Easter 2020

La musique.

I feel the darkness breaking.

I bet the devil's shaken.

Somebody shall break.

I see an empty job.

There's no big cry.

Go and tell the news.

What started in the garden, what's finished in the tomb.

It's all the first day I put the curse for three days in the ground.

Which the Lord is written.

Let's put it out in the colour.

And so whether you are part of our social circle campus or whether you are part of our Walnut Grove campus, or maybe you find yourself worshiping with us or watching with us from somewhere else on the planet, I want to say welcome.

My name is Russ, and we're excited to be in this beautiful place to celebrate the story of Easter.

But way before we get to Easter, we go back to creation and we find ourselves in this beautiful garden right now.

And it's a bit of a representation of creation.

You see, in the beginning of the story, God created everything.

And part of his creation was this beautiful garden that we see in scripture called the Garden of Eden.

And God created it with beauty, just like the garden that I'm standing in, but it was so much more, so much beyond just physical beauty.

It was a place of perfection.

It was a place without any disease.

It was a place without any imperfection.

And so the only comparison I can think of is a place that my wife and I were able to visit recently, and it's called Hawaii.

And it's this beautiful place that has beaches and has beautiful mountains.

It has beautiful places inside the islands where you can hike to waterfalls.

It's unbelievable how beautiful it is.

In the middle of the day, it only gets to about 82 or 83 degrees, and at night it only gets down to about 77 degrees, and it is a beautiful place on God's earth.

But God's garden in the beginning was even better than that.

It was a place without disease.

It was a place without shame.

It was a place without emptiness or brokenness.

See, we find ourselves this morning, we're celebrating Easter, which is exciting.

But we're celebrating in the middle of a broken world that's been affected by a pandemic.

And so we find ourselves in this garden that represents creation, but we also want to look at the story where brokenness and emptiness enters the story.

As a matter of fact, here's what I'm reading: Genesis 3, verse 1.

Genesis 3:1

Here's where we find ourselves in the story.

The enemy comes in to tempt Adam and Eve.

And the temptation is this is to believe that what God says is not true, and to believe that God is not good.

Look at what it says here in Genesis 3, verse 1.

Genesis 3:1

It says, Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And so you see the first temptation?

The first temptation is, I'm not going to believe what God says.

I'm not going to believe that God is good.

And so when that enters the equation, it causes Eve to slowly take the fruit from the forbidden tree.

And she eats from the fruit.

And then she shares it with Adam.

And as they take from the fruit, their eyes are open to the reality of emptiness and brokenness.

And sin enters the picture for the first time.

Let's look back at the story.

Verse 7, it said, Then the eyes of both were open.

And they knew that they were naked.

And they sowed fig leaves together, made themselves loincloths.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

The man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you?

And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself.

And so for the first time, sin enters the equation, and the result is shame and this reality of being naked.

It leads to brokenness and emptiness.

That's where we find ourselves in this story.

God did not create brokenness and emptiness, but we see the result of sin is it leads to brokenness and emptiness.

Ever since the fateful day when Adam and Eve ate the fruit off the tree, the world had then experienced death, pain, and emptiness.

And ever since then, we've been trying to fill the void that we have in our lives.

And so in ancient times, they made idols and they made the idols and they worshiped the idols, thinking that that was going to bring fulfillment in their lives, only to come up empty time and time again.

However, in today's world, we maybe don't create graven images, but we do have idols in our lives and in our culture today that try to fill our lives to bring us fulfillment and meaning.

Maybe that's alcohol, maybe that's some type of drug use, maybe that's an individual in the relationship, maybe that's a shopping habit, maybe it's pornography.

It can be a number of different things, but we are sold the bill of goods that if we can fill our lives with these things, then our lives will be complete.

But we come up empty time and time again.

Hey guys, my name is Madeline, and uh I want to tell y'all a little story about uh my life before and after Jesus.

Right up until just before my 13th birthday, it was really perfect.

Um, and then just before my 13th birthday, my father uh fell ill and passed away with a terminal illness, and man, everything changed.

Um, big hole, big loss for me.

Uh had to watch my mom struggle to try to fill both uh sets of shoes, and she did a really great job with that.

But from that point on, there was just always something missing, and I was continuously looking and searching to kind of fill that void all through my teenage years and my young adulthood.

And uh, you know, so I thought, yeah, I need to get married, you know, have kids, start my own family, and that would be it.

That would be what solved this whole, this missing uh thing in my life.

So that's what I did.

I met my husband, you know, we settled down, we started our family.

Uh it couldn't have been more perfect, actually.

You know, we had uh two beautiful kids, um, owned a home, two cars, family pet, you know, just everything you would think the American dream is made of.

And uh yet there was still just something missing.

I was constantly unhappy, constantly discontent, constantly feeling like, you know, I wasn't good enough, just something was just always missing.

