Making Sense of Jesus' Resurrection (Luke 24:1-12)

Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.

We're a gospel centered church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.

May God bless you today through his life-giving word.

This is the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Luke.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared, and they found the stone and 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 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 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 the 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 cloths by themselves and he went home, marveling at what had happened.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Christ.

Friends, why are you seeking the living among the dead?

He is not here, but has risen.

Hallelujah.

Let's pray.

Oh God, our King, by the resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ, on the first day of the week, you conquered sin, put death to flight, and gave us the hope of everlasting life.

Redeem all our days by this victory.

Forgive our sins, banish our fears, make us bold to praise you and to do your will, and steal us to wait for the consummation of your kingdom on the lens breathing day.

And it's the claim on which the Christian faith stands or falls.

So if I'm going to be a Christian, it's because I believe that that claim is true.

And I think I have that in common with the author of our gospel text this morning.

Luke writes a gospel, a biography of Jesus.

He writes an historical account.

He's making truth claims about Jesus' life and his ministry, everything that Jesus got up to.

He's not trying to spin a tall tale, he tells us in the first chapter.

He's trying to give us a true and accurate report of the events.

And Luke, I think, knows just as much as we do how extraordinary these claims are.

It is not every day you hear a report that someone rose from the dead.

It is the great claim of the Christian faith.

And the question is, how do we explain that?

How do we account for this claim?

There are well-accepted facts surrounding Easter Sunday which have to be explained.

It's not just biblical, conservative, evangelical Christian sorts who, you know, double down on certain carefully selected facts.

The broad methodology of the study of history suggests there are well-established facts around Easter Sunday.

And we'll circle back round to those to try and figure if we can explain those.

But they ought to be explained.

They have to be explained.

The best objection, of course, to this claim that Jesus rose from the dead, I think, is the oldest and the simplest.

And the objection goes like this dead people don't come back to life.

You're probably thinking that yourself, because y'all are smart people.

And friends, we'd be foolish to think that anyone in the first century thought that that was any more likely than we do in the 21st century.

We have a certain uh propensity towards what C.S.

Lewis calls chronological snobbery, which is basically saying because we live in the 21st century, we think we're just so much smarter than people in the first century or earlier.

No, people in the first century and earlier knew just as well as we do dead people don't come back to life, and they knew just as well as we do the difference between telling a legend or a myth and telling history.

They knew the difference.

And the claim here is not a legendary claim, it's not mythology.

The claim is that Jesus actually died and actually rose again in the history that we live in.

So if we endeavor to be a Christian, if we endeavor to be Christians together, that's the claim we have to wrestle with.

We don't get to hedge our bets and say it's a nice story, that's all we should treat it as.

It's either history or it's not, and therefore everything else follows.

There's plenty of reasonable objections we can make to Christianity.

There's plenty of things to wrestle with, implications of Christian teaching and belief.

And some of those can trouble us.

But the reason to reject Christianity is not a secondary or tertiary issue, it's the central issue.

It's the resurrection.

If Jesus rose from the dead, it makes a claim on us.

It changes everything.

That's what we have to deal with.

One pastor and Bible teacher named Tim Keller puts it this way: he says, if Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said.

If he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said?

The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching, but whether or not he rose from the dead.

So that's what we want to wrestle with this morning.

I want to suggest that the resurrection, the bodily resurrection of Jesus in history is a reality.

And it's a reality that best explains the facts of Easter Sunday.

Not only is it a reality, you know, an intellectual proposition to accept, this changes everything.

It injects our world and our life with a hope that cannot be shaken.

So let's deal with this central claim.

Let's wrestle around with the resurrection.

You can open up your uh bulletin if you like to Luke chapter 24.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

The truth is, I'm going to be walking more through kind of an argument in three parts with some references to the text here.

My argument for the reasonableness of the resurrection goes like this.

Which, by the way, is, I'd like to just say, acknowledge, that's probably a big claim.

Resurrection is, we're not talking about irrational.

We're not talking about check your brain at the door so that we can all track together and pretend like this is something to.

No, I'm saying let's engage our brains this morning and every day as Christians.

We should never check our brain at the door.

So here's my argument in three parts.

Part number one, there is a God.

Part number two, this God can and does intervene in history.

