He Is Risen: The Power of Belief and the Empty Tomb

Well, hey, good morning, everybody. Happy Easter. Thank you for joining us.

Would you do me a favor? Turn to your neighbor and say, He is risen.

All right, now turn to your other neighbor, the one you just avoided.

Tell him the second best thing anybody could hear.

You look like you've lost weight. All right, turn to your neighbor, tell him that.

Hey, he is risen. That's what we're celebrating on Easter Sunday,

that the grave is empty, that Jesus defeated sin and death. Can I get an amen?

All right, I know Easter is a time where I have some guests visiting us.

And I hate that word guest.

And here's why I know I'm being a little particular here. but when you have

guests over for dinner at the house, what's the expectation of the guest, right?

It's totally different from the people who are my family. We have somebody over for dinner.

My family's expectation is to stay, right? They're not going anywhere.

I might send the kids upstairs, but they're going to sleep here because it's their house, right?

It's different with a guest. There comes a point where you don't have to go

home, but you can't stay here, right?

Like you haven't had a guest that seemed like they just won't,

you can't even leave. It's time to go home.

A guest is just visiting. They have a different home. A guest comes and a guest goes.

So this is really important. Please hear me today. If you are a guest,

that is the exact opposite of what we want for you here at Refuge.

We don't want you to come and then to go.

We want to be a church home for you where you can find community.

You can feel the love of Jesus and you can stay. We are a church for everyone. All right.

And so we exist for everyone to

know Jesus and to become more deeply and intimately acquainted with him.

So if you're a guest this morning, I want you to know that we're honored you're here.

And our prayer is that you found a church that you can call home.

But right now, let's get our hearts ready for what God has for us this morning.

And would you put your arms out with your palms up? Close your eyes.

Just a posture of surrender. Take a deep breath.

And remember that God is just as near as the air. You're breathing.

Let's pray. God, today, would you guide us closer to you?

Help our minds put away the frustrations

of the past week, to put away the distractions of the coming week.

We want to fully focus on you. We'll come empty with nothing to offer but surrender.

Fill us up as only you can. Holy Spirit, move in here today with power.

We believe that in advance.

We ask all these things in Jesus' his name and all God's people said, amen, amen.

In 2007, I was a Grammy award-winning artist named Joshua Bell.

He did something a little bit unusual. Maybe you guys have heard about this,

but in 2007, he went incognito, went in street clothes, put a hat on,

kind of looked just like a normal guy, and he played in the subway station in D.C.

The night before, he was playing in the Library of Congress to like a sold-out crowd, okay?

But that morning, he was playing for free in front of a bunch of commuters.

They're just going to and from work. He is playing on a multi-million dollar violin.

Over 45 minutes at the train station, he made a whopping $32 rolling in it.

It says that 20 of that came from somebody who was at the concert the night

before and knew who he was, they said, dude, you're awesome. You're 20 bucks.

His ability, his skill, his value as an artist did not change at all.

In one environment, he was surrounded by people who valued him.

And the other environment, he was surrounded by people who didn't.

They didn't know who he was.

I know those people here just checking it out today, trying to get a feel for

church. And here's the deal. I can't speak to the people around you in your

life, but I can speak for Refuge Church.

Here you are seen, loved, and valued.

And here's the deal. We're honored you with us, and we just want to encourage you.

We would love to just simply encourage you because here's the deal. Life is tough.

We're going to talk about that a little bit later.

It is so much easier with the right people around you, being in the right environment.

So let's get into God's Word this morning. This is probably the most well-known verse from the Bible.

Tim Tebow helped us out with that. That was one of the things when we did the

eye black there with John 3.16.

Probably one of the most well-known verses in the Bible, one of the well-known

verses just ever. If you'll help me out when I get to that word in yellow and say it out loud.

This is John 3, 16. For this is how God loved the world. He gave his one and

only son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have life.

Everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

I heard a pastor talking once about a young lady in his ministry.

She heard that verse, one of the most well-known repeated verses,

and her immediate response was, why?

Not why would he give a son, but why would I want forever?

I don't want this forever. This is hard.

This life is challenging. Why in the world would I want more of this?

I just hear that. It breaks my heart because it's true. I understand there's

a lot of heartache in the world.

It is broken and full of disappointment, but the eternal life,

that Jesus offers is not more of what we have right now.

That is why it's called the gospel. That is the good news. That's literally what gospel means.

The forever that is found in Jesus is perfect and without blemish.

Revelation 21.4 says, He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain.

All of these things are gone forever.

No death, sorrow, crying, pain.

They're gone. The eternal life we find in Jesus is perfect.

As Jesus followers, the hope of our faith is what we are celebrating today.

Yes, he died on the cross, but Sunday morning he rose.

And when he did, he defeated death and sin.

