Is It Alive? Discovering the Risen Jesus

You've got a few children here. Okay, I'm going to need your help. Where's my helper?

Come on, helper. And we're going to do a little test, kids.

And the test is called, is it alive?

Is it alive? Okay, and so the answer is yes or no, and I need it to be nice and loud.

Okay, so my fantastic helper is going to bring something out of the bag,

and you're going to have to answer the question, is it alive?

Okay, there's the first one.

Is it alive?

Someone said yes. Someone got very confused. No, a bit louder. Is it alive?

Oh, okay, good. This is not alive.

All right, next one. Is it alive?

A stone no okay we know a stone is not alive is it alive.

No the elephant is not alive no is it alive,

yeah the apple not connected to the tree and this one is going a little bit

mouldy is it alive it's dying Tying. Tough one.

Tough one. Is it alive?

Some people say yes. How about now? Is it alive?

No, it's not. It's a fake plant. Hold on a minute. Hold on a minute.

Is it alive? Yes, It's alive, right?

What's the point? It's actually not that difficult to tell whether something is alive or not.

And if you can tell whether something is alive or not,

it's quite possible that a few thousand years ago, when someone met a person,

they were able to tell whether that person was dead or alive,

living or not.

It's not actually all that tricky.

If someone has breakfast with

you and talks to you and goes on a walk with you and you can touch them,

you would probably come to the conclusion that that person is alive.

Yes. And if kids can do it, I think adults can do it.

And I think that people have always been able to tell whether the person that

they're talking with is alive or not.

2,000 years ago, people became convinced that Jesus wasn't dead but was alive and they could tell.

Let's have a think about how they could tell. For some reason,

I seem to be in a musketeer's phase.

Noah and I have been listening to an audio book of the Three Musketeers.

And then we just started watching a TV series at home of D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers.

Heroes, sword fights, chases, adventure.

And at the heart of the story is loyal friendship and the famous catchphrase,

all for one and one for all.

That's the famous catchphrase of the musketeers, and it's a powerful idea.

As friends, we will fight as one, but the one will also fight with the others.

But the three musketeers weren't the sacrificing sort.

If you fight with me, I'll fight with you.

If you help me, I'll help you.

Your friend will be my friend and your enemy will be my enemy.

But if you don't fight for me, if you don't fight for me, why would I fight for you?

We're going to read from 2 Corinthians chapter 5, and this was written by a man called Paul.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

And the verses are coming up, I can tell, on the screen behind me.

And we're going to read from 2 Corinthians chapter 5 from verse 14 to 21.

2 Corinthians 5 · chapter mention

Any chance you can make that a bit larger? For the love of Christ controls us,

because we've concluded this, that one has died for all, therefore all have died.

And he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves,

but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh.

Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.

And all this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave

us the ministry of reconciliation.

That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself,

not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

And we implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might

become the righteousness of God.

So Paul says something that sounds a bit similar to the musketeers,

but actually reality is radically different.

The bit that sounds similar is we're convinced that one has died for all,

therefore all have died.

One for all, and all have died. Here's the bit that's a bit different.

He died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves,

but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

You see, the Christian belief is that Jesus died for people who were sinners.

People who weren't particularly interested in God.

People who were living lives their own way, sometimes getting it right,

sometimes getting it wrong.

Imperfect people, with flaws that we excuse, shame that we can hide,

pain that we can conceal.

But Jesus didn't say, I'll do this for you if you do this for me.

He simply said, I'll do this for you.

I'll do this for you. I'll die for you.

Without you having to do anything He said I'll do this for you,

And at the very center of the Christian faith is a cross.

It's a strange feature of any religion to have at the center something on which someone died.

See, the Romans were good at crucifixion. They killed hundreds of thousands of people that way.

It was their most shameful, most humiliating, and most painful means of execution.

It was public, it was difficult to watch, and it was drawn out.

Death for some people could take days.

But the Christians turned it all on its head.

They said, this shows how much God loves us.

This cross is a sign not of death and execution and humiliation, but of love.

This is love, one of them wrote. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us

and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

And the place of sacrifice was the cross.

See, Jesus is not unique in the way that he died.

In fact, the way that Jesus died wasn't particularly special at all.

As I said, Rome crucified enormous numbers of people.

The Jewish historian Josephus mentions thousands of Jews crucified during a

war between the Jews and the Romans.

And nearly all of them, completely anonymous, gone without a trace.

The default fate of a crucified person in the first century was total historical oblivion.

No one wrote their names down.

No one told their stories. No one knows who they were.