And then, of course, part number three, there are accepted facts about Easter Sunday that we have to explain.

How do we explain them?

So let me walk you through this argument, the reasonableness of the resurrection, and then we'll consider how we have to respond to that.

Argument number one, premise number one, there is a God.

This is a theistic worldview.

Now, right off the bat, we want to say, well, who or what are we talking about when we talk about God?

Because that is not necessarily a self-evident claim or word, right?

We are not talking about uh, you know, an ancient dude living in the clouds with a big burly beard sitting on a big white chair or something like that.

Truth is, that's still the first thing that comes to my mind.

Thank you, Bugs Bunny.

We are not talking about a being or even a big being, a powerful being among other beings, right?

The being that could arm wrestle, out-arm-restle every other being.

We are talking not about another being among beings, we are talking about God, the source of all being.

Because things are, there is a source, and that source is God.

The middle evil theologian Thomas Aquinas famously said that God is ipse actus ascendi subsistens.

And I know you all know your Latin, so I don't need to translate that.

God is the ultimate source of all existence.

Because things are, he is.

Because things are, they must subsist in him.

And there's no, I think, one slam dunk, knock it out of the park argument for the existence of God.

Instead, I think it's a cumulative case.

I think when we look at the evidence and consider one thing after the other, it's like Sherlock Holmes doing detective work.

One clue after another adds up to a worldview where we have to at least consider the reasonableness of belief in God.

Let me just name a couple of arguments that I find particularly persuasive.

These are some of the more modern arguments for God's existence, and one is um one is based in the theory of general relativity.

Anyone read Einstein recently?

I know everybody's getting very excited about the theory of relativity here.

Einstein is the one who said that as time goes on, the universe is expanding.

But it was a Jesuit theologian, philosopher, physicist who said if that's true, the universe expands over time, then the opposite has to be true, that if you go back in time, the universe gets smaller and smaller.

But eventually it has to reach a point of origin, a point where it cannot get any smaller, a point where it does not exist and it has to pop into existence.

What happened?

What made it do that?

What precedes that?

And this becomes, of course, what gets explained is the Big Bang, right?

That there was an origin, a start to the universe.

There has to be.

This is the uh foundation of modern physics, and it suggests that there was indeed an origin of all things.

And suddenly physicists are saying similar things to what theologians have been saying for thousands of years, that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

There's also a fine-tuning argument, and this one goes like this: the conditions of life in the universe are so precise, they are beyond a hair's breadth of a hair's breadth, of a hair's breadth, worth of a likelihood that would even allow for life to develop in our world, in our universe.

And those conditions are so precise it's almost as though they have to be carefully monitored, like trillions and trillions and trillions of levers and dials that have to be constantly overseen.

And yet all of those conditions add up to allow for us to exist and sit here this morning listening to me drone on.

So, what do we do with that appearance of design?

What do we do with that appearance of intentionality?

Well, perhaps we have to consider that there's a divine mind behind all of this, that there's an intelligence that allows for all of this to take place.

And again, suddenly scientists sound a lot like theologians.

By wisdom, the Lord laid the earth's foundation.

By understanding, he set the heavens in place.

Then, of course, there's the moral argument, which is, I think, the most self-evident of these arguments.

No matter what your worldview is, we all demand justice, right?

I know someone who says, um, if someone ever says to me, you know, all morality is relative, he asks them, can I borrow your wallet?

And he takes it from them and he puts it in his pocket and he walks away.

And what are you gonna do?

You're gonna say, hey, you have my wallet.

And he goes, Well, all morality is relative.

I didn't do anything wrong.

We all demand justice when injustice has been committed.

And what does that suggest?

It suggests that there is, just like there are physical laws that govern the universe, there is moral laws that govern us as well.

And moral law suggests a lawgiver, one to whom we are accountable, one who places these laws in place.

Now you could say that God isn't necessary to explain any of this.

Why should we make a leap to belief in God at all?

And that's a fair objection.

But what we're not doing is we're not making an unreasonable leap.

We're making a reasonable inference, aren't we?

The classic example is if you're walking along the beach and you find a watch, you're not gonna think, what an amazing thing.

All of the conditions of the air pressure and the waves and the sand came together to put this perfectly working watch all together spontaneously.

