Easter Sunday

The resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now here is the claim of Easter.

Christ was crucified on a cross.

He was really dead, really buried, and three days later he really came back, not just resuscitated in the same self-same body with all the wounds and things, but in a resurrected body completely healed, the same kind of resurrection body that we are promised when we come back.

Someday, one day, when Jesus comes and gives us our new bodies.

That's the claim.

So all else, and but that's not the only claim.

There are other things that are established with the resurrection of Jesus.

A Christian asked his secular friend, he said, What is the bottom line when it comes to Christianity, or what is it all about?

And his friend, who was an atheist, replied and said, That's easy.

It's the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And then this friend responded, the secular person, he said, that's easy, it's the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

If the resurrection is true, then so are a number of other things.

One, there is a God.

Number two, Jesus is that God.

Number three, the Bible is true.

Number four, heaven and hell are real.

And five, Jesus makes the difference whether you go to one or to the other.

One pastor is, uh he gets quoted a lot this time of year, but he said, either Jesus was resurrected and he matters more than everything else, or he wasn't resurrected and he doesn't matter at all.

Jesus was resurrected, and he matters more than anything else.

So let me invite you to stand as we read about the resurrection.

In Luke 24, we'll read verses 1 to 12 and then verses 36 to 52.

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared, and they found the stone rolled away from the tomb.

But when they went in, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel, and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, Why?

Why do you seek the living among the dead?

He is not here, but has risen.

Remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise.

And they remembered his words.

And returning from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven disciples, and to all the rest.

Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them, who told these things to the apostles.

But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in, he saw the linen clothes by themselves, and he went home marveling at what had happened.

As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, Peace to you.

But they were startled and frightened, of course they were, and thought they saw a spirit, and he said to them, Why are you troubled?

And why do doubts arise in your hearts?

See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself, touch me and see.

For a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see that I have.

And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.

And while they still disbelieved for joy, and were marveling, he said to them, Have you anything here to eat?

They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them.

Then he said to them, These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

You are witnesses of these things, and behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you were clothed with power from on high.

And he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them.

While he blessed them, he parted from them, and was carried up into heaven, and they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.

The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the message of Jesus will endure forever.

Let me pray and uh ask him to bless us, Father.

We are grateful that you sent your Son.

Lord Jesus, we are grateful that you came.

Holy Spirit, we ask now that you would open our minds to understand more fully what it was that the Father intended and what the Son has accomplished.

Would you be with us in this place to help us to see and understand?

And Lord, I pray that you would help me.

I pray that weak and frail as I am, flawed as I am, faltering as I am in so many areas, that you would be pleased to use one whose only hope is your grace to tell others about that same grace.

Would you bless us?

Would you be with us?

We pray in your holy name.

Amen.

Have a seat.

We need the resurrection because of how we're made.

We don't simply die and rot, we have a soul because things are not going to end.

They're going to keep going on and on.

We need the resurrection of Jesus for our sakes.

In the West, we have inherited a materialistic view of our humanity from atheistic thinkers.

We call it philosophical materialism.

Philosophical materialism is the air that we breathe, and basically it teaches this there is only the material world.

There is no God, there's just the material universe.

There's no soul, there's just the body.

There is no consciousness, there's only the brain.

The soul is just an illusion of biochemical processes that are at work in our brains.

But this purely materialistic explanation of the world does not do justice to our experience of life in the world.

And this is not something that simply Christians notice, this is something even secular people notice.

So this week being Easter, you know, I did searches on a variety of things, and one thing came up in my feed that I did not anticipate, and it was from a social media influencer.

This is on YouTube, and uh he was talking about near-death experiences, if you've ever heard of such a thing.

And basically what happens in a near-death experience is that when people die, they flatline, they they die clinically in the hospital room or wherever, and then they come back after being flatlined dead for just a short time.

And many of them tell the story of what they saw when they were there.

Um and so he's describing from his own framework these things called uh near-death experiences.

And he's listened to a lot of them.

He said, This is describing our world and our experience in the world.

He said, This, what we are in this world, no, this is his perspective, not mine.

He says, this is a simulation that we're going through.

It might be digital, it might be spiritual, who knows?

He says, everyone who has ever had a near-death experience talks about their experience as if there's another level, as if there's another plane of existence.