So it ten years into marriage, I decided it was my marriage that was making me unhappy.

So I separated from my husband and broke the only foundation I had in my life into two pieces and drugged my precious children through all of it.

That actually took me further away from where I really wanted to be in more ways than I could ever see coming.

And so the devil was just dancing in every area of my life, and I mean that in every way possible.

Like there was just so much just dysfunction in me personally.

I, you know, was um, you know, buying into the whole like material things would make me feel more complete, and then recreational drug use, you know, just you know, any and everything you can think of, um, trying to fill a void that was just not fillable by any of those things.

I was so ashamed of what I had done to, you know, uh to my marriage, to my family, to our home.

And it set a downward spiral of depression and despair that was just consuming, all-consuming.

And I actually had thoughts on many nights of this world would just be better off without me.

They'd be better off without me.

You know, if I just took my life, that that would just clean up my mess.

I could just just wipe it all out if I just took myself out of the equation.

There's no darker, deeper despair than thinking that your life is so broken and worthless that ending it makes sense.

There's just nothing as dark and despairing as that.

Now, the interesting part of the story of God is this.

If you are new to this whole Christianity thing, you need to know this.

That God, although he is a creator and he has a purpose and a plan, he doesn't stay back at a distance.

He comes to us.

And so the central character in the story of God is Jesus.

You've probably heard of Jesus.

Jesus, who has always been and always will be, who is in heaven receiving all of the glory and all the praises, he decides to step into the story as the central character.

He comes to us.

He comes to us to rescue us from emptiness and brokenness.

And so you need to know this.

God doesn't stay at a distance, he comes to you.

And so let me let me read you just a little portion out of the letter that Paul wrote to the church at Philippi.

And he and it's it's about Jesus, it's about his identity as our rescuer.

It says this: He says, Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men, and being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Now let me tell you what happened while Jesus was on the cross.

He took sin upon himself.

As a matter of fact, the apostle Paul said that he who knew no sin became sin.

And so while Jesus is on the cross, he is receiving the punishment, the brokenness, the emptiness that all of us deserved.

And so that's what Jesus was doing when he was on the cross.

He was taking all of that upon himself.

There's this theological word called substitution, where he became sin so we wouldn't have to experience it ourselves.

And so when Jesus was on the cross, he took on himself emptiness.

He became empty so we could experience the abundant life that God wants for us.

And we can experience the restoration back to what he originally planned for us in the Garden of Eden.

And so the story of God is that is that he comes to us.

He wants to rescue us out of emptiness and brokenness.

But he doesn't stop with just stepping out of heaven and into our story.

He lives his life here on earth.

And here's what the story of the Bible tells us that Jesus was born, he lived 30 years with no sin, no brokenness, no emptiness, full of righteousness.

And then he willingly gave his life to take upon himself all of the consequences that humanity deserved from brokenness and emptiness and from sin.

And so I want to read to you what it says here in John chapter 10, what it says about Jesus.

John 10 · chapter mention

It says, No one takes it from me, John 10, 18, but I lay it down of my own accord.

I have authority to lay it down, I have authority to take it up again.

This charge I have received from my Father.

So I'm standing here in this beautiful location with crosses behind me.

And here we are on Easter Sunday.

And I know there's a world full of chaos around us, but I want you to know this.

In the middle of the chaos, in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of confusion, there's a Savior that willingly laid his life down.

And he died on a cruel Roman cross.

And while he hung on that cross, he took all of sin upon himself.

And you know why he did it?

He did it to deal with the issues of emptiness and brokenness.

So I want you to be encouraged that Jesus comes to offer you life and to deal with the endiness and brokenness.

And wherever you are right now in your home with your family, wherever you are, emotionally or mentally or spiritually, I want you to be encouraged that Jesus came to rescue us.

He came to be your savior.

And so when he died on that cross, he became the answer to emptiness and brokenness.

Now I love the story of Mary Magdalene.

In Luke chapter 8, Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus for the very first time.

Luke 8 · chapter mention

She's demon-possessed and she's empty.

We've been talking about being empty, and she's definitely someone that experienced that emptiness and that void in her life.

I mean, imagine just her being a social outcast and unable to do the things that she would normally want to do with her life.

But here comes Jesus.

And Jesus, in a moment's notice, He heals her.

He casts the demons out, and she's a changed person.

She goes from emptiness to now having a life that is full and complete.

She leaves her lifestyle and she begins to follow Jesus.

She sees other miracles that he does and she sees incredible things just through the ministry of Jesus.

Until one day, when Jesus is in a garden and he's praying in the garden and he's so desperately wanting the Father to take away the pain that he's about to experience.

But the Father does not take that away.

Instead, he gives Jesus the cup of suffering and he goes and he is crucified on the cross, which we talked about just a moment ago.

