if you see Jesus as a life coach, what you in essence are doing is you're saying this Jesus shows you the way to live your life.

He tells you all the things that you need.

And if you get out of bounds a little, you know, he calls, call calls you back into the bounds and he directs you for your best life now.

And so what you do is you have it have a Jesus who will coach you up so that you can live your life to the fullest.

I heard one person teaching about this, and they said that if you listen to the charge to superheroes in like kind of the superhero tales, and you listen to teaching in the average church that there isn't much difference.

And here's what they were saying: the charge to a superhero is there's an impossible odd, but you have a superpower deep within you.

And if you'll access your superpower, you can be the hero and save the day.

And then they said, but if you listen to a lot of teaching in churches today, it's you can live a great life.

God has something amazing for you to do, some amazing future for you.

And if you would just access the superpower in you, which is Jesus, then you would be able to live for everything that's in front of you.

Here's how Richard Matthew writes about this in his book, Will the Real Jesus please stand up?

He says this.

He says, This false Christ, talking about this version of life coach, that's my title for it, not his, primary purpose is to alleviate and improve bad marriages, parenting problems, unsatisfying sex lives, low self-esteem, and so on.

Inadvertently and advertently, this leads Christians away from the real Jesus.

Because Jesus and his gifts no longer become an end goal for the Christian, but only something that is used to get the Christian to a completely different goal.

And so in this version of Jesus, there's always something more.

And even when somebody affirms the resurrection, what they're doing is they're saying, you can affirm the resurrected Jesus, but Jesus has something more for you, and he'll be your guru, your life coach to get you the life that you really want, because there's always something more.

Here's what 1 Corinthians 15, verse 14 says.

1 Corinthians 15:14

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless.

And so is your faith.

So the resurrected Jesus counters this because it says, you can teach and you can you can use all that Jesus has to say to you, but it's useless.

Your faith is useless if you don't understand or appreciate or worship the resurrected Jesus.

So that's one version of a customizable Jesus that the resurrected Jesus counters.

Here's a second, and I'm just going to call this the prototype.

And the prototype or a prototype Jesus, I have some flip-flops to represent this.

These are supposed to be like sandals Jesus wore, but these were what I could find in my garage last night.

I don't think his sandals look like this.

But the idea of this is where we start to say, this Jesus that we worship or that we follow is the example.

Jesus does instruct us.

Jesus does emulate or become a model or a prototype for us.

But the problem with this view is that when we start to say, Jesus is the prototype, I have to follow in the dust of the rabbi, I have to be so closely behind his sandals that people can't tell the difference between me and Jesus, is that what we start to do then is we start to raise a moralistic bar where we say, if you really want to be like Jesus, then you have to do all the things that Jesus did.

You have to be like me.

And sometimes the things are absolutely right.

They're in Scripture, and you go, oh, that's how I should live.

But sometimes there are things that people put on top of Scripture and they add to it and they say, if you really want to be a good Christian, then here are all the things that you'll do.

And sometimes it becomes not just about our own behavior, but it becomes about a cause.

In fact, I call this causeism.

I think I made that word up, but causism is where we say Jesus has a cause.

He's against the oppressors, and so when you say I'm going to stand against the oppressors and I'm going to stand with the victims, then I'm being like Jesus.

And what can happen is we can say all that following Jesus is, is becoming more and more like him in the world.

Now don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that it's not good to be like Jesus, but again, I want you to hear the words of 1 Corinthians 15, verse 17.

1 Corinthians 15:17

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.

It's worthless.

And you're still in your sins, is what it says.

You see, what happens for some of us is we will work so hard to try to be like Jesus that what we need is we need wood to build a ladder so that we can try to get closer and closer to Jesus when Jesus is given the wood of the cross so that he could become a sacrifice for us.

I love how one author put it.

He put it like this He said, the Bible is not a record of the blessed good, but rather of the blessed bad.

Far from being a book of moral heroes to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes of the Bible are really not heroes at all.

They fall and fail and make huge mistakes and get scared and they're selfish and deceptive and egotistical and unreliable.

The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with his rescue, our sin with his salvation, our failure with his favor, our guilt with his grace, and our badness with his goodness.

So if we read the Bible asking, what would Jesus do instead of what has Jesus done?

we will miss the good news that sets us free.

I love that because so often what we do is we say, What would Jesus do?

Now I'm not saying that's a bad question.

You remember a few years ago there used to be the bracelet thing.

