The Time Has Come | Easter

You are listening to the Gateway Franklin Church podcast.

To learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, including our service times here in Franklin, Tennessee, visit us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

And now, here is this week's message.

Early in um my marriage, Gina, um, she had a miscarriage.

So, you know, so you know, do we did we have a miscarriage?

Did she have a miscarriage, right?

So if you've been through this, you know that it the woman has the miscarriage, but the emotions are carried by by both of you.

And it would take it would take three years or longer before she got pregnant again.

And so I don't know if that's why we were so nervous through the whole term of Annie's birth, or we just we would have just been nervous anyway.

But you know, it's every ultrasound appointment is you know, you're wanting to, you're wanting to hear the heartbeat, you're wanting to see the baby develop um each morning that she was sick.

I I was excited anyway, right?

So everything's you know, the punching, and so so because of that, when she was born, she didn't come out crying, she came out quiet.

And so I don't know if the delivery um uh doctor, I don't know if he if he was nervous or he just saw how nervous Gina and I were, and because he immediately said, She's breathing, she's just not crying.

And then he took her little foot and he thumped it like like twice hard.

It took two thumps to get her to give the you know, and then okay, then then she's she's with us, she's she's breathing.

Birth in and of itself is a miracle, but all the stuff that goes on in birth is a miracle in that little body, right?

So, right up into the baby exiting the uterus, their lungs are filled with amniotic fluid and mucus.

And the baby's blood is oxygenated through the placenta and the umbilical cord.

So during the birthing process, a lot of that fluid is pushed out of the lungs, but the final amount of that fluid gets pushed out with that big cry, that big breath, the expansion of those lungs then forces the remaining fluids out.

But it also does, it also does some other things, like it um it then triggers this this physiological element of then the blood going to the lungs and the fetal heart shunts get shut off, and now the her blood is being the baby's blood is being oxygenated um um by the by her own breathing.

Um and then it's also it triggers, it triggers and and and it lets known that the respiratory system and the nervous system are all working, all working properly.

And I and I will say that though, that is the last time Andy's crying was comforting to us, was that first cry.

And what I found to be true physiologically is true spiritually.

That life is in the blood and life is in the breath.

Christmas and Easter weekends are kind of the bookend signature Christian celebrations of breath, really.

Christmas celebrates Jesus' first breath.

Good Friday, which we did celebrate with two services in here, celebrates Jesus' last breath.

And then today, Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, it celebrates his next breath.

So all of the Christian worldview gets encompassed in these bookend celebrations.

Life has a way of knocking the breath right out of you, doesn't it?

It can be so heavy at times that it's difficult to even take a deep breath.

Listen, even if things are going well and manageable in your life, even the pace of life sometimes can impact how you breathe.

What if there was another way to live?

What if gasping for air or fighting for breath could be replaced with lung-filling, life-giving, life-sustaining breath of Christ?

And the simple and profound answer here is it can, it can, life can be that way, but you have to ask for it.

Let me circle back to crying.

We have two records of Jesus crying in the Gospels.

And they're really not so much crying about life, it's crying around the absence of life.

So the first record we have of Jesus crying is with the death of one of his friends whose name is Lazarus.

And Jesus is a friend with Lazarus and his two younger sisters, Martha and Mary.

Well, Lazarus dies, and Lazarus is put in a tomb, and he was in the tomb four days before Jesus makes his way to their home.

When he gets to the home, he has two encounters with the sisters.

They're separate encounters, one with Martha.

Martha is kind of wanting to know explanations.

She's wanting to know why you weren't here.

Mary brings a whole nother set of emotions to the conversation.

And it's in the emotions of Mary, where Jesus said, I am the resurrection of life.

Do you believe this?

And it's it's it's like maybe probably for a lot of us, it's like, I believe, but I don't sure don't understand.

And it's in that conversation that we have, I think, one of the most one of the most profound passages of scripture.

It has its own verse.

There, there, there is a period that comes before it and a period that comes after it.

And the two words in the middle says, Jesus wept.

Now, just in a moment, and if he's people are going to lead him to that tomb.