But imagine Mary in that moment, following Jesus, the man that changed her life, the man that set her free from the demons.

And now she sees him hanging on the cross.

If she experienced emptiness while she was demon-possessed, imagine how she felt in this moment where she sees her Savior hanging on a cross, only to see his body take its last breath.

She's there when the body is eventually taken down from the cross and she sees Jesus being buried in the tomb.

And when the stone is rolled in front of the tomb, imagine that the emptiness that she once experienced has returned yet again.

Brokenness, emptiness, worry, pain that you could not even begin to imagine.

In fact, we maybe can't imagine it to an extent.

Because I think a lot of times, or especially in the season that we're living in right now with the coronavirus and all that's happening around us, I feel like we're almost in this season where we've lost hope and we're feeling this emptiness and this void.

But Mary, the story continues that after three days, Mary goes to the tomb.

She's going to anoint his body and she's going to bring the perfumes and the fragrance, fragrances there.

But when she shows up at the tomb with the other women, she realizes that the tomb has, the stone has been rolled away from the tomb and the body of Jesus is missing.

Now imagine that this would just be a terrible thing because her first thing is, her first thought is not that his body has been resurrected, but instead, her first thought is that somebody has come and tampered with the tomb and removed the body.

And so she's worried, she's panicked, she's in fear.

The emptiness, the void that's there has just made insult to injury.

Things have gotten even worse now.

She runs and she tells the other disciples, the disciples come running to the tomb, and they again see that there's nobody there in the tomb.

Mary stays behind as everybody else leaves, and she's wallowing in her sorrow and her despair.

She's crying in disbelief about what has just occurred.

She's reliving the last 72 hours and just the pain that she's experienced and the emptiness that she's feeling in this moment.

And this is where the story picks up in John chapter 20 and verse 11.

John 20 · chapter mention

It says, Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying.

As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, Woman, why are you crying?

And she responded, They have taken away my Lord.

And I don't know where they have put him.

At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

And he said to her, Woman, why are you crying?

Who is it that you are looking for?

Thinking that he was the gardener, she said, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go get him.

Here in this moment, she's encountering the resurrected Savior, but she doesn't even recognize him in this moment.

This moment.

I imagine that her eyes are full of tears and she can't even see right, and she doesn't even realize that it's Jesus.

But then the next verse that comes up, Jesus responds to her by calling her name.

He says, Mary.

And in an instant, she immediately knows who is calling her name because there's only one person that talks like that.

And it's her Savior.

It's her Lord.

It's the one that had changed and revolutionized her life.

And so she immediately sees that it's Jesus.

She recognizes that it's her Savior.

She notices that it's not a dead body, but it's now a living, breathing person that is standing right in front of her.

Her emptiness has now been completely fulfilled.

That she has now experienced this grace and this mercy and this love that is beyond comprehension.

And she grabs hold of Jesus to the point where Jesus says not to cling on to him because he still has to ascend to heaven.

This is an incredible miracle that has taken place.

And what I love about this story is that Mary's emptiness is fulfilled because there's an empty tomb.

Because the tomb is empty, we don't have to have empty lives.

We can be fulfilled because there is a resurrected Savior.

And that's why we're excited about Easter.

That's why we celebrate Easter.

That's why Easter is such a big deal.

Because our Savior is not dead, but he is alive.

And because of that, we can have lives that are fulfilled forever and for always.

And out of the silence, the roaring lion declared the grief.

Then came the morning that showed the voice.

Jesus delivers.

He is the one thing that can keep that pit from swallowing you whole.

He is the one thing that can restore you, rescue you, set your feet on solid ground, and put so much truth in you that you learn how not to believe those lies anymore.

On a random Wednesday night, in the midst of all this vicious dysfunction going on in my life, I was invited to church.

And I was thinking to myself, uh, no, uh, someone like me does not belong in a church.

There's not a church out there for someone like me.

I walked into the church that night, lost, broken, exhausted, beyond redemption, embarrassed, consumed with guilt and shame, mostly for not being a person I felt that my children and my mother and my husband could be proud of.

So I sat through that service, and before I knew it, I was walking down this aisle and I was at this altar and I was on my knees, and I was just, here I am, God.

Do what you can with this mess.

I give it up, I give it all to you.

I don't know what else I can do.

And it was the most almost out-of-body experience, but I walked out of that place different.

I knew I had done something good.

For once, I had done something real and good.

I didn't really know what it was, but I knew it was good.

So, you know, it took the Lord several years to start putting my life into his order.

Not me and what I wanted, not me and what I thought I needed, but what he wanted and what he had for me.

And he did just that, just piece by piece, he started putting my life back together.

The first thing he did was, remarkably, he restored my marriage.

I mean, from a point of brokenness that marriages don't typically come back from.

He restored my marriage.

He restored my home, our family, and he marked that with a third child so that we would not forget what he had done.