People would wear around the little bracelets that said WWJD, what would Jesus do?

I'm not saying it's not a good question, but what I'm saying is when that becomes your entire focus, what you're doing is you're saying it's all about what Jesus would do rather than what Jesus has done and what Easter is about, what Good Friday is about, what Holy Week is about, is what Jesus has done, and what should happen when you are in a Christian environment and worshiping is there should be a moment where you say, This is what I should do, but you shouldn't leave saying, I'm going to redouble my efforts because it will lead to self-righteousness or despair.

Because you'll say, When I do these things, I'm enough, but instead you should leave saying, Here's what Jesus has done.

Jesus has paid the price.

And it'll keep us from exhaustion and from being in a place where what 1 Corinthians 15, 17 says that your faith is futile and you're still in your sins is true.

Because for some of us, our whole version of Jesus is just improve myself, be better.

And so we miss the resurrected Jesus.

So we have Jesus as a life coach, we have Jesus as a prototype.

There's a third kind of Jesus that gets into our culture, and I'm going to just say that this is Jesus as a cheerleader.

And I'm going to just let you guess what my prop for this is for a moment.

Actually, not too long.

But the cheerleader Jesus is one who is always for us.

Now, again, understand that the idea of each of these is that there's some truth.

Jesus is for us, Jesus does teach us, Jesus does show us the way.

These are the pom-poms for a cheerleader.

Now, I just want to be very clear, I'm pro-cheerleader.

Male and female cheerleader.

I played sports in college and in high school, and cheerleaders were awesome.

And here's why cheerleaders were awesome.

Whatever you did, whether it was good or bad, they were like, yes.

They didn't coach you up, they didn't boo you, they didn't, they didn't tell you what you did wrong.

They were just like, you go, you do it, you can.

And the reason cheerleaders are awesome is because they just want everything to work out well.

Now, again, there's some truth to the idea that God wants everything to work out well, but here's the problem with this, and that is for some of us, what we've done with God is we've assumed that God wants us to be happy in such a way that God will never counteract anything that we want.

And if you've been around Orchard Hill, you've heard me say this, but if but if the God that you worship never counters your will, never challenges your will, it isn't God that you're worshiping, but it's some version of God that you've made up in your own image that's more palatable to you.

In Richard Matthew's book about will the real Jesus please stand up, he talks about a conversation he has with somebody who has the version of Jesus as the cheerleader, and he doesn't use that phrase, he uses a different phrase.

But the cheerleader Jesus, this person rejects because what they basically do is they say, I grew up in church, but as I got older, I realized that the church believed things, and if I believed those things, then I couldn't do what I wanted to do, I couldn't be happy.

And what some of us do is we equate happiness with goodness and unhappiness with badness and say, God couldn't possibly ever direct me in a way that isn't in accordance with what I want.

But again, notice what 1 Corinthians 15 says.

1 Corinthians 15 verse 19 says this if only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

1 Corinthians 15:19

In other words, if your version of Jesus is just saying, you do you, you make your life good, you be happy, don't worry about anything else, it says what?

You are to be pitied most of all.

We're to be pitied most of all if there isn't the resurrected Jesus.

So we have Jesus as a life coach, we have Jesus as a prototype, we have Jesus as a cheerleader.

Here's another option that has occurred to some, and that is Jesus as an option among many.

Jesus is an option among many.

For many people, the way that Jesus works is they say, well, Jesus is good if that works for you.

You can choose Jesus, you can choose something else.

As long as you have some spiritual awareness, some spiritual kind of impulse in your life, then it really doesn't matter which way you go.

So this is a map.

This is an old school map before GPS.

And so this would tell you different ways to get to the same place.

So if I were to say I want to travel from my home to Chicago, I could go multiple ways.

I could go the fastest way, the turnpike, 80, right across.

I could go south and go 70 through Columbus and Indianapolis and up.

I could go into Michigan and take 94.

But ultimately, if I'm going to Chicago, I could take any of those routes.

And what some people do with Jesus is they say, well, Jesus is just one of those routes to God.

There's a lot of ways, and everybody's spiritual in their own way.

And again, understand, there's some truth to everything.

In other words, there are the the it's each of these views, there's truth in the idea that there's truth in all religion, because all religions talk about sinfulness in their own terms.

But here's where the resurrection is different.

And that is all the other religious leaders of the world basically say, here's the way that you ingratiate yourself to deity, so be better, avoid these sins, and then you might have a chance.