Do you know how many names of those hundreds of thousands of people that we

know that were crucified in and around the time of Jesus.

Hundreds of thousands. We know the names of four. Four people.

Two of them were brothers. Also, interestingly, from Galilee.

They get a passing mention in Josephus' book.

And then there was one. he's got a name that

I'm going to struggle to pronounce Yehu Hanan

and we didn't know who he was for

1970 years until

a couple of decades ago someone looked inside a coffin and found the bones of

someone who'd been crucified and it still had the nail through the ankles and

it had his name but for over 1900 years he was unknown to history.

Across the entire Roman Empire.

One of the world's largest across 500 years of Romans crucifying people,

we can name perhaps 10 people.

And most of those actually are Christians who were pleased to be crucified because

it was the same way their savior died.

So there's something very strange going on. The Roman Empire was extraordinarily

efficient at killing people and extraordinarily indifferent to writing their names down.

They didn't care. That was the point.

And then, out of all of these people, there's Jesus.

His crucifixion should have produced the same result as every other crucifixion.

Obscurity. Disciples scattered, the leader dead, publicly shamed.

By every logic of the Roman world,

that should have been the end of Jesus and the end of his movement because it

worked every other time.

So how come we know about Jesus?

Jesus, by contrast, had letters being written about him within 20 years of his death.

There were biographies being written about him within 40 years of his death.

And there was a movement that spread faster than almost anything else the ancient world had ever seen.

And every one of these letters and biographies insisted that Jesus died on a cross.

See, they didn't claim that he didn't die.

They 100% agreed with the Romans.

You crucified him and it worked. He was dead.

Jesus died. what they claimed was that Jesus isn't dead any longer,

They said, you put his body in a tomb, but on the third day,

Jesus got up and walked out.

They said they talked with him. They had breakfast with him.

They touched him. They said he appeared to them in ones and twos and in groups

of 12 or 20, and one time even to a group of 500 people.

And they were so convinced that this was real, so convinced this was not a dream,

not a hallucination, not a wish fulfillment, that they went to prison,

that they were willingly martyred.

They were even proud, as I said, to be crucified because of the claim that Jesus died and rose again.

Rome's cross was specifically designed to discredit, to shame,

to erase, to obliterate, to kill.

Wisdom didn't survive the cross. Movements don't survive the cross.

The teacher's reputation died with him.

In fact, being crucified was supposed to be proof that he couldn't have been the Messiah.

The only thing that could restart a movement after crucifixion was the claim

that the crucifixion wasn't the end.

We read from Paul, and Paul is an interesting case study, you see,

because Paul was not one of Jesus' followers at the time he was crucified.

So Paul was not a grieving friend,

And Paul was not someone interested in building the legend of Jesus.

He was an educated, theologically trained opponent who, by his own admission,

was actively trying to destroy the Christian movement.

Having people arrested and on at least one occasion killed.

Precisely because they were claiming that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

That was the reason why Paul was happy for them to be arrested and stoned.

So what happened to Paul? He said he was converted from being a persecutor of

Christians to being a follower of Jesus Christ because Jesus did something that dead people don't do,

which is they appeared to him and spoke to him.

And Paul, some years later, having traveled all around the ancient Near East

and talked to people and convinced them that Jesus was alive,

was arrested and he was on trial.

And he was being, because he'd preached about the resurrection and it caused

such an uproar that Paul had got arrested.

And so Paul is being asked for, you know, explain his beliefs.

And he says this, Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?

Why should that be such a difficult thing to believe?

Good question. As someone put it, the problem with the resurrection isn't the historical evidence.

It's that the resurrection forces a question about whether God exists at all.

And if God exists, well, then the evidence is exactly what you'd expect.

If God was with Jesus, if Jesus was God, then the evidence points to exactly

what you think it would be. The tomb is empty.

Jesus is alive. In fact, to deny the historical evidence means you've probably got a prior commitment.

A claim, a belief that says, no, it's not possible, no matter what the evidence

suggests. So that's what happened.

Jesus died on a cross.

And the claim is that on the third day, day one being the day Jesus dies,

day two being the next day, the Saturday,

day three being the Sunday morning, that when they went to the tomb,

which they all saw where Jesus was,

that the stone had being rolled away, the gravestones being pushed to the side, and he was not there.

And they then said, where's he gone? Who's taken the body? No one. He is risen.

But what does it mean? What does it mean?

Well, it has something to do with sin, and has something to do with how it can be forgiven.

Paul, in this passage that I read out, describes it this way.

It says, God made him who didn't know sin to be sin.