He's going to yell to towards that tomb.

He's going to say, Lazarus, come out, and that body that had no breath in it for four days, the lungs collapsed.

There's going to be this jolt of breath, and Lazarus is going to waddle out.

Because he's still wrapped.

We know he's still wrapped because Jesus says, somebody unwrap him, right?

I mean, so why is Jesus crying if he's going to end that death?

Here's what I contend: the emotion that death calls, causes.

The emotions around that.

I think he's he's crying with what death extracts from all of us.

The heavy emotion that he knew his two friends, those two girls, had to walk through before with the death of their older brother.

Which would have been the older brother?

I mean, we we don't have any record of moms and dads.

Very, very, very possible, possibly as Lazarus is the head of this household.

And now two women will be left alone.

And then what about just even the emotion Jesus would have carried that he would have known what his friend Lazarus had to walk through taking his last breath?

So it wasn't, his tears aren't around what that what that death meant then.

His tears were around the sorrow that accompanies death, and that is what makes him emotionally tied to us.

The second time we have record of Jesus crying is during Holy Week, what we now call Holy Week, means entering into Jerusalem in the last week of his life.

That he looks over the city of Jerusalem and he cries.

Scripture says he weeps over Jerusalem and he says, How I longed to gather you under my wing.

And one gospel writer says, and yet you refused.

And he cries.

In this instance, his tears aren't necessarily around the emotions that death extracts, but how death is an end.

How death seals it has the potential of just sealing it, just being a final period, a final last breath.

And that's what his tears are generated to.

But is that the only times Jesus cried?

Well, it's the only two recorded times we have, but I'm pretty sure we can say there was one more he cried.

Because when he was born.

Now, I understand that Mary hovers over the womb, uh, the Holy Spirit hovers over the womb of Mary.

And so that Jesus is not conceived biologically, he's conceived spiritually.

But I'm telling you, that rest of that birthing process, it's as biological as you can get.

I mean, Mary's Mary's headed to Bethlehem and she's pregnant, and they've done the math and they have already figured out it's going to be an away from home birth.

I mean, they know it.

They would have had to have known it.

And so she gives birth there where she wouldn't have wanted to give birth there.

And that baby comes out that womb crying, his lungs expanding, the amniotic fluid being pushed out into his body.

The now the oxygen coming down through that blood, through that breath, where now the lungs are starting to take over, and the lungs are taking over, and the fetal heart shunts are being shut down, and the umbilical cord is cut.

And so now the blood and the oxygen is completely being generated from that little body.

And yet, and yet that blood running through that little boy was going to be different than any other blood of any other child being born that day across the Roman world.

There would have been other babies born across the Roman world, and yet none was going to carry the blood and breath of this little boy as he enters the world crying like the rest of us.

We have a tendency to fixate on the angel's interaction with Mary at the announcement that she is going to give birth to a savior, rightly so.

But in Matthew's account of the birth narratives, Joseph gets four angelic visits.

Four.

Now you can land on either side of this, right?

You can land on, wow, Joseph must have been pretty special.

Angel visits him four times, angel visits Mary once.

And then the other side of it is sometimes it just takes men four different times, right, to hear and get an instruction.

But the first, the first, um, the first angelic visit, this is how it's recorded in Matthew.

The angel speaking to Joseph says, Give this baby the name of Jesus, because he will save the people from their sins.

Now, you can learn a lot about scripture in context.

Okay, you can learn about the context of the event happening.

You can learn a lot in the geopolitical context of the time.

You can learn a lot maybe in the economic social context of the time.

You can learn a lot around scripture, around context.

You can also learn a lot around word choice and certain words chosen.

And then when you break those words out into English, the the Greek and Hebrew words don't have, uh don't carry all the context or English words that would be translated, don't carry all the nuance that a Greek and Hebrew word is.

So you can learn a lot in Scripture by the word, but there's also another way.

You can learn a lot about what Scripture says through syntax, about the grammar used.

So the grammar here will save is a future active indicative tense.

All right.