And so when he says it's like a simulation, if you've ever seen people put on like virtual reality goggles and they're seeing something else and they're interacting with something else, but they're in this world, he says that's kind of what it's like for us.

It's going on all around us all the time, is this another, this other world, but we only see part of it, whatever we're viewing through the goggles.

And he said, like 99% of people who go through near-death experiences say this.

He says, it seems like we're on another plane.

That, and this is these are his words, he says, that we're some sort of ghost that puts on a meat suit.

I don't know if that's gross, but that's what it is.

A meat suit and lives in the world.

And this is what he said.

If you take a person and showed them the reality of the world, what it's what it is made of, where the world came from, all the spirit world, all that, and brought them back to earth, they can't explain it.

Our language is not capable of communicating that, even if they knew the truth, they just can't express it the way they want.

And when you listen to people who've had this kind of near-death experiences, they're all saying very similar things and they're trying to express what they're seeing, but they can't quite put it into words that fit with what we're dealing with in the world.

And he's saying that we're what he's saying is we're not just biological beings that shut down when the factory goes offline.

He's saying that there's a realm beyond the physical.

He's saying that philosophical materialism is wrong.

And where he's bumping up against and he doesn't know it is the biblical teaching about what it means to be a human being.

He's taking his perspective, it's similar to what the Bible teaches.

You are not just you as a body, you are a body and a soul, a spirit, a material part of you and a spirit, non-material part of you.

And both of these are good in the way that God intended it for us to be.

You were created with these two vital components to your humanity.

This is what Derek Thomas, a biblical writer, um, modern biblical writer, talked says.

He says, We believe that the Bible teaches that we are both a body and a soul.

There are two aspects to who we are as persons, a material body and a non-material soul.

We are people of two realms, spirit and earth.

So you're more than the sum of your body parts.

There's something else going on with you.

And other people recognize this, not just Christians.

And what the Bible teaches happens at death is at death, we retain our individual personhood and our consciousness, but our bodies and our souls are separated for a time.

When the body dies, our soul continues on.

And depending on what you believed in this life and how you were connected to God, it depends on where you go.

So the Bible teaches the permanence of the soul even after death.

The death of the body is not the death of you.

And there are two places, depending on your desire for God, your faith in Jesus, is the Bible describes one as entering into the presence, the joy, the peace of Jesus, and the Bible calls that heaven or paradise.

And then the Bible says that others who want nothing to do with God go into another place.

That's not so nice, but it's a place of judgment for people who say, I don't want to follow who God is.

I don't want to follow Jesus.

And so, how do we know?

How do we know that when we die, there's a spirit body component, these are separated, we go one of two places.

It's by believing in Jesus.

Well, how do we know that if we believe in Jesus, we're going to go into heaven?

It's because we have one who came back not from a near-death experience, but from a full death experience.

He was put into the grave, he was dead for three days, but he came back in a resurrection body.

Now that's a difficulty because there's a challenge to the resurrection for people back then, and a challenge for resurrection today is we know that dead people don't come back, dead people stay dead.

And so nobody was expecting Jesus to come back.

And you can just look at the passage we just read.

Jesus' followers are the way they reacted to his death.

They weren't stupid, they weren't gullible, they weren't superstitious.

Chapter 24, verse 11, the women say, We, this is what happened.

And then it says, But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.

At first, they didn't believe because it seemed too far-fetched, and then a little bit later they didn't believe because it seemed too wonderful.

Chapter 24, verse 41, they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling.

Is this real?

Am I dreaming?

Are we hallucinating in the midst of this?

So Jesus spent some time verifying to them this isn't a dream, this is not a mass hallucination, which is impossible for you to have this.

Uh, do you have something to eat?

And so he's showing them.

They believed in spirits, they believed in ghosts in that way, but they didn't believe that a person could be in the body.

So spirits don't eat.

So he asked for evidence for proof, like, give me the food, and I'll eat the food and I'll show you that it is I myself.

And then in 24, 39, he invites them to come and interact with them.

See my hands and my feet that it is I myself, touch me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have, and he showed them his hands and feet.

And then he says in 24, verse 48, You are witnesses of these things.

You are my witnesses to tell the whole world.

Now, I've not seen the resurrected Jesus.