We believe that our Savior, Jesus, he died, was buried, and came back to life.

If you're not a Jesus follower, I understand that's a lot to stomach, right?

It seems like a scene that would be from a movie, like he's dead,

he came back to life. That seems impossible. And here's the, that's the point.

Yes, for a human, it would be impossible, but Jesus is God and we believe in him.

That's where our belief is. And here's the, belief is incredibly powerful.

Belief in anything can have power.

There's a guy, his name is Nir Eyal. He wrote a book, it's called Beyond Belief.

This is not a religious book. He's not a Jesus follower. He took more of an

academic approach to the book as far as what belief is, lots of studies and data.

And he's got a few great examples of belief changing things.

I want to share a couple of them that he has there.

One of the most famous is a study on wild rats in 1957.

They made the rats, they put them in like, I don't know, like a tub or something.

They made them swim for as long as they could before they would give up. And,

This is from 1957. I don't think you can do this anymore. PETA might be a little

on it, but like, they're no longer with us, if you smell what I'm saying.

They went all the way on the experiment and then lasted about 15 minutes before

they accepted their fate.

Then took some more rats and they did this experiment again.

And right before they would give up, like right around that 14 minute mark,

they would rescue them and they would give them some respite, right?

Get a little towel, dry them off, give them some food, water,

just take a little break.

You know, and then back into the water they go. And the belief that they will

be rescued made them swim longer.

Remember the first time about 15 minutes, uh, you can go find this study.

Uh, they swam for 60 hours, not 60 minutes, 60 hours, an insane amount of time.

Belief is powerful.

Now I can hear what is going on in some of y'all's heads right now.

You're going to, he just equate me to a wild rat? No, no, no.

We're talking about belief.

Let me give you a human example as well. This is from the book.

He says, a young man came into the ER. He's in his early 20s,

or in his 20s, and he has an empty pill bottle in his hand.

He told the nurses, he came in, that he took all the pills. I took them all.

And he's got, his blood pressure is low. He has a faint heartbeat.

Everybody's convinced that he's overdosed on whatever it is.

But the pills are from a drug trial, so they didn't really know what was in

the bottle. They just knew it was from a trial.

And so they call up the trial to kind of figure out, hey, what are we supposed

to do? Because we don't want to give the man anything that's going to make it worse.

And so they call, they pull up the patient's file, and they find out he's on

the placebo, right? Sugar pills.

His body was having all of these reactions from nothing.

Placebo, I found this out in the Latin, it means I shall heal, right?

Like sometimes just belief, it's just I shall heal. This is actually what they

would call a nocebo, all right? Which means I shall hurt.

Because he believed the pills were going to harm his body, his body was struggling.

Doctors come in, break the news, there ain't nothing in these.

Within 50 minutes, homie's body was back to a normal baseline.

Belief. Belief is incredibly powerful.

Incredibly powerful. Now, we can get off track there if we think it's only about belief.

Belief is powerful, but the right question is, what are we going to believe in?

Because you could take that, somebody might take that and say,

we need to believe in yourself. Go for it.

Now, there is a healthy level of confidence, right?

But your belief is only as good as what it is in.

An example I like to use with this is if I walked up to a lake,

it's got a quarter inch of ice on the top of it, and I step out onto that ice

with all the belief in the world, I'm sinking, I'm breaking through that.

It does not matter how much belief I have of men stepping onto ice, that thing.

Belief is only as powerful as the object of it.

So if you were to take a step on that same lake, but the ice is frozen a foot

solid. It wouldn't matter if your belief was big or small.

When you step onto it, it will hold you.

Belief is incredibly powerful, but the object of your belief is where the real power is.

And church, our belief, our faith is in Jesus.

He is the object of our faith.

So the natural question, belief is powerful. You got to believe in the right

thing. We're at church, we're talking about Jesus.

The natural question is why believe in Jesus? And I love it when your questions

match up with my notes. It's fantastic. Makes it easy on me.

But here's the deal. There are two testimonies that I think give us reason to believe in Jesus.

Two of the strongest testimonies we have in scripture, one is in 1 Corinthians

15, the other one is in 1 John 5.

And here's the thing, a testimony, it tells the truth about something.

In a courtroom, a testimony, somebody telling the evidence that someone saw.

So we're going to look at the evidence of two different testimonies.

And the first one we're going to look at is the Apostle Paul.

It's in 1 Corinthians 15.

I'm going to start in verse three.

It says this, I pass on to you what was most important and what has also been passed on to me.

I'm just going to pause real quick. I know you're thinking if he stopped that

quick, it's going to be a long day. I'll be quick. I promise.

But I pass on to you what is most important and I pass on what has been passed on to me.

Most important, he is saying this, the empty grave is of the utmost importance to Jesus' followers.