That's remarkable.

So you're gonna find this watch in the sand and you're gonna think, that suggests there's a watchmaker.

The idea is not that any one of these is a slam dunk.

The idea is that the evidence or this persuasiveness of God, the cumulative case for God, adds up over time from argument to argument to argument.

So between being and mind and moral law, all of this demands a rational explanation, and this gives us good reason to hold to a theistic worldview that there is a God.

That's premise number one.

Premise number two, this God can and does intervene in history.

See, it'd be one thing to find a watch on the beach and then walk away.

You could never meet the watchmaker, and that watch will keep clicking on no matter what.

But what the Bible claims is even more than a theistic worldview.

The Bible claims that this God who created the world is a God who involves himself in this world, a God who discloses himself to this world, a God who wants a relationship with those that he's created in his image.

God's self-disclosure is consistent with his attributes as God.

It's a little bit like I was talking to an artist yesterday, and we were talking about how when an artist creates, a painter paints, or a musician plays the instrument, there is a special relationship you share with that which you're creating.

It's almost sacral in a way, right?

Even more than that, there's a parent who relates to the child.

What parent, you know, brings a child into the world and thinks, all right, get on with life.

I'll see you, you know, in 18 years or something like that.

Every parent is drawn to a deeper and deeper relationship with their child out of love.

This God who creates is a God who desires to involve himself in his creation.

And so God discloses himself.

He gives us a general knowledge of him through creation.

The creation of the world, pardon me, Paul writes Romans 1, since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, his eternal power, divine nature have been clearly seen and understood from what he is made so that people are without excuse.

Creation testifies to us that yes, there is a creator.

But even more than that, God doesn't just reveal himself in a general way through creation.

God speaks his word, his life-giving word, to his people, and he sends his son to bear witness to the heart of a father.

The beginning of the book of Hebrews, in the past, God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he's spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed as heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.

The Son is the radiance of God's glory, the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.

See, biblical worldview says we come to true knowledge of this living God through this God entering into our world.

We cannot ascend to knowledge of God.

Knowledge of God has to come down to us.

And that's exactly who Jesus is in the biblical worldview.

God reveals himself in the world and he's at work in the world in spontaneous and miraculous ways.

The philosopher David Hume, of course, has a famous objection to miracles.

He calls them violations of the laws of nature, and laws of nature, by definition, cannot be violated.

But David Hume's argument has largely been overturned.

David Hume's argument suggests it's a violation.

But Christian theologians have never suggested that miracles are a violation of the laws of nature.

They're an intervention.

They're an intervention by the one who has placed the laws in place.

So let me give you an example.

Let's say I had a ball in my hand, and let's say I tossed it up in the air.

What would you expect to happen?

Thank you.

You all are so smart.

It's gonna come down and it's gonna hit the floor.

That's what we'd expect, wouldn't it?

Okay.

And I'll give you ten times out of ten, that's what happened.

But let's say once I reach out my hand and I grab that ball.

What's gonna happen?

It's not gonna hit the floor, is it?

And you're gonna say, well, of course, because you intervened, and I say, that's exactly my point.

The laws of nature aren't being violated.

God is personally intervening in the world in which we live.

And so these miracles we encounter in the Bible, sometimes they can be intellectually troubling.

But we have to say a God who can create all things and sustain all things is surely capable of intervening in all ways.

And when we talk about the resurrection, we are talking about the miracle of miracles.

We are talking about the intervention of interventions.

And of course, we could say, well, if God can intervene, speak, and act in history, what why wouldn't he do something about the evil that we experience in the world?

And that's a good objection.

And that's a whole other sermon in itself, but let me just say these two things.

One, the Bible and a biblical worldview is not clinical about evil and suffering, as though it's a Rubik's Cube that can get solved dispassionately.

But instead, Scripture witnesses that God enters into the fullness of human evil and suffering in Jesus.

He does not stand apart from evil and suffering, he enters into it for our sake, the fullness thereof in Jesus.

And not just that, but if someone is a materialist or an atheist, someone who would reject God's intervention or the existence of God, not only do you have the problem of evil to explain, but you've got the problem of the good as well.

Because without a moral lawgiver, what right have we to say that one thing is good and one thing is evil?