And you probably haven't seen the resurrected Jesus, but we have evidence of it, that Jesus rose from the dead.

And the evidence that we have is not scientific.

It's not scientific, it's not testable, it's not repeatable, you can't prove it in a lab.

We don't have samples of Jesus' blood that you could put under a microscope, anything like that.

We don't have it.

It's historical.

And historical studies confirm that it happened.

William Lane Craig, uh, who is a he's an apologist, he debates people online, he's written a lot of books about these things.

He said, he wrote, The gospels were written in such temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events.

Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of what they reported.

The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true.

For they could never have proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred.

Somebody simply would have produced the body, but there wasn't one.

Mike Likona and Gary Habermas have something they called five minimal facts.

And this is something you can remember, and you can go investigate these things yourself.

Because what they're saying is from most people look at the Bible and say, Well, we don't accept what the Bible says about Jesus.

I do, and most of you in here accept what the Bible says about Jesus.

Most people say, Is there any external corroboration?

So Mike Likona and Gary Habermas have looked at the historical record outside of the Bible.

And they said, the Bible and the outside record shows five minimal facts that historians agree on.

Number one, Jesus was crucified.

That's in the record.

You can read Greek historians, Greek writers, they refer to him as being crucified.

Number two, the early followers of Jesus claimed to have seen him after his resurrection and were dramatically changed by what they claimed to have seen.

That's on record outside of what the Bible teaches.

The hostile skeptic Paul claimed to have seen Jesus after his resurrection and was dramatically changed by what he claimed to have seen.

That's number three, that's in the broader historical record as well as in the Bible.

Number four, the skeptic James, the brother of Jesus, during Jesus' life he didn't believe, but after Jesus appeared to him post-resurrection, James came to believe.

That's on the broader historical record and in the Bible.

And then five, and sometimes people don't accept this as much, but the tomb of Jesus was empty.

Somehow it was empty.

And we have the reason here, but uh the broader historical audience may not agree with it, but he was resurrected.

And so this has led many people to one simple historical conclusion.

After a brutal death at the hands of Romans and Jewish leaders, Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to many people.

And we have need of that resurrection.

We have need of that resurrection, not simply because of the way we're made, where we're body and spirit, but we have need of the resurrection because there is something wrong with us.

And he tells us in 24, 46 to 47, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer, and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

So he's saying, after his death and his resurrection, forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed.

Because it was at his death that he paid for our sins, and at his resurrection he proved that the debt had been paid.

Because what Jesus is was doing on the cross is facing our death sentence.

It's like a prison sentence.

Death is the result of sin against God.

Sin against God is not just like small things that you do.

Sin is actually described in the Bible as an attitude towards God, where we ignore him, we disobey him, deny him, and even sometimes hate him.

And we are at odds with what he wants for the world.

And so the Bible says that yes, we can scientifically study what happens when people die, but death is for the guilty.

And our guilt brings a death sentence.

And so when Jesus is on the cross and he's resurrected, it's showing that he has paid the death sentence.

Peter processed this in chapter in chapter 2, verse 24 of his epistle, the first epistle.

He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.

And that's why every other person who has ever lived, who has died, has stayed dead.

Because they're still paying the death penalty, the death sentence for their sins.

And Jesus is the only one who completely paid it off.

I had a student years ago when I was uh working as a campus minister at Clemson, which I have to mention every week, it appears.

And uh and he uh he was a he was a character.

He was a good guy, he was just a character, uh, but he was a young man with uh not a lot of sense, and he decided to bring his airsoft gun into his campus apartment.

So he had his airsoft gun, he showed it to people.

And I don't know the details of how he got found out, but he got found out.

And having an airsoft gun in your apartment on campus is uh punishable by expulsion.

You just are completely kicked out of the university.

And so he went and appeared before the judicial court, made of students and faculty and others, and made his case, and they said, okay, here's what's going to happen for you is uh we're not going to expel you.

We are going to have you do community service on campus for 10 weekends.

Ten Saturdays, the next 10 Saturdays, you're going to spend doing community service.

And if you don't show up for one, then you will be expelled.

So the first week he showed up, the fifth week he showed up, the tenth week he showed up, and the eleventh week he did not show up.

Why did he not show up the 11th week?

Because he'd already paid for it.