I know there's so many grammar scholar, grammar scholars in the room.

Here's what this means: the future part of this tense is although this act is going to be sometime in the future, you can count on it as being done.

It is a consistent, this will happen.

This is a done deal.

It won't happen until later, but using this tense saying it is secure, this is going to happen.

You can be confident in this act.

The active part of this, the save part, indicates that Jesus was not going to be a passive observer to the act of salvation.

He was going to be an active participant, that it's going to be through him that we are saved.

It is the future active indicative tense.

Now, Joseph would have been a rule-following Jewish practicing man.

So when when he hears the words of the angel say that he will save, he will save, his mind, he would have had to have connected the dots.

That every other time in his history, the covering of sin, salvation, was going to be done through some sacrifice.

Some lamb, some goat, some ox, some bull.

There was going to be some blood from those animals that was going to cover sin.

And then, gosh, sacrifices were given all the time.

And then one in particular, the highest holy day in the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur.

Is a day when the high priest would enter behind the veil in the Holy of Holies and offer one sacrifice for the nation.

Joseph knows this.

But now he's hearing my son, this boy that you're giving us, he's going to save the world.

And what we know is that sacrifice of that man, that boy turned man, was enough for everyone for all time.

That there would be no other need for any other sacrifice, for any other blood to be shed to cover the sin of mankind, because that boy, that blood from him was going to be the covering that all of us needed, knew, and had to have.

Jesus' was the last sacrifice that would ever have to be needed to cover the penalty of sin.

Now a man Jesus' age at 33 and a half would have taken approximately 300 million breaths in his life.

From that cry to at the end of his life, that would have been his approximated 300 millionth breath.

So people who sing professionally and some communicators that communicate professionally, they have they have breath coaches.

They have people to help them learn how to take a deep breath to fill up their lungs from the diaphragm up in order to project and enunciate all of what has to be done because you can't talk without breathing.

You hear me talking, you don't see me breathing.

You can't talk without breathing.

Which means then when Jesus utters the last words on the cross, it was his last breath.

His last breath.

What does he say at the cross?

He says, It is finished.

But when you read it out of Matthew, Matthew says, when he cried out again, when he cried, I'm not hearing tears here, right?

I'm hearing, I'm hearing this, this, this emotion coming out of Jesus.

When when he cried out again in a loud voice, it says, then he gave up his spirit.

The Greek word is pneuma, also translated breath.

See, when you died on a cross, you died, if Jesus would have had a death certificate, it would have said suffocation.

Suffocation.

Now he was he was beaten, scripture says, beyond recognition.

The amount of torture that he'd went through is indescribable.

So but hanging on the cross with the nails in the wrist or hand and then the overlapped feet, what would happen is over time, and losing your strength and losing that amount of blood, that you would sink.

And sinking, you put you compressed the diaphragm, and you could not, it was difficult to breathe.

So literally, he would have had to, hanging on that cross from nine to three, six hours, at that sixth hour, he would have had to summon up every last ounce of emotional, physical strength to push up enough to get out those words.

It is finished.

See, when when when someone wasn't, when when the when the Romans were done with the practice, they were done with that day, and someone had not died yet on the cross, they would break their legs.

That seems odd.

They've beaten them to a pump, they're hanging on a cross by nails.

So why break their legs?

To keep them from pushing up and being able to breathe.

So it's his last breath.

He says it is finished.

So what's finished?

What's finished with his last breath?

At least two things.

One would be his mission's finished.

We know by scripture it said that he was slain from the foundation of the world, but but think about Genesis 3 is when the pronouncement of sin and its consequences come.

Genesis 3.

Adam and Eve sins, God addresses Adam, God addresses Eve, and God addresses Satan.

In his address to Satan, he said, You will strike his heel, but he will crush your head.

That's what was finished.

He crushed his head.

The mission that began in Genesis 3, that last breath, I finished that mission.

One of the most recognized, iconic verses of scripture.

You don't even have never had to open your Bible to know about it.

You could just see some athlete in some big game put John 3.16 on their eye black or tattoo or a banner hanging somewhere in an end zone or some placard behind a wall.