That's the most important. And he says, I am passing on to you what has been

passed on to me. It is not his opinion.

He is sharing. This has been shared with me and I am sharing it with others.

This is the most important. Let's read the next part of verse three.

Christ died for our sins, just as the scripture said.

He was buried and raised from dead on the third day, just as the scriptures said. Amen.

He starts by saying, I'm passing this on because it was passed on to me.

What he's getting at there is this is a trustworthy source because I know who gave it to me.

And then in this passage, he says, just as the scriptures said.

He actually says it twice. Remember, Paul used to be a religious zealot.

He persecuted the church. He persecuted those who followed the way of Jesus.

He knew the scriptures well. That would have been a large part of his training for his role.

And he's saying Jesus was buried. He was raised on the third day.

And he knows that to be true because it was passed on to him and because it

was written in God's word.

He continues with his testimony in verse five.

He says he was seen by Peter and then by the 12th. He said, hey,

Jesus was seen by 13 people.

There are eyewitness accounts of people that saw Jesus after the resurrection. Verse 6.

After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time,

most of whom are still alive, though some have died.

Then he was seen by James and later by all of the apostles.

Paul is sharing that all of these people have seen Jesus after his death.

There are well over 500 people that have seen Jesus resurrected,

walking around the earth after being in the tomb.

Five people, they all agree. We saw Jesus. They're in agreement.

If I was to take a survey, depending on which door you came in and say,

what was the color of the shirt of the person holding the door open for you?

I think we'd get a wide variety of answers.

I don't think we could have consensus about that today. And yet there's several

hundred people that are saying, we saw Jesus with our own eyes and they are agreeing about it.

There's consensus about it.

Yet they saw him after his very public execution.

Let's keep going. Verse eight, last of all, as though I had been born at the

wrong time, I also saw him.

Remember, this is Paul talking. For I am the least of all the apostles.

In fact, I'm not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God's church.

You can read Paul's experience with Jesus in the book of Acts.

Paul considers himself to be at the bottom because of how he has persecuted

the church of God. He goes, I know I've done wrong things.

Let's keep going. Verse eight says, but whatever I am now, It is all because

God poured out his special favor on me and not without results.

For I have worked harder than any of the other apostles, yet it was not I,

but God who was working through me by his grace.

Paul got that dog in him, right? He just does. He's like, I was a sinner.

I know I am at the bottom because of what I've done. I have done some terrible

things, but I am so grateful for the work of God and I am working hard.

And here's the deal, not because of my hard work are we seeing results,

but God is blessing and we are seeing results.

It is all because of the grace of God.

Paul has all the reasons to boast from his ministry.

He's seeing results. He's seeing these great things happen. He doesn't boasts

in himself, he boasts in the Lord.

Let's keep going. Verse 11, he says, So it makes no difference whether I preach

or they preach, for we all preach the same message you have already believed.

The message that is being preached is the message of Christ's death,

burial, and resurrection.

Paul is saying it does not matter who the messenger is.

It's all about the message. And the message is the grave is empty.

He is risen. That is the testimony that has been passed on to Paul by all the

others who have seen Jesus.

I think even more powerful than the crowds that saw Jesus, Paul was one of the

biggest persecutors of the church. He mocked, he killed followers of Jesus.

And here's the deal. Jesus literally knocks Paul off of his horse and Paul has

this radical conversion.

He goes from killing believers to becoming one. You want to talk about a huge

change. He would have had everything you could imagine.

Like literally he would have had power. He would have had some wealth with his

role. He would have had some authority.

And he goes from that and persecuting Jesus' followers and kind of mocking them and killing them.

And he's doing all these things to being unemployed, to being a tent maker to

make ends meet and being so grateful for the change.

He believes in Jesus.

That's a powerful testimony. There are lots of people who have seen Jesus.

They've seen the change that happened in Paul's life.

Those are the testimonies of men.

There are people who have seen the eyewitness accounts of Jesus.

They've seen him with their own eyes. And then there's people who have seen

the evidence of Jesus in the lives of others.

But in 1 John, we see a different type of testimony. I'm going to read a chunk

of verses here for us. It's 1 John 5. We're going to start in verse 6.

And Jesus Christ was revealed as God's son by his baptism in the water and by

shedding his blood on the cross. Not by water only, but by water and blood.

And the Spirit, who is truth, confirms it with his testimony.

So we have these three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood. And all three agree.

Since we believe human testimony, surely we can believe this greater testimony that comes from God.

And God has testified about his Son.

All who believe in the Son of God know in their hearts that this testimony is true.

Those who don't believe this are actually calling God a liar because they don't

believe what God has testified about his son.

This isn't a testimony of men. This is a testimony of God.

First John, it's John, the disciple, and he's a little older.

And have you ever noticed that people get older, just the filter gets like less?

That's more get through.

