Acts: We Need a Resurrection

So we're moving out of Genesis and jumping all the way into Acts, and we're going to be looking at probably the first half of the book of Acts for the next couple of months.

So I've cried in a few movies.

And I can remember the ones I've cried in because I haven't cried in a lot.

I remember the first movie I cried in.

My mom was watching it.

I was a little boy, and I sat down and I watched the movie with her.

It was Beaches with the Bette Midler, like the original.

Anybody else cry in Beaches?

Okay.

Anybody cry in the notebook?

I cried in the notebook.

Sappy, just a sappy cry, let it out.

I cried in the rookie.

When he walks out the first time in the major leagues, he walks out of the dugout to pitch.

I'll cry again if I watch it this afternoon.

I'll cry again.

I cried in Castaway.

Anybody cry in Castaway?

Partially I watched it by myself in a movie theater.

That'll do it.

Anytime you're in a movie theater by yourself, I think you're probably close to crying.

I watched it all by myself, and the movie was about being by yourself.

So do you remember, do you remember Castaway?

So it was the year 2000, Tom Hanks movie.

I will ruin the movie for you.

I'm just gonna let you know.

It's been 17 years.

I don't feel bad about this.

And so it was Tom Hanks, he's Chuck, and remember he's a FedEx employee, he's on a plane, the plane wrecks, he ends up on a deserted island, small island.

He has nothing.

He has a handful of FedEx boxes, he has very little, and he has to figure out how he's going to live on this island.

So first, of course, he organizes those FedEx boxes, eventually he opens a few of them and he figures out what he can do with those things.

And one of the things, if you remember, was that volleyball, right?

And then he makes the smiley face on it and it becomes his friend.

I mean, after like, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes of silence in the movie, finally we get conversation in the movie, and for a long period of the movie, it's just him talking to Wilson.

So we have we have great, great uh feelings for Wilson for volleyball during all of this.

And the entire time, whenever he's really, really struggling, right, he goes into that cave.

Do you remember?

And he has that picture, right?

Of the love of his life, Kelly, right?

I mean, and the whole time he's just thinking, he's gotta get back to Kelly.

He's gotta get back.

Four years we watched him struggle on this island, and he survives on this island.

He turns into quite a stud, really.

I mean, he is making it work, but he knows eventually he's gonna die on this island.

So finally, a storm washes a sail, something he can use as a sail, up on the beach.

He builds a raft and he's going for it.

He ties down Wilson, he ties down one box that he did not open.

So he had opened all the boxes except this one box.

This one box had angel wings painted on it.

Then he decided he was not going to open that one.

He ties this stuff down, he sets off, he makes it over the break, which he had not been able to do before without a sail, makes it over the break, he gets out into the ocean, and you remember what happens eventually, right?

Wilson falls off the raft, and it is heartbreaking.

You never knew you could be that emotionally tied to a volleyball in your life, right?

And he breaks off and Wilson floats away because he's gotta go back.

Chuck's gotta go back for the raft.

He's back on the raft, he's weeping on the raft because he's lost Wilson.

So now it's just him on the raft.

He's got this box, he's drifting.

Eventually, it just looks like he's gonna die.

It doesn't look good, but eventually he drifts into a shipping lane, a ship picks him up, and we think this is the point of the movie, right?

We think life again.

We think life again for Chuck.

He's gonna go home, they saved him, he's they're gonna clean him up, they're gonna cut his hair, he's gonna shave, he's gonna get all cleaned up, he's gonna go home, and Kelly's gonna be waiting for him because she's been waiting for him for four years, and they're gonna get married, and they're gonna have kids, and this is what you think is gonna happen, because this is what happens in most movies, and this is the reason why this movie sticks with us so much.

Because he gets home, and what is going on?

Do you remember?

Kelly married somebody else.

Kelly has a family, Kelly has kids, right?

They buried Chuck.

It's been four years, and so you have a whole nother death, right?

Like you got the death of Wilson, now you got the death of this idea of Kelly that you're trying to reconcile, and all that is left at this point, all that is left.

Because you have, with him, you have died to his old life.

You have died to his friendship with Wilson, you have died to the life he hoped for with Kelly the entire time, and now all you have left is him in this box, right?

With angel wings on it.

It's all that's left for him to deliver this.

And what's on the other side of it.