See, a Christian, it's true, we've got the problem of evil to wrestle with, but an atheist has the problem of evil and good to wrestle with.

Where does that come from?

So if there is a God, it's not unreasonable to think that this God intervenes in history and that the resurrection is the culmination, the very climax, the mountaintop of his intervention on earth.

Indeed, the interven intervention that begins to overturn all suffering and all evil.

It changes everything.

So you're tracking with me so far?

Because we're covering some really heavy topics, and I'm so impressed with you guys.

We're talking about worldview, aren't we?

We're talking about a theistic worldview where we can reasonably say, yes, there is a God.

We're talking about a biblical worldview where we say, not only is there a God, this God involves himself and intervenes in our world.

Now we come to premise three.

I had mentioned broadly accepted facts about Easter Sunday that need to be explained.

Let me share with you what those are.

Because again, this is not me being selective about my sources.

I'm going around reading non-Christian authors, Christians, or pardon me, authors who are critical of the Christian faith, because I want to know can we agree on the facts of the case?

Defense and prosecution.

Here are at least four facts that whether you're critical of the resurrection, whether you believe in the resurrection, everyone can agree with this.

Fact number one: Jesus was crucified and died.

It takes a really fringy YouTuber, by the way, to say that Jesus never existed.

So Jesus existed.

There is plenty of evidence for that.

Jesus was crucified and he died on the cross.

Both first century Christian, Jewish, and Roman sources agree on that.

Here's one early second century historian named Tacitus saying, Christus, from whom we have the name the name has its origin, suffered the extreme penalty, which is crucifixion.

By the way, Romans couldn't even bring themselves to say crucifixion.

It was so ugly.

So instead, he suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of Pontius Pilate.

Jesus was crucified and died.

That's fact number one.

Fact number two, the tomb was found empty.

And that we can reasonably conclude is true because what historians call the criterion of embarrassment, which sounds like a Friday night for me.

But for historians, it means those facts that don't paint you in a good light are generally more plausible and likely to be true.

See, if I'm telling you a tall tale, I'm going to make myself look as good as I can.

But if I tell you a story and it ends up making me look foolish, probably you're more inclined to think, yeah, I know Creighton, and that's more his thing.

The criterion of embarrassment applied to the resurrection narrative, the Eastern narrative, goes recognizes that the first to discover the empty tomb were women.

And we have to understand the role of women in first century Judea, Palestine.

The testimony of women was so poorly regarded it was not even admissible in court.

Certainly not saying that's the way it ought to be.

But if we're going to be in first century Palestine, considering the claims that are being made in its time, we need to recognize that is not a very persuasive argument for the resurrection.

Right?

If I'm telling you a tall tale, if I'm inventing this story, of course I'm going to tell you, well, Peter, you know, and John and the male disciples, they of course are the ones to go, because they're the credible witnesses, you know.

But if I'm inventing the story, I'm not going to suggest that witnesses who aren't even credible in court would be the ones to find them.

And yet, consistently across all four Gospels, it's these unlikely witnesses who proclaim the resurrection to the apostles, and it's the apostles who don't believe it.

It's the women who are the first witnesses to the resurrection.

And that's a remarkable thing.

That's a, if you're making up that story, that's that's an embarrassing detail to include.

Suggests it's not made up.

That's the point.

Jesus was crucified and died, the tomb was found empty.

Fact number three, the disciples, whatever happened on Easter Sunday, the disciples were transformed by it.

It changed their life completely.

From abandonment and denial on the night that Jesus was crucified, again, let's apply the criterion of embarrassment, to proclaiming the resurrection fearlessly and boldly and right off the bat.

The resurrection did not go through a stage of development.

The resurrection seems to have been proclaimed right away, in its fullness.

And we just have to look at people like Peter, of course, who denied Jesus at the crucifixion, now proclaiming to thousands only days later that Jesus is alive.

And of course, Paul, who persecuted and put many Christians to death, encounters the risen Lord Jesus and spends the rest of his life proclaiming the Christ he once crucified.

Bart Ehrman, who is no friend to Orthodox Christianity, but a leading New Testament historian, he writes this it is a historical fact that some of Jesus' followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution.

Thus, for the historian, Christianity begins after the death of Jesus with the belief in the resurrection.