And so he was released from paying the penalty.

And like a man who pays his debt to society emerges from prison of a free man, Jesus rising from the tomb shows that he was a free man.

And because he wasn't dying for his sins, but for our sins, because he didn't have any, it shows that those who trust in him are free people.

He wasn't just a free man.

He was winning for himself a free people.

It wasn't just raw power that he conquered death.

It was because he paid the penalty of death.

So do you see what Jesus is saying here?

There is forgiveness before God in him.

The message is that you can return, that anyone can return, even people who feel like they should have known better, even people who know they've been caught.

Can return.

And we don't think we can.

Many of us don't think we can.

Because we have a view of the Heavenly Father.

We have a view of God's love where it's performative.

And some of us got that from childhood, from the way our parents interacted with us.

I can remember being in middle school, and my parents left for a weekend, and I think it was the first time they put my brothers in charge.

And they did what high school boys do.

They had a party at the house.

And so there was this frantic moment where Sunday morning, knowing my parents are going to be back, they're cleaning up the joint.

You know, uh, we still found stuff behind couches later, but you know, we cleaned it up pretty well.

So my parents weren't gonna find anything because we were terrified, they were terrified of what was going to happen when my dad found out.

Like what was going to happen?

We were terrified of him.

And that's the way that a lot of us approach God is I have to hide these things, or at least I have to get everything cleaned up before I come into his presence.

So did you take a shower before you came in to worship today?

Did you clean up before you came in?

That's probably not for God.

You probably did it for the other people around you, for which we're grateful.

We really are.

But we have that sense of to come into the presence of God.

I've got to clean up my life first instead of coming in all the muck and mire of all this stuff and letting Him do the work of cleansing me.

I remember this story because I entered into most of my life with kind of that mindset of Jesus, my younger life.

It's like, that's this is the way God is.

You've got to clean up your life, you've got to be doing right.

And uh, you know, I was very susceptible to get guilt manipulation and those kinds of things from preachers and others during that time period.

But I remember being at a at a college campus conference when I was in college, this is 35 years ago.

And I still remember this story because it was the first time I got it.

And I know I've told the story in here before, and some of you have heard this, but I'm gonna tell it again because it was powerful for me, and I think for some people it might be powerful for you.

It's not my story, it's a story from a man named Wilson Benton, and he was the one who was preaching.

He's a pastor in our denomination.

And uh he grew up in the Old South in Mississippi.

Uh, and before you went outdoors, you had to, you know, everybody had to dress to the nines to go outdoors if you went out in public anywhere.

And there was some big function that was going on in town, and so his mom had put him in his, you know, his knickers and his little shorts, and he had his nice shoes with his socks pulled up over to his knees and had his hair slicked back, and he looked the beautiful picture of like early uh Mississippi life.

And uh they had a few hours before they were supposed to be there, and uh so she let him go outside to be with his friend, and they played for a little bit.

Now his friend's name was Fatty.

I don't know how he got that name, I can guess.

That was a very different era with cruel nicknames for kids, and but uh he was Wilson's best friend, and so he and Fatty went out to play, and he wasn't supposed to go far, they weren't supposed to rough house, he wasn't supposed to get dirty, his mom set out all the rules of what was supposed to happen for him because they were going into town.

And so he and Fatty made their way down to the creek, and there was a vine across the creek, and and Wilson said, I can't do this because I'm gonna get dirty.

My mom was very clear, and Fatty said, No, you're not.

Look, this is how you do it.

And so he got the vine, he swung across, and he landed on the other side, and it was perfect.

So he flung the sun the vine back to Wilson.

Wilson grabbed the vine and he swung and went straight down into the muddy water and came up covered with muck and mire and everything from head to toe, sputtering, and fatty was nowhere in sight.

He just comes, he came up, and there's nobody here with him, and Fatty's just running away as fast as he can.

And Wilson actually said, he said, probably Fatty loosened the vine when he swung across.

So he went in the water, came up, and his immediate instinct is to go home.

He said, I can't go home.

I can't let my mother see me like this.

She was very clear about what I was not supposed to do, but I've got nowhere else to go.

So he started running back towards home and then he stopped.

He said, I can't go home looking like this.

But every instinct in him was go home.

But everything inside of him says, You can't go home because you're gonna get killed.