And he does deliver this, and this is the beauty of the whole movie, is that very last scene, right?

He delivers it, he leaves it on the porch, he comes back, he's at intersection.

You remember it?

A truck pulls by, good looking lady, good looking lady, she's by herself, and on the back of the truck are angel wings, and you don't quite know what he's gonna do, but what you know is there's new life for him.

So, why do we love movies like this?

Well, great acting, Tom Hanks, right?

I mean, like, of course, we got that, but there's something more like why do we love stories like this?

Right?

I could have picked a whole bunch of different movies or books to kind of analyze right there.

I could have plugged in just a ton of them.

Well, we need this because we need to know that death does not get the final word in our lives, and that new life is possible for us.

Because we need resurrection in our lives.

That's what this text in Acts chapter 1 is about.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

It's about resurrection, that Jesus was resurrected, that he was dead and he came back to life.

And we need to know in our lives, in the death we feel, and the death we will know eventually physically, but also in the death that we feel and we know now, in the shame and the guilt and the fear and the anxiety and the suffering.

We need to know that death does not get the final word.

That's why we look at Castaway and we leave and we go, what a great movie! Because we've experienced all this death, but then we get life.

So let's reread a few of these verses that Sam read for us.

Acts chapter 1, verse 3.

Acts 1:3

We'll jump in at verse 3.

He, Jesus, presented himself alive to them after his suffering, so meaning after his death, by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God, and while staying with them, he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, You heard from me.

For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

Now, a few things.

First, this is a crazy story.

If you're a Christian, you believe some crazy stuff.

Because if you're a Christian, you believe in the resurrection.

You believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

And that's who we're talking about.

We're talking about Jesus the Christ.

But you don't believe he was just a man.

You believe he was God in man.

You believe it was God incarnating himself into skin and bone.

And you go, that's a crazy belief.

I agree, that is a crazy belief.

But if I believe in a creator God, I can believe that that creator God can come into his creation.

So here we have this Jesus of Christ who's incredibly upsetting to the systems, incredibly upsetting to the Roman Empire, upsetting to the Jewish leaders.

He had his followers, but he had many, many, many enemies.

So eventually he is executed and he is put in an above-ground tomb, and a rock is rolled in front of it, and soldiers are guarding it because the Romans were very detailed, and they did not want anybody to come and steal this body.

Because what they like to do is shut down uprisings.

Now, at the time of Christ, and about a hundred years before that, and about a hundred years after that, there had been about, in those 200 years, there had been about ten messianic uprisings.

Ten people who came along and said, I am the Messiah, and they build up all this following, and everybody's following them, and eventually this person dies.

Every other time, one of two things occurred.

Number one, they just all went away.

All the followers just went away quietly.

Number two, they just began to follow another guy.

They stayed as a group, but they followed another guy.

But these followers did neither of those things.

They did something very different.

They said, no, no, no, no, no.

I saw him.

Like I saw him.

And not just me.

This is just me, you think I was crazy.

But he he saw him, and she saw him, and that other person saw him.

And if you need to know about it, you can go talk to them because they saw him also.

You can go talk.

There's a whole group of people.

He was around for 40 days.

Lots of people saw him.

So you can go talk to them, and they just kept on with this story.

Not one person, not two people, a whole group of people.

And other people joined in because the tomb was empty.

And Jesus was letting himself be seen.

So a few points here.

Point number one Jesus is our representative all at once on the issue of death.

Jesus is our representative all at once on an issue of death.

Now that doesn't sound very personal, right?

But you know about death.

These questions that we have all the time: what happens to me after I die?

Or let's just take it into this life.

Will it ever be enough?

The question we talked about a couple weeks ago very thoroughly, if people really saw me, could I really be loved?

Will I ever have enough or control enough or look good enough?

Will I ever be at peace?

Will this depression ever lift?

Will I ever have a sense of peace or a sense of purpose?

These are questions that have to do with the feeling of death inside of us.

About nine years ago, I went to Israel.

I stood in the garden of the resurrection.

So this is the place where traditionally it's believed Jesus was put in the tomb.

And there's a cave there, a big garden.

Garden's probably the size of this room.

And there's a cave that was over to the left over there, and you pay your entrance fee, and you get in there, and you kind of take your turn going in.

The garden was nice, and so I walk in, you take turns going into the cave, and I walked into the cave, and I saw something toward the back of the cave, sort of like kind of like a light or something.