See, Jesus only knew sin by seeing it in other people.

Jesus didn't know himself what it was like to screw up and to offend God and

to hurt God and to do something that we just knew was wrong.

Jesus never had that feeling of like, I shouldn't have said that.

I shouldn't have done that.

I hope no one knows what I'm thinking right now. Jesus never had that experience.

He only recognized sin because he saw it in other people.

But on the cross, all of that became his.

All of that is put on him, and he carries it.

Jesus took the consequence of all that sin, which always leads to death,

and he took it to the grave.

And Paul says this is what it means. It means that God is willing for the things

that you have done wrong, to not be counted against you, but to be counted against Jesus.

He's willing to say they're not in your column, they're in his.

And because they're not on you any longer, but they were put on Jesus,

because he paid the penalty, because he paid the price, you don't have to.

And because of that, God is willing to forgive anyone who would ask.

Anyone who would ask him, he's willing to forgive.

But he'll go further than that and say he wants to be reconciled.

He wants to come back into relationship with you and he wants to give you new life.

New life. So it says if you're in Christ by trusting in him,

then it's as if when Jesus died, all of that old stuff, all that old life that

was me, that died with Jesus too.

And so when God raised Christ to new life, he raises us up too.

And so Paul can say, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

She is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come.

Some of us love old things. Some of us really love new things.

But when it comes to our souls, scarred by what we've done or what's been done

to us, it's not about what we prefer.

It's about what we need.

We need restoration.

We need reconciliation.

We need the resurrection.

You can keep your old life, you can live for yourself,

you can keep God at a distance, and you can keep your sins and all that comes with them.

Or you can give it all to Jesus and you can let him give you what belongs to

him and let him give you his life, his love,

his hope, his spirit, his joy, his peace, his relationship with God the Father, his wisdom.

And you can have, in fact, you can have Jesus himself.

That's what you can have. You can have him who died for you.

You can have him. And Paul says the result of all this means that those who

live might no longer live for themselves,

but for him who for their sake died and was raised.

Here's where people sometimes trip up, Christians included.

We think that we have to live a certain way so that God will be pleased with us,

if I want God to accept me I have to follow the

rules I have to do these things otherwise God won't accept me that's not what

this says this says because he has loved you because he died for you because

he did all of these things for you because Jesus died and was raised we want to live for him.

We want to please him. His love comes first.

Jesus' death and resurrection offers forgiveness, hope, a new start,

new relationship, new connection.

So don't live for yourself any longer.

Live for Jesus.

Live with Jesus. Live with him and for him.

The Three Musketeers are fiction. It's a story.

The cross of Christ is history.

And if the tomb is empty, then the most unconditional act of love in human history

is not just a story stuck in the past.

If Jesus is alive now, present now,

then the story still has power to change lives and to bring freedom and to bring

hope and to bring forgiveness.

It still has that power.

And there are stories in this room that will testify that, yes,

indeed, this story is true because it's changed me.

It's changed my life.

I am different because of Jesus.

So the living Jesus still makes an invitation to receive his life right here, right now.

One died for all, new life for anyone who will ask him for it.

And the question is, is will you come to Jesus and ask?

You know what, even if you are a Christian, if this is not your first Easter,

if this is not your first time remembering the cross, we still come to Jesus and ask him for his life.

We ask him to refresh our souls we

ask him to that we would abide with him because we

know that without Jesus we can do nothing but we want to live day by day moment

by moment in the power of Christ knowing Jesus Christ that surpasses all greatness

and the power of his resurrection that's what Paul said that's what I want to

know I want to know Christ.

In a moment we're going to take communion.

It's opportunities, bread and wine, it's symbols of Jesus' death and resurrection.

Things that for 2,000 years Christians have considered the most important thing.

If you wouldn't say, I'm not sure I believe in Jesus, I'm not sure he's raised

from the dead, I'm not sure about that, well, this is a moment for you to reflect on that question.

And please, when people are coming up to take bread and wine,

please just feel free to remain in your seats and think about that.

If you love Lord Jesus, if you know that His story has become in some way your story,

that His death has meant that you are forgiven and His life has changed everything

for you, and we want to encourage you to come and to receive with us.

And if you're a guest here and you can say the same thing, we trust you and you're welcome.

We will gladly celebrate this thing together.

And then, when we sing after the communion, this is where I want you guys to get involved.

There's a verse, if you have in your Bibles, from 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

So if you find 1 Corinthians 15, we're going to...

We hope that this sermon has encouraged you. If you'd like to learn more about

us, visit us online at gracechurch.se.

Thanks for listening.