So, sure, Ehrman says, Christianity begins with the belief in the resurrection, and he discounts the resurrection happens, but you still have to account for the fact that the disciples are proclaiming it, and proclaiming it so early, and proclaiming it having witnessed their leader, their Messiah, getting crucified days earlier.

So I'm with Blaise Pascal, who writes, I believe those witnesses that get their throats cut.

They're willing to go to their deaths proclaiming Jesus is alive.

Okay, so three facts so far Jesus was crucified and died, the tomb was empty, the disciples were transformed by whatever happened on Easter Sunday.

And here's fact number four.

Over, just hanging over this whole conversation is this.

There was no expectation of anything like this occurring.

There was no expectation of a resurrection in mid-history.

Sure, there was a general expectation that on the last day, when the Lord returns, yes, there'll be a resurrection of all people then.

But here in the middle of history, before history is brought to its conclusive finale, a single individual is resurrected.

There's nothing like that.

There's no expectation for that.

So it suggests that these events were not invented to support a pre-conceived belief, but rather these beliefs are being proclaimed to explain what remarkable events have occurred.

So Tim Keller writes this: an idea of an individual being resurrected in the middle of history while the rest of the world continued on, burdened by sickness, decay, and death, was inconceivable.

This is not what the disciples expected to happen.

And yet it happened, allegedly.

Therefore, the rest of their lives were changed.

So those four facts, we have to explain those four facts somehow.

He was crucified and died, the tomb was empty, the disciples were transformed.

There's no expectation of any of this happening.

So here's a couple of explanations we could suggest.

Well, maybe they were all hallucinating.

But then they're doing it together, and hallucinations don't happen in a group, do they?

And the claim that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians is that Jesus appeared to 500 people, as in, go ask these people and they'll tell you Jesus was alive.

Well, the disciples could have stolen his body.

That might be true, but again, why would they go to the death proclaiming that?

Stolen bodies don't produce martyrs.

And we could say, well, this is all just a legend.

This is mythology.

This is good triumphing over evil sort of stuff.

And the thing is, the resurrection is proclaimed far too early for a legend to develop.

There are too many witnesses, too many folks around who have seen this happen.

So the question I would want to ask in return is this: why all the elaborate objections to Jesus' resurrection?

For me, a Christian worldview best explains Easter.

If there is a God, and if it's reasonable that this God intervenes in history, then the best explanation for all of the facts of the first Easter Sunday is this: that God raised Jesus from the dead.

One historian named Molly Worthen, who's a historian of the church, though not a believing Christian herself for many, many years, in the last couple of years has changed her mind on the resurrection and become a believing Christian.

And in an interview, Molly Worthen describes this process of consideration, reconsideration for herself, and she says this.

She says the big hurdle, the intellectual hurdle for many is this.

If you don't already allow for the possibility of an open universe, a theistic biblical worldview is what we're talking about, if you are committed to an anti-supernaturalist understanding of reality, then any possible explanation of the empty tomb and Jesus' appearances to his followers is preferable to the Christian explanation, no matter how broke and elaborate.

Molly says I had to come to grips with my own deep anti-supernaturalist bias.

And she concludes this way: if you're willing to suspend your disbelief in the supernatural, then you can begin to investigate the historical context of Christians' claims about the empty tomb and the appearances of Christ.

You're still faced with a leap of faith, but it's no longer a wild leap in the dark.

It's a well-researched, reasonable leap.

And then you start to realize that you were always making a bit of a leap.

You just weren't acknowledging your presuppositions.

So what does all this mean for us?

If Jesus is alive, if indeed it is reasonable to proclaim the reality of the resurrection, then what do we do with that?

Keller says that most people think that when it comes to Jesus' resurrection, the burden of proof is on believers to give evidence that it happened.

But that's not completely the case, he says.

The resurrection also puts a burden of proof on its unbelievers.

You have to provide some other plausible account for how things began.

There is room to wrestle around with this.

I mean, is anyone certain that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon?

Was anyone there for that?

Anyone see that for themselves?

No.

But we accept that on good authority.

That's history.

History is balance of probabilities.

And the question is: on this balance of probabilities, does Jesus' resurrection explain the facts?

Or do we commit ourselves to an anti-supernaturalist worldview and discount that right off the bat?