I have this walking, talking, living, breathing reminder in my third child, my son Kyler.

And I will not and could not ever forget, even without Kyler, I would have never forgotten.

But what a beautiful testimony and memorial he gave us in that child.

From that point, guys, I'd love to tell you that life's been awesome and great and rainbows and butterflies, but that's not true.

Life is hard, and things don't go the way you think they will, and they certainly don't turn out the way you want them to sometimes.

And you know, it can be mean, and and people will let you down, and you know, light will leave scars.

And if you're living, life is gonna leave some scars.

But who you are is who Jesus says you are.

And what faith is, is letting Jesus use those scars for something beautiful.

He taught me how to um love myself, to love others, to believe in myself, to invest in myself, to believe and invest in others in spite of everything this world and the devil would want me to believe.

All the things that used to try to tear me down, the Lord now uses for something beautiful.

So the thing I want to tell y'all most is that good people are really great at making bad choices.

You cannot get it right on your own and apart from Jesus.

You just can't.

Trust him, believe in him, follow him.

He's got everything we need to be who we always wanted to be and who he created us to be, and we don't have to do that on our own.

Here's the good news.

You have now heard the story for the reason.

You've also heard the testimony of my deal today on the resurrection.

Without disease, without eakiness, without brokenness, we we heard how energy away brokenness and brokenness is horrible.

We we chase after all kinds of things.

We chase after money, we chase after fame, we chase after pleasure, we chase after all of these things, and just like a rubber band that you all snap back in the broken.

So God created us forever, eternal ready.

He said it's part of the story we just read, right?

It's part of the testimony we just heard.

He said it's like Jesus.

God read in human flesh, and he would live a perfect 30 years, a righteous, sinless life on this earth.

And then he would spend three years teaching and preaching and healing, pretty much demonstrating that the kingdom of God is available to us in coming.

And then he would give his life and he would lay it down, he would suffer, and he would die a cruel death on a Roman cross.

And they would take his lifeless body and they would put it in a tomb.

But praise God, what we celebrate today is that his body didn't stay in the tomb, it came out of that tomb.

Breath came inside of his lungs and he rose again.

That's what we are talking about.

It's the apex of the story.

Jesus is resurrected, and it shows us that he conquered death and the grave, and he has power to give us hope, even in the midst of the world that's messed up and broken.

And so the question is: what is our response?

What is your response to this Easter message?

Is it just to kind of ignore it?

Or is it maybe to take a step toward God and receive and believe, and to put your trust in what He's provided to save us.

And in that salvation, we have hope for eternal life.

Life that will give us strength in the midst of difficult circumstances like we're in today, and life that will be forever in eternity.

So we say at Church of the Grove, it's as simple as ABC.

Accept the reality that you are in sin and admit that you need a Savior.

Believe and trust in what God has provided in this story, what you've heard in this testimony.

Put your faith in the Jesus that was crucified and that rose again on that first Easter Sunday.

You trust, you accept, and you believe it for yourself.

And here's what God promises us: everything comes back to his perfect design.

He will restore everything back to the way he started, and it will be perfect, and I can't wait for that day.

But until then, you can have Jesus living inside of you through the power of the Holy Spirit, and he can give you hope in the midst of an emptiness and a brokenness that we see in this world.

And so today takes on significance.

It really is Resurrection Sunday, and Jesus is alive.

So I want to ask you this question.

Is right now maybe a time that you would be ready to put your trust in Jesus?

Maybe you've never taken that step ever in your life.

And today you found yourself watching us and joining with us in worship on Resurrection Sunday, or maybe you're watching this even after this particular Sunday, I want to encourage you to join me in praying.

As I said earlier, we say this is as simple as ABC.

Admit that you need Jesus.

Believe in what God provided in his life and death and resurrection, and confess Jesus as your Lord.

And so can I just pray with you right now?

Look, let's just pray right now.

And you don't have to say the exact words, but something like this where you would say, Dear Jesus, I admit that I need you.

And I believe in what you provided in the life and death and resurrection of your Son Jesus to provide for my salvation.

And I confess Jesus as my Lord and Savior right now.

The Bible says when you just call upon the name of the Lord Jesus, you are saved.

And so if you pray that prayer, we want to know there's a place for you to click online to let us know your response today.

And so we want to know if you trusted Jesus for the first time.

So please respond and let us know.

And if you maybe you're a believer and you need prayer, or maybe you're rededicating your life, or you just have a need.

Whatever it is, click on the response right there on your screen and let us know, and we'll be in prayer with you.

And treasures that faith I never know.

But then you came along and put me back together And every desire is now satisfied curing you love there's nothing better than you there's nothing better than you there's nothing nothing is better than you Yes I'm not true I'm not afraid Show you how we did my friends and falls for you to see the mall and you still call me free to mount it's the God, but it's a very good idea.