And so finally he's doing this thing where he starts to run and then just starts weeping and he just stops and he can't help himself.

He just knows he's done something wrong.

He's just filthy and he did exactly what his mom said not to do.

And so that's when he looked up and saw running across this field, his beautiful mom with her best dress, her best shoes, her hair done up, her apron on, running to him.

She dropped on her knees right beside him and wrapped him in her arms.

And she took her apron and brushed the mud off of his face and pushed it out of his hair, just kind of brushed off a little bit there.

And then she took him by the hand and she took him back to the house and she washed him and cleaned him, cleansed him once more.

She never fussed at him, she never yelled at him.

In fact, she's the one who came to him in his grief about what he had done and washed and cleansed him.

That's the love of the Father.

That's the love of Jesus.

That's the Jesus who would go to a cross for you and for me.

Not to say, get your act together, but to say, trust me, I've taken care of all the guilt, I've taken care of all the dirt.

That thing you did 30 years ago, it's forgiven.

That thing you did 10 years ago, it's forgiven.

That thing you're struggling with right now, you don't have to be afraid to come home.

Just come home.

Just come home and I will cleanse you.

And this is what we see here in this passage.

Is is at the end of the passage, when Jesus ascends, it it gives us the response of the early disciples.

And it doesn't say they tried harder, they did better.

What it says is this they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple blessing God.

It wasn't just a cool trick, not just Jesus was alive.

There was more to that, it's I will be, because he cleansed me.

People talk in vague terms about the possibility of life after death, but Jesus shows that that's not just a possibility.

For those who trust in him, it is a reality.

How could I know that when I die, I won't just snap out of existence, but that my life will continue and I will not enter into judgment but will enter into joy?

Here's how we know we have one who came back from the dead.

Roughly 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ was placed in a tomb.

Three days later, he rose from the grave.

And today, on the Easter, we celebrate what these witnesses saw and what they have told the world, and we enter into that joy, and we worship Jesus and we celebrate what he's done.

This is what Jesus says.

It says that the Bible says, He didn't rise from the grave just to show that death had no hold on him.

He rose from the grave to show that death no longer had a hold on us, that we would be free.

Though I die, yet shall I live, is what the Bible says.

Jesus said, Whoever hears my words and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned.

They have crossed over from death to life.

Though I die, yet shall I live.

We aren't perfect.

But we never had to be.

Sins are forgiven, death is overcome, life is restored.

And that means that you have hope for you.

But it also means great joy because you have hope for others.

The relationships that we have here.

That those who are in Christ, we will see each other again.

Though we say goodbye for a bit, we will be together again.

Beautiful picture of this several years ago.

One of my former students, um, he and his wife got married.

I was uh fortunate enough to participate in their wedding.

They have had multiple children.

One of their children was born with some internal defects and didn't live very long.

And this is the letter that her dad wrote.

He sent out an email and text to let everybody know.

He said, It's with great sadness and joy that we share with you Sadie Margaret went home to be with Jesus on Wednesday at such and such time.

Sadie peacefully took her last breath in my arms.

I've pictured her taking her last breath on earth in my arms, and her first breath with no oxygen tubes in heaven in Jesus' arms.

So, of course, there's sorrow for us left behind.

I miss my beautiful, spunky, bright-eyed, curly-haired girl.

There will be a hole in my life on this side of heaven.

But, but there's also joy.

Our baby is free from her broken body.

I can't help but be overjoyed for Sadie.

She is safe and resting in her heavenly father's arms.

And in a breath, that hole in my life will be gone.

Our tears will be wiped away.

Death will be no more, and we will be reunited.

My hope overshadows my sorrow.

We need the resurrection to do life in this world with hope.

We need the resurrection.

Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ is coming back.

And so will I.

And so will all of you who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

You will come back.

So are all who will believe.

And so that call, that invitation is for all of us.

If you're struggling with a particular sin in your life, go home.

Go to your Father.

Go to your Savior.

He'll cleanse you.

For the thing that you're currently struggling with, go home.

He will help you.

He provides the resources for you.

For the grief that you struggle with in this life, for the people you've lost.

Take that to Jesus too.

Because He understands that.

And He gives us hope.

We need the resurrection.

All of us.

Let me pray for us.