That's the question.

There's room to wrestle around.

There's room for doubt.

There's room to grow.

But at the very least, if you've come here this morning skeptical about the claim that Jesus is alive, I hope that you can at least acknowledge this: that from a certain angle, a certain point of view, this is not irrational.

This is not unreasonable.

This is not check your brain at the door sort of stuff.

But this might just explain what's going on here on Easter Sunday.

But how do we respond?

If the resurrection of Jesus is reasonable, it makes a claim on us.

Don't cop out on the claim.

Earlier this year, uh, yeah, I mentioned this at my peril.

Earlier this year, um two very famous internet personalities sat down together for a conversation, and those two internet personalities were Jordan Peterson and Alex O'Connor.

And Jordan Peterson might be a familiar name, not saying you should listen to him, not saying you shouldn't.

He's just, you know, a controversial guy, let's put it that way.

But he's got a lot of thoughts that are influencing a lot of young folks in terms of how they view religion.

And then Alex O'Connor is a very thoughtful but committed atheist.

And they're sitting down together, and Peterson is very famously, he hedges when he talks about the resurrection.

And he talks about myth being more real than reality, but you're kind of like, okay, but does that mean it really happened?

And he just, he's slippery.

So Alex O'Connor, in this conversation they had, does this beautiful job at, you know, just kind of cutting off every escape route that Peterson has and really corners them.

And he gets them into this logical corner.

He says, okay, if you set up a camcorder, you know, when it's filming the tomb on Sunday morning, do you see someone walk out of the tomb on the playback?

And Peterson sort of leans back and he goes, Yes.

I suppose, I would suspect, yes.

Which is a pretty remarkable thing to say.

That's the first time Peterson's done anything like a firm, anything like the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

And so all of the evangelical and Catholic bros I know who follow Peterson rejoice.

But here's the thing Peterson says next.

And I gotta be honest, I missed it on first listen, first watch.

Peterson says, yes, I would suspect that someone would walk out of the tomb, he says, but I have no idea what that means.

And neither did the people who saw it.

Au contraire.

1 Corinthians 15, Paul writes, If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins.

The resurrection makes all the difference.

And it deals conclusively with everything that can separate us from God.

And then Paul goes on to say, if all of that's in vain, if Jesus hasn't been raised from the dead, in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For as by a man came death, by a man is come also the resurrection of the dead.

For in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

The resurrection pledges us, guarantees us a share in his new life.

It's like a friend of yours comes to you and says, I've finally done it.

I discovered the lost city of gold.

And you think, You're insane.

But then they say, No, no, look at this.

And they put into your hand a gold coin that you've never seen anything like it before.

And you take it to someone who knows history or gold or whatever, and they say, Yeah, that's the real deal.

Never seen anything like that.

Well, suddenly your skepticism is transformed, isn't it?

You're kind of thinking, okay, because this gold coin, which sure it could just be a gold coin all on its own, but it suggests a greater reality.

It suggests something more, it suggests an origin.

See, Jesus' resurrection is the first fruits of our resurrection.

He is the first to be raised so that we may be raised in him, that we will have a share of his everlasting eternal life.

So how do we receive this gift?

We turn to Christ, Christ who is our life.

And turning to Christ who is our life means we don't search for life anywhere apart from him.

He is our life.

So we set our whole lives upon him.

And we put our trust in Christ, Christ who did for us what we could not do for ourselves, Christ who is raised promises us a share in his resurrection.

So we bend the knee of our heart to the risen Lord Jesus and we put our trust in him.

And we cling to that gold coin he has put into our hands, and we follow him into eternity.

See, friends, I want to be a Christian not because of how it makes me feel.

I want to be a Christian because it's true.

And I want us to be Christians because we believe it's true.

The resurrection is a reality that explains not just Easter Sunday, but it changes our whole lives for the better.

Death has been overcome by life, and it cannot be undone.

So put your trust today in the risen, reigning, and returning Lord Jesus.

Christ is risen.

The Lord is risen indeed.

Alleluia.

Amen.

We hope that you've been blessed by God's Word today.

If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.

If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.

Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.

Newsong's ministry is entirely funded by the generous giving of those who worship and journey with us.

If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsongportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.