John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever would believe on him would not perish, would not, their life would not end with their last breath, but they would have everlasting life.

There would be a next breath.

Now, here's to me one of the most fascinating things about that verse of scripture.

You would think something as like monumental, like hang your hat on, like Jesus would have like saved that one.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, let me, I need as many people as possible to hear this declaration.

And that's not where it comes.

It's at night he's having a conversation with one man, one man, a religious scholar and leader.

And that one man asks, How do I inherit the kingdom of God?

And Jesus says, You must be born again.

Born again.

You're gonna have to take a new breath.

That's his answer.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever will breathe in him will have everlasting breath.

One man he has that conversation with.

And we put it on I black now.

So that was one thing that was finished.

The other things I would say was finished is the power of sin, what it wields, the power of sin and the power of Satan.

His his intimidating voice.

His intimidating actions, those things, those things were ended.

We read, Paul writes this in Colossians, and it's in a reflection over what was done on the cross.

And he says, when you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision on your flesh, that would be a Jewish phrase here, but it's when you were when you were dead in your sin and you were completely disconnected, never had a connection with God, God makes you alive in Christ.

Like we don't have anything to do with this.

He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of your legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us.

He has taken it away, nailing it to a cross.

So this is very literal language.

And having disarmed the powers and the authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The cross wasn't designed just to end someone's life.

The cross was designed to end them.

What you may not know is the Romans would inscribe basically their crime, why they were committed, the crime they committed, why they were being executed.

They would hang that on the cross.

So although I think Pilate knows something's big going on here, but I don't know what completely is going on, he writes out King of the Jews.

He doesn't just write it out in one language.

It's written in three languages.

It's written in Aramaic, it's written in Latin, and it's written in Greek.

Now why?

Why would you go to that extent?

Again, I think Pilate and his wife have some something's happening, but here's at least what it ends up doing.

There wasn't anybody within sight of that cross that didn't know why he was hanging there.

They could read it in their own language.

That this man was the king of the Jews.

Now the Pharisees pushed back.

They wanted to say he claimed to be.

Well, that's why they would have had him killed.

But the bigger picture was he was hanging there because he was the king of the Jews.

What the enemy had intended to not just end him, but end this whole notion, this whole notion of God and power and creation and Christianity and salvation.

He wanted to end all of that.

And what happens, what Paul tells us, is that God takes that cross and flips that over and disarms him.

In fact, we we one one of the one of the other passages of scripture, I'm gonna skip here a little bit, so catch up with me.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes, he's quoting the prophet Hosea, where O death is your victory, where O death is your sting.

The sting of death is sin, the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

He is taking away that last power.

Well, he doesn't do it yet.

This is in reference to the resurrection.

But this is telling you how much is flipped with what was supposed to be his ending.

All right, so it's finished.

Then he's wrapped, he's taken off the cross, he's wrapped in a tomb, uh wrapped, his body's wrapped, he's placed in a tomb.

Uh every every gospel record has a record of actually not the resurrection.

Every gospel has record of the empty tomb.

No one witnesses the resurrection.

All of them witness empty tomb.

Now, the way oral tradition works is that the the goal of oral tradition is to get the core of the story right or is correct, and it's where where it where it crosses, like everybody holds this core, but then other writers have the ability with the way oral tradition works is to record details that maybe somebody else might not.

Okay?

So here's an instance.

You say, I went to Easter Sunday at Gateway Franklin Church, and Pastor Charlie had on a blue shirt.

That's true, because in the first two services, I wore a blue shirt.

You would, however, say, I went to Easter at Gateway Franklin Church and Pastor Charlie had on a white shirt.

Is one right and one wrong?

No.

You might say, I went to Gateway Church and Pastor Charlie had on brown shoes, and you don't say anything about a shirt.

So you get how oral tradition works.

So here's the core of the story.

The tomb is guarded by a Roman detachment of soldiers.

Before the women get there, there's an earthquake.

Earthquake and an angel, then in tandem or whatever, this the stone that's placed in front of the tomb gets rolled out of the way.