And he says, if you don't believe this testimony of God, you're calling God

a liar. I mean, shots fired. He's not pulling any punches.

He's just kind of saying how it is. There are three witnesses to Jesus being

the son of God, his baptism.

Remember when Jesus is baptized, it says the heavens opened up and the spirit

of God descended like dove.

Absolutely. I'm him moment. Like this is a sign.

Next is his blood. That Jesus' blood was spilt on the cross.

Remember when that happened, Jesus went from leader to leader and they,

after his arrest and they all, they all declare him innocent saying like,

they find no reason to kill him, but the crowd is thirsty for blood. And so it happens.

The water, the blood, and then we have the Spirit of God, it says,

who confirms it all, the truth.

Three witnesses that Jesus is the Son of God.

That's the testimony. It says Jesus is the Lord.

Jesus is the Son of God, but it doesn't end with it there just saying Jesus is the Son of God.

He finishes with this, verse 11 through 13.

And this is what God has testified, that he has given us eternal life.

And this life is in his son. It's in Jesus.

Whoever has the son has life. Whoever does not have the son does not have life.

I have written this to you who believe in the name of the son of God so that

you may have eternal life.

John, he makes it real simple. Whoever has the son has life.

Whoever does not have the son does not have life.

He says, I'm telling you this so that you will have eternal life.

Do you have eternal life? Have you put your faith in Jesus?

It's possible you're here and you're thinking, I just, I couldn't do that.

I'm not good enough. I don't wanna be a Christian. There's too many rules to be in a Christian.

Church, to be a Jesus follower, there is one question.

Is your faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus? That's the line.

Is your faith in Jesus? Is your faith in the empty tomb? Jesus doesn't turn away anybody.

Romans 10, 13 says, Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Everyone, no qualifications, no exemptions. Anyone who calls on the name of

Jesus will be saved. he doesn't turn away anybody.

It's a beautiful picture of this in Mark 16.

In Mark 16, we see the angel, he's at the tomb.

He's telling Mary and Mary, he's not here. He has risen just as he said he would.

And then as the Marys are leaving, the angel offers them this instruction.

Verse seven, he says, now go and tell the disciples, go and tell his disciples,

including Peter, that Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee.

You will see him there just as he told you before he died.

Now, it makes sense for the angel to tell them, hey, tell the disciples.

He's going to meet them over there. He's going to be there.

But he makes it a point to say they need to tell who? You tell Peter.

Go and tell his disciples, including Peter.

Remember, Peter is the one who denied Jesus three times the night he was betrayed.

Peter, the one who swore, I would never deny you, Lord. Lord,

I would die before I deny you.

And yet that very night he did, he failed the Lord.

Church, don't miss this. Jesus wants Peter to know, I'm back.

Not because he wants to tear him a new one. He doesn't want to shame him.

He actually wants to restore Peter.

He wants to build him up. So now I'm this rock, I'll build my church.

Jesus does not want to shame you. He doesn't want to make you feel bad or tear you down.

He wants to save you, to give you the eternal life that is found in him and him alone.

Would you close your eyes for just a moment? No looking around.

Jesus is in the business of saving souls.

He paid for our sin on the cross but death could not hold him because three

days later he rose and through him we have eternal life,

question for you is is your belief in Jesus have you called on him to save you

if you're here and you've never put your faith in Jesus,

I'd love to give you an opportunity to do that today.

So you know what? I'm going to call on the name of Jesus. I want to put my faith in him.

If that's you, would you just raise your hand? I'm not going to call you out.

I just want to pray for you.

Thank you. Thank you. If you raised your hand or maybe even you didn't,

I'm gonna lead us in a prayer for everybody in this room.

I want us to pray out loud and I want us to pray together because nobody prays.

Would you just repeat after me? Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for sending Jesus to die in my place.

I confess I'm a sinner. I need a savior.

I believe you were raised from the dead.

I confess Jesus is Lord.

Take my life, my past, my present, my future. I am completely yours.

Thank you, Jesus, for saving me.

And all God's people said, amen. Hey, if you made a decision today to put your

faith in Jesus, I'm so proud of you for responding to the gospel.

The good news of what Jesus has done for us.

We want to celebrate how God is moving in your life.

Please grab one of those connect cards, fill it out, drop it in one of the black boxes on the way out.

We just wanna celebrate together what God is doing in your life.

You pray for us and then we'll worship together. God, thank you for moving in our midst this morning.

I pray that you would continue to move in this room as we sing praises to you.

Help us to honor you, not just today, but every day, God, that our belief in

you would change the way we live.

That if our faith is you, God, we would share that light with others around

us. We wouldn't hide it. We would walk obediently and humbly with you.

We ask all these things in Jesus' name, amen. Church, let's stand and let's

sing praises to God because he is worthy of it all.