I walked back there and I mean there's a vision of the risen Christ.

I saw a vision of the risen Christ.

He said, Go, beloved son, and plant a church in Marietta and invest in Netflix.

No, I'm kidding.

That did not happen, none of that.

I really wish the second part happened, because it was 10 years ago, and I'd be really sad.

Really, really sad at that point.

None of that happened.

I walked into a cave, it looked like an empty room.

I walked back out.

It was not very memorable.

There's not much there.

It was like, okay, empty cave.

I got it.

And I walked back out into the garden.

Back out in the garden.

I'm sitting there, everybody's taking their turns coming in, right?

Nothing super spiritual here.

Just a place.

Just a place traditionally believed.

Maybe it's the place.

Maybe it's not.

We don't even know.

Traditionally believed to be the place.

And I'm sitting out there and I'm going, how could we not even know this?

How can we not even know the exact place where Jesus was buried?

How could we have lost his body if it was still buried?

It couldn't have been stolen.

The Romans would not have allowed that.

They would not have allowed his body to be stolen.

And no other spiritual movement lost their leader.

And lost the grave.

I mean, when you buried the leader, you marked the grave, right?

Like you respect the grave.

It's the grave you go to for reflection.

I mean, this would have been a holy place.

We don't even know if this is the right place.

We don't have a body.

We don't even really have a tomb.

This is a crazy story.

And it's hard to believe unless you're at the end of yourself.

And you need a God, a source from outside of yourself that can choose to incarnate himself into history as to show you and to show us that his love is true and forever.

And in the person of Jesus, that is the incarnate God for us to know, who on the cross takes our sin upon himself that he might give to us his righteousness so we are free and beloved in his sight, not by our work, but by his work.

And it's known and it's seen and it's finished.

We need a God to intervene in our lives.

That's what the incarnation is.

God's intervening into history, into our lives to rescue and remind us what we need to know all the time that from the very beginning he's loved us.

From Genesis 1, he has loved us.

And in Christ, he creates this new life for us.

I need it.

I need a God that creates new life.

And he is the stand-in for all of humanity at once on the issue of death.

So let me explain that further.

Point number two.

Death holds no lasting power, but actually becomes our path to life.

Death holds no actual power over you, but actually becomes your path to life.

This week, several times, I think three or four times, I have conversations with people dealing with horrible things in their lives.

Like death stuff.

No death this week.

We didn't have a death in our church this week.

No death this week, but death stuff.

Like shame and depression, anxiety, and marital conflict, really nasty family issues.

And what I've learned over the years, not many things, what I have learned, one thing is I just need to keep my mouth shut most of the time.

The best thing in those conversations is for me to say very little and to listen and then to tell them that God loves them and I love them.

And let's see how this plays out.

And there's good news.

The good news is not that everything gets better tomorrow, right?

If anybody's telling you that, just go to a different place.

That's not true.

A lot of times that's not true.

But the good news is, and what we need to hear, is that all that death stuff, all of that that's in us and it's around us, it doesn't have lasting power over you.

Meaning it's not the final word in your life.

It's not the end of the story for your life, and it's not, it's not the end of your story in this life.

Listen, it may affect you.

Sin and shame and guilt and family issues and marital issues and depression and anxiety and fear, all this.

It may affect you, but it does not define you.

Your salvation and your justification is known through Christ's work outside of you and given to you, and the suffering of this life and the difficulty of this life, it will end one day.

And maybe that'll be in this life, or maybe it'll be in the next life.

So as death holds no lasting power over us, it then becomes our path to life.

Okay, so it has no lasting power over us.

Okay, we could not along, okay, I get that.

But how does it become our path to life?

Well, this is true in two ways, right?

Like I just hinted toward it.

First is then, right?

You ever had a family member who has cancer and they're just getting eaten up by cancer.

And then they pass away.

And you're grieving, but also you're so joyful.

They have been relieved of the pain and the suffering.

See, the afterlife, the afterlife even gives us healing.

It's our path to life.

But then the now for this life.

There's all this talk in the New Testament about crucifying the flesh or the false self, right?

This is this manufactured self, the one that's constantly using unstable things to try to get a sense of identity, a sense of salvation, a sense of justification.

And so we're on that treadmill of your salvation drug of choice, whatever your salvation drug of choice is, whether it be religion or moralism or escapism or status or image.