And an angel's there, and the scripture says that the Roman soldiers fell to the ground like they were dead.

Like probably me too, right?

Earthquake, angels, stones moving, and when they were able to gather themselves enough, they leave.

How do we know we leave?

Because we don't have any encounter with the women and with soldiers.

What do they encounter?

When they get there, there's an empty tomb.

And they go inside and they know it's empty.

They know it's empty.

Because where Jesus was supposed to be laying, his clothes were there.

Right now, with Lazarus, it says, hey, y'all help him get out of his stuff.

With Jesus, he folds it up and puts it in place.

Like I was here.

I want you to know I was here.

I'm not here anymore.

This stuff is here, but I'm gone.

I particularly like Luke's um details of the story where Mary is left, she's kind of left alone at the tomb.

And um, well not not not just yet.

So the women are at the tomb, and an angel speaks to these women, and he says, Why are you looking?

Why are you looking for um the living among the dead?

Why are you looking for someone who's breathing where no breath is?

Why are you looking for fresh air where the only thing around here is stale air, dead air?

He is risen just like he said he would.

Wow, what an interaction.

At some point, Mary is left by herself.

And she mistakes Jesus as working there.

So so I'll get to that in a minute that that Jesus He didn't look like himself.

He definitely didn't look like he hung what he looked like he was when they took him off the cross.

But she didn't recognize him until he says her name.

He says, Mary.

And it's almost like she catches her breath.

The teacher.

This is amazing to me.

She recognizes his voice.

An interesting dialect that he didn't talk in an interesting fashion.

Maybe all of those, but this one I think is probably right.

There was a time in her life that she heard him call her by name, and her whole life changed.

And I think she hears the same tone.

She hears the same tenderness.

She catches her breath all over again.

Jesus laid in that tomb all day or most of the day Friday, all day Saturday, and into Sunday morning.

His death was real.

He was dead.

Until he wasn't.

What was that breath like?

I'm wondering, I'm wondering if he cried.

I'm wondering if if then this there was this wave of emotion over Jesus.

But he takes that first or that next breath, and life just comes.

And that death, that last kind of powerful weapon that the enemy uses against all of us.

Look, the older you get, the more you stare that thing in the face.

One phone call, one diagnosis, and you stare the thing right in the face.

And what Jesus defeats is that last kind of tool in the enemy's toolbox.

Jesus knows the pain that death causes, he knows what it extracts, but with his resurrection, death is no longer the end.

It's no longer the seal.

Because he took a next breath, he gives us a next breath.

Psalm says that to be absent in the body is to be present with the Lord.

Let me say it this way in the context of today.

To have taken your last breath out, your next breath is with the Father in heaven.

And I don't know.

I don't know what our bodies look like.

When he takes that first breath, and he's not recognizable, but he is.

He's like he's a body and he's not.

Like there's still holes where he takes nails.

There's still hole where he takes a spear, and yet, but he's not.

He eats.

He eats.

But he also enters locked rooms without going through the door.

I mean, it's I I don't I'll I don't know if I'll ever be able to understand it.

What I know is he's living and he's breathing and he's there, and you can touch him and you can talk to him.

And this is what we're promised.

Jesus' next breath gives us breath.

Life is in the blood and the breath of Jesus.

So kind of wrap up.

That was that was Mary's encounter with Jesus.

It would, it would be a day or so later that it says that he enters into a locked room.

So the disciples were they were afraid, and here's why they were afraid.

In fact, when Lazarus was raised from the dead, some of the text in the gospel says then that caused them to, the the religious uh leaders to go after Jesus and Lazarus.

Right?

Because the guy he just raised from the dead was a pretty good testimony that like Jesus is God.

Right?

And so let's eliminate the testimony and let's eliminate the person who brings about the testimony.

So it there's legitimate, there's legitimate fear that they're exhibiting.

And it says that Jesus enters that locked room.

He did what his first words are what I would have expected.

Like, how about where were you guys when I was hanging there?