But Christianity says something entirely different, and it's rooted in the resurrection of Jesus.

And that is that you and I are born sinful, and that in all of our sin we need a savior.

See, our culture tells us that tolerance equals love and that exclusivity equals hate, and that the Christian message is exclusive because it excludes people.

It's actually not true.

The Christian message is the widest message of all because it says you don't have to perform, you don't have to be anything.

Whereas every other creed will say you have to be something.

Christianity says Jesus has done it for you.

And here's where we see this in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 20.

1 Corinthians 15:20

But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the first roots of those who've fallen asleep.

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes through a man also.

It's talking about death through a man, through Adam, through his sin, that it came to all of us.

And he says, But the resurrection comes through a man also, through Jesus.

Verse 12, but if it's preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say there's no resurrection from the dead?

You see, it's the resurrection of Jesus that puts us in a place where we can say, Now I know that there's a resurrection from the dead for me, and I know that there isn't just an option among many.

Verse 26 says it this way the last enemy, speaking of death, will be destroyed, for he's put everything under his feet.

Now, when he says he's put everything under his feet, it's clear that he does not include God himself when he put everything under Christ.

In other words, Jesus isn't just an option among many.

It might be like this, the baseball season just started.

If you were to say, you know, I don't really like how they score runs in baseball, having to go to first base, second base, third base, and home.

I just want to go out and touch the pitcher's mount and come back and touch home plate and call it a run.

That wouldn't change the game.

What you and I can't do is just simply say, well, it doesn't matter.

You see, this is why the resurrection of Jesus matters.

This is why we had verses one through four read of 1 Corinthians 15, where it says that Jesus died, was raised to life, and was seen by witnesses.

Lots of witnesses.

So there were people alive in the first century who could see and tell that they had seen Jesus after his crucifixion and burial.

And even more, many of the disciples who followed Jesus went to their death saying he was alive.

And I don't know about you, but but if you ever get caught in a lie and it costs you more than the truth, what do you quickly do?

You say, Oh, hold on, hold on, here's the truth.

In other words, these people went to their death when all they would have had to do was say, no, no, he he really was dead.

We just made it up.

Because he's alive.

And it's the resurrection that sets Christianity apart.

Because if the resurrection isn't true, then Christianity doesn't make sense.

Then Jesus isn't a better guru.

He's a liar.

He's not worth emulating because he didn't lead us anywhere except to a grave.

But because of this belief, this fundamental belief that Jesus rose from the dead, we can say he's not just an option among many in a spiritual smorgasbord, but he is the way, the truth, and the life.

And that leads me to one more Christ that could be a distorted Christ.

And I'm going to call this a better Santa.

So here's Santa.

Now, Santa is one of those things in our culture that is considered to be kind of a Pleasant thing.

And here's what I mean.

Santa knows if you've been naughty or nice.

And if you've been nice, he gives you a lot of good things.

And if you've been naughty, it isn't really that big a deal.

He'll still give you something pretty good.

That's basically Santa in our culture.

And for some people, Jesus is really nothing more than a better version of Santa.

Richard Matthew, in his book, Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up, calls this version of Jesus the giver of bling.

And what he's referring to is this, and that is in this version of Jesus, Jesus wants you to be happy and wealthy and healthy, and he'll make those things happy happen in your life in accordance with your faith and in accordance with your goodness.

So if you are good, if you believe enough, then the better version of Santa will make sure everything goes really well in your life.

Now, this is appealing.

Because there's a piece of me that wants to be able to control my future.

And so if I say, well, if I have enough faith, if I'm good enough, then God will do X for me, that's very appealing because that makes me say, I can control my future.

And there are churches, whole churches that believe this and teach this.

And what they'll often say, and they'll claim this proudly, they'll say, we're a word-faith church.

We believe that if you speak something, you're going to speak it into existence.

So if you want to be healthy and you're not, you speak it and believe it, and God will do it.

If you want to be wealthy and you're not, you speak it and believe it, and God will make you wealthy.

And what God becomes in this version is a better version of Santa.

Here's what 1 Corinthians 15 shows us.

Verse 30.

And following, it says, And as for us, this is Paul talking.

Why do we endanger ourselves every hour?

I face death every day.

And he talks about here and then in 1 Corinthians, some other places, what the cost of was for him in following Jesus.

In other words, following Jesus is not a guarantee that everything goes well, that the better version of Santa will show up and make everything the way that you want it.

And I realize that this is hard because some of us will say, well, then what's the point of following Jesus?