I mean, you can take your pick, but apart from God's grace, it's you that's working.

It's you on a treadmill of salvation.

And it never ends, and it only creates exhaustion, it only creates more shame, it only creates more death.

See, that's the path of the fleshly, false, manufactured self that will wear you out and cause destruction.

That's the part that has to die, that has to be crucified into Christ.

And I need my life, you need your life, hidden with Christ in his death, as to be risen with Christ in his new life in the resurrection.

So back to Acts chapter 1, verses 9 through 11.

Acts 1:9–11

And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up.

So this is the ascension.

He was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.

And while they were gazing into heaven, as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?

This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

Now there's a lot there, and I won't pretend to even understand all of that, because I wasn't there.

But I know this.

So he was he was there, and now he's not.

Okay, that's about as far as I can go into it.

I don't know more than that.

Some experience of he was there and then he was not.

Point number three is this the Christ incarnate is no longer there, but Christ is now here.

So Monday I had this incredibly random, really random day.

I mean, you've had these that are just random days.

You're in a bunch of different places in one day.

Um, just a variety of settings.

I woke up and I walked to the gym and I worked out.

I came back home and I got cleaned up, and then I came over here to the church building, and we had our staff meetings, and then I go back home and I eat lunch, and then I ran by a friend's house and I borrowed something, and I came back home, and then I worked from home for a little bit, and then another friend came over and I got in his car in the afternoon, and then we drove in some traffic, and we drove up to North Carolina, and by like early evening, I'm standing in a river fishing, and it was beautiful.

And then it gets dark, and we're hungry, and so we go to look for somewhere to eat, but there's nowhere open.

We're in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina, middle of nowhere, nothing.

And we're driving along, we're just waiting for somewhere, somewhere where we can eat, and there is like a beacon of light, a beacon of light in the middle of nowhere.

All these billboards, this huge hotel, the Harris hotel and casino in Murphy, North Carolina.

And I don't know if you've been to the Harris Casino in Murphy, North Carolina on a Monday night.

On a Monday night, not a Friday night, on a Monday night.

But I can assure you, it's interesting.

And it's real sad, and it's hilarious, and it's a whole bunch of it at the same time.

Because we're in there eating and we're walking around, and it's it's it's comical.

Monday night.

If you just need some interesting, just go to the Harris Casino, go on a weeknight specifically.

I think the weekend might be a little more normalized.

The weeknight, real interesting.

Here's what's amazing.

I lost no money.

Thank you.

That was my friend, he lost money.

I didn't lose any money, so that was good.

Amazing to go in and out, lost no money.

Then lying in bed that night.

Here's my point.

Lying in bed that night, a glorious thought.

The Spirit of God was with me just as much in the gym that morning, this church building for meetings, when I'm driving around my car at my house, in that mountain river, and in that really bizarre casino.

Because, see, there are no boundaries to the spirit.

The Holy Spirit has no geographic boundaries in this world and it has no geographic boundaries in your heart.

The Holy Spirit's always with us.

This is a worry we never have to have.

Is God still with me?

This is a worry we never have to have.

Now, you may not feel like God is with you, but that's a different thing.

But you never have to worry as his beloved if he's with you.

See, God is no longer in the skin.

This is the great thing of this text.

God is no longer in the skin because he is always with us in the spirit.

So, my brothers and sisters, Jesus the Christ, He lived and He died, and He resurrected, and He ascended, that you might walk in the Spirit, as the Spirit is always with you.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for your great promise.

That you make things right.

Not us, but you make things right through the death of your son.

As we all experience death in this life, and finally a physical death, but none of that death has the final word over us as those who place belief in Jesus.

Because you have conquered death.

And our new life is not even reliant upon our work, but upon your work for us, and that we find it as we rest more and more in your sufficiency for us, that you are enough and you never leave us, and we are never alone.

For those of us in this room that feel alone, God, would we would we be brutally honest with you in all moments of how we feel?

Would you be a comforter in the midst of anxiety and fear and depression and shame?

Would we believe more and more that there's nothing that can surprise you and there's nothing that nothing that runs you off?

For you have handled all of our sin and all of our shame, and that your spirit might live with us always, always.

We thank you for this great gift that we walk in.

Help us to trust greater in the gift of Jesus and walk in the Spirit.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.