This is this is this is this is so this speaks to the magnificent of magnificence of Christ is that when he speaks to us, he speaks to us in full understanding of where we are emotionally.

Because his first words are peace be under you.

Their fear, the breath that they would have witnessed, the first breath they would have witnessed, he's speaking, the peace, and then and then it says that he breathed on them to receive the Holy Spirit, that his next breath breathes life into all of us.

Now, for the follow of Christ, the one one of the Easter takeaways is if you have been feeling like that your chest is compressed, that you you can't you can't catch your breath.

Maybe the your the wind has been knocked out of you.

The message is Easter is breathe deep in Christ.

That his blood flows through your veins.

You have been redeemed by God.

There is no other sacrifice necessary.

He has presented himself to you.

If you're a follower of Christ, what you've done is you've received that from him and you can breathe deep because he will resurrect.

The best thing he does is resurrections.

Just the best thing he does.

Whatever seems dead, listen, it either stay dead or he's gonna resurrect it.

And you can have confidence in both of those.

It needs to stay dead, it needs to stay dead behind you, or he'll resurrect it.

For the wanderer and the wanderer, you find yourself in those places.

I think there's a couple messages today.

One is you have to come to the end of yourself.

You have to, somewhere in your world, you have to take your last breath of you to receive the first breath of Christ.

You have to come to some kind of understanding that what you've been breathing in has not been healthy.

It's been stale, it's been dead, and what you inhale impacts all of you.

And you can come to the conclusion, like the angel said, why do you look for life?

Why are you looking for breath in these dead places?

There is a place of life, and it's Christ, and this is where you'll find it.

And you have, look, the first phase of salvation is what he does for us.

The second phase of salvation is we have to receive from him.

It's not withheld from anybody, whosoever will.

I mean, if you think about going into Jerusalem saying, How I longed, how I longed to gather you, and you refused me.

You refused me.

You said no to me.

If you're a wanderer and a wanderer, you have to be able to get to a place where you say yes to Jesus.

And then I think all of us, you know, we we have to think about, you know, is this li is this it?

Like, is this life it?

Because all of us are going to come to the same.

Listen, everybody Jesus resurrected still died.

There was still a funeral.

He gave them, there was temporary life and then gone.

And what happens, what happens when we're gone?

Is there life after this?

According to Scripture, it is.

According to Scripture, there is a life after this one.

And in fact, this one's a blip on the radar screen, actually, in terms of time, if you talk about how many years that you will live and measure that up against eternity.

And that new body, in the new breath.

And I think everybody has to grapple with what's next.

And how do I prepare for what's next?

And that preparation is I want to breathe again now.

The promise is now and later.

Not just later, there's breath now.

So I'm gonna ask you, and I'm gonna pray, and then we're gonna we're gonna worship one more time before I dismiss.

But if you're a follower of Christ in the room and you have found yourself lately feeling like an elephant is sitting on your chest and you can't breathe, and you are, and you want to, but Easter means to you today is taking a fresh breath in Christ.

Raise your hand for me.

I've had trouble breathing lately, Pastor, and I need that breath of Christ, and may I speak that over you today.

Peace be with you.

May his breath of his spirit fill your lungs full.

If you're a wanderer or a wanderer, and maybe today you've kind of come to that conclusion that maybe this Jesus is real.

And I have been just breathing in dead air.

And I want to take a first new breath in Christ.

Because He has done the work.

Again, it's our reception.

And it's literally as your prayer.

Is there anyone that raise your hand and you say, That's me, Pastor?

I want to take that fresh new breath in Christ.

Anybody today would raise your hand and hear?

All right, let's stand and I'm gonna pray, and then we're gonna worship.

Lord, what a day your resurrection day did it, you knew it.

It would just change history.

It would flip everything on its head.

Well, maybe the better way to say it, it would flip everything upright that had been on its head for all those years.

I thank you that you endured what you endured so that we could live again.

And Father, I pray over this whole body watch it online today, Lord, that you breathe fresh, new breath in all of us.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.

We hope you were encouraged and challenged by today's message.

Again, to learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, find us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

Thanks for joining us today.