But here's the issue: the resurrected Jesus promises something better.

Years ago, I was pastoring a church in Michigan, and a man came in one weekend.

And then I met him, he said that his wife had died just two weeks earlier.

And I was obviously concerned about just his loss.

He was a guy who was probably just a couple years older than me at the time.

So he was a young man.

And he he came and he said, you know, I I thought maybe he was coming just seeking God after the loss, but he said, No, we've been really religious, really churched.

And he told me about going to a different church, one of these churches that says, if you believe it, it will happen.

And as he told the story, his wife died over about a three-year period in her battle with cancer.

And he said, We all got around and we prayed and we believed.

We stormed the gates of heaven and asked God to deliver her.

And he said, and what we were taught at our church was that if we had enough faith, she would be healed.

And so the message from that church when my wife died was that she and I did not believe enough.

And he said, I want to tell you, we did believe.

I believed with all my heart God was going to heal her.

And he said, in just a couple of weeks since she died, he said, here's what I've come to see.

And I'll never forget this.

He said, He said, Here's the flaw with that thinking, that theology.

He said, everybody dies sooner or later, meaning you can't outfaith your way from death.

Now, I'm not suggesting that we don't pray for miraculous healing when somebody's sick.

We pray as a church.

We don't often pray in the gathered assembly here because there's so many people, so many needs, but there are prayer lists and things that if you want to be a part of, contact our church office.

You can be part of the prayer movement of this church.

We pray and see God do miraculous things from time to time.

But here's the challenge.

When we have a better version of Santa as our version of Jesus, then we live with double the disappointment.

The disappointment of the loss, and then the disappointment of God either not coming through or us not having enough faith.

But the resurrected Jesus promises something better than just good things in this life.

And that's the resurrection.

Do you see what this passage says?

It says, if Jesus hasn't been raised, your faith is in vain, it's worthless, it's useless, it's futile, you're still in your sins, you're to be pitied most among all people.

What's he saying?

What's his argument?

His argument is this, and that is without the resurrected Jesus, you don't actually experience all the good.

And what is the promise of the resurrected Jesus?

It's not that everything will go well in this life.

It's better than that.

It's for resurrection.

We don't think a lot about resurrection.

We think, God, give me everything I need here and now, and I need to load all of my best living into my 70, 80, 90 years on this life.

But the resurrection is the promise of God that everything sad will come untrue for those who believe in his son.

It's the promise of new life.

It's the promise of a body that won't be ravaged by disease.

It's the promise of a world that's not stained by sin.

It's the promise of a community that's not bereft of relationships that have been broken by our pettiness.

It's the promise of a world that's not stained by pollution.

It's the promise of God saying, I will raise you up to new life, and it will be a glorious thing.

If you believe in the resurrected Jesus.

And that is, what version of Christ do you believe in?

Do you have a customizable Jesus who's your life coach, who's your prototype, who's your cheerleader, who's just an option among many, is a better version of Santa, or is it a resurrected Jesus who died and suffered in your place and came back to life to show you the way and to give you a better promise.

See, the invitation of Easter is to come and worship and believe that Jesus.

And it won't take away all of the hardship of this life, but it will give us a resource to deal with the hardship of this life as we look to the hope of what the resurrection means.

And that's the invitation that God has for you, has for me this year.

For some of us, it's something we've believed for a long time, and it's to re-ground ourselves in that reality and worship Jesus.

For some of us, we are still uncertain about really what we think, and it's to say, I don't want to have a partial lottery ticket punched for the future, an 80-20 chance.

But I want to investigate this.

Now, some of you may say, well, are you saying God doesn't care about our here and now?

Not at all.

In fact, next weekend we begin a new series.

We're going to go through the Psalms, the first seven psalms of the Old Testament.

And we're going to talk about the cry of the heart.

The cry of our heart for happiness, for control, the cry of our heart when we're hurt, when we're betrayed.

God cares about those things.

But his promise is for a resurrection and a resource for our strength in the midst of what we're walking through.

Father God, we thank you for what this day represents.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ that guarantees the resurrection of those who have faith in your Son.

And Father, I ask today that that hope would be real for each of us.

That we would worship fully because of it.

And God, for those who who maybe are here and saying, I'm not sure, God, I pray that there would even just be an impulse, a drawing of them to you in this moment that would give them the heart, the desire just to investigate whether or not these beautiful, unblemished promises of resurrection are true.

And we pray it in Jesus' name.

Amen.