Easter

There’s a story[1] about a pastor who was concerned about reports that the Christian education program was ineffective. He decided to check it out for himself. He stopped in a fourth-grade classroom and asked one of the students, "Janie, when is Easter and what happens on it?"

Janie said, "Well, Easter's in the fall, and we dress up in costumes and go trick-or-treating."

Oh, no! the pastor thought. This really is a problem. Hoping for better results, he tried another student. "Jimmy, can you tell me when Easter is and what happens on that day?"

Jimmy said, "Well, it's in the winter, and we put up the tree and decorate it and exchange gifts."

Mikey answered, "Well, Easter is in the springtime when Jesus came up from the grave."

Then Mikey added, "And if he sees his shadow, he goes back, and we have six more weeks of winter."

A couple of years after I arrived in Loveland as a new pastor, I decided to take a little poll of the town. In those years, (around 1980) Fourth Street was the economic center of the city, and there were lots of people going in and out of stores. So a week before Easter, I took my clipboard, and stood outside one of the department stores, and asked people this question: “Do you really believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead?” To my astonishment, virtually every single person I asked (about 100) said yes, they did believe that. I still find that hard to believe, but a recent Gallup poll reported that 84 percent of non-church-goers believe Christ rose from the dead.

But I wonder, what do they think that means? Do they have any idea what the implications of that are—for them, or for anyone else? That’s what I’d like to explore with you this morning. So first I want to talk about why we have good reason to believe Christ actually did rise from the dead, then what the resurrection means with regard to Jesus Himself, and then finally, why it matters to us.

To begin with, I want to stress that Christianity is based on a historical event that can be proven as thoroughly as any historical event of that time. Nobody doubts Brutus killed Caesar, and neither should we doubt that Jesus came back from the dead. There is a lot to be said about this, but briefly, here are three major lines of evidence.

There were at least twelve separate appearances to various groups of His followers—sometimes just one or two of them, sometimes the whole group of disciples, and one time He appeared to over 500 people at once. All these people became convinced that Jesus had really come back from the dead.

This was most inconvenient for the religious authorities and the Romans, both of whom would have loved to have paraded Jesus’s body through the streets of Jerusalem, and put an end once and for all to all this talk about resurrection. But they couldn’t find the body. So they persecuted the disciples. And the disciples are another reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead, because they were significantly changed by what they had seen.

Before the resurrection, the disciples were conspicuous by their weakness. Peter denied three times that he had ever known Jesus. During the crucifixion, only one disciple dared to be anywhere near Jesus, thinking that the authorities might come after them next. After Jesus died, they were hiding behind locked doors for fear of the Jews. But after Jesus had appeared to them multiple times, they were out on the streets of Jerusalem, boldly preaching the resurrection. All but one of them died a martyr’s death rather than say Christ was still dead. Because they knew He was alive. If Jesus had been dead, and they had hidden His body, don’t you think at least one of them would have cracked and told where His body was? These men were so convinced that Jesus was alive, they were willing to die for that belief.

There’s a lot more that could be said about that, and I recommend this little book, The Case for Easter: A Journalist Investigates the Evidence for the Resurrection. It’s very readable, and gives a lot of facts that support the Christian claim that Christ rose from the dead. The book is available on the Information Center counter in the hallway. There is as much or more evidence for the resurrection of Christ as there is for any historical event of the time. We have good reasons to believe this. It is not just a leap of faith into the dark; it is a reasonable conclusion from the evidence.

But so what? What difference does it make if Jesus rose from the dead? Well, it has tremendous implications, both for Jesus, and for us.

The resurrection is important, because it means Jesus has the power He claimed to have. When the moneychangers in the temple told Jesus to prove his identity, to say why He had the authority to throw them out, He told them that He would rise from the dead three days after His death (John 2:13-22), which He did.

The cross and the resurrection were not surprises to Jesus; they were all part of God's plan. Starting about 6 months before the crucifixion, Jesus began telling His disciples that He was going to go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things at the hands of the religious authorities, and be killed, but then be raised to life on the third day. (Matthew 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; Luke 9:22; 18:33; 24:7)

The disciples could probably see some of that coming. Jesus’s conflicts with the authorities were getting sharper as time went on, and they could guess that the leaders might try to do Jesus harm. But this bit about rising from the dead surely made them wonder what in the world He was talking about. Dead men don’t rise, plain and simple. Or so they thought. In this respect, Jesus was sort of like Cool Hand Luke, who boasted that he could eat 50 eggs. Nobody believed him, either, until he did it. The resurrection means Jesus had the power He claimed to have.

You and I borrow life from our parents, who borrow it from their parents, who borrowed it from their parents, and so on. Furthermore, none of us can live very long without oxygen, water, and food, in that order. We are dependent on other people to give us life, and dependent on outside resources to keep us alive. Jesus, however, said He had life in Himself, and He proved that because when they took it away from Him, He came back to life.

One of the New Testament writers described Jesus as having “the power of an indestructible life”. The image that comes to mind is one of those blow-up punching bags that are often painted to look like people that are weighted with sand in the bottom, so no matter how hard you punch it, it keeps bobbing back upright. Or those trick birthday candles that you blow out but which come back to flame again. But that somehow trivializes who Jesus was and what He did. Jesus claimed to be able to rise from the dead after being in the grave for parts of three days, and He did it. He has the power He claimed to have.

Jesus made many claims to be divine, and He did it in lots of different ways. 1. Direct claims

· At one point the people asked Him, Luke 22:70, "Are you then the Son of God?" He replied, "You are right in saying I am."

· After the resurrection, there was one disciple who just couldn’t believe that a man had come back from the dead (we can probably relate to him). His name was Thomas, the one who got the nickname, “doubting Thomas”. Then one day, Jesus showed Himself to Thomas, and he had a chance to see the scars and verify that this was the same Jesus who had been crucified. He fell at Jesus’ feet and exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” Amazingly, Jesus accepted those titles from him. He didn’t rebuke His disciple for calling him Lord and God.

· to forgive sins (Matt 9:2, to paralytic) The religious leaders who heard that started buzzing among themselves, “Who can forgive sins but God?” and they were right on target. That’s exactly who Jesus was claiming to be.

· to teach the truth in an absolute and authoritative way. His favorite way of starting a teaching was to say, “truly, truly, I say to you,” or, “I tell you the truth.” And he often contrasted His teaching with that of the religious teachers of His day. “They say this, but I say to you…,” thereby setting Himself up above all those other teachers.

· to judge the world. John 5:27; Matt 25:31-46 Jesus said that at the end of time, He was going to sit on a throne and separate all of humanity into two groups, much as a shepherd of His day might separate the sheep from the goats in a flock. One group will go to heaven, and the other to hell. If you think about it, this is a really astonishing thing for anyone to say. Some men have sought to rule the world, and religious leaders have aspired to change the world, but nobody else has ever claimed to judge the world.

miracles = signs F And then there were the dramatized claims, the miracles, which the New Testament calls “signs” that pointed to His true identity. For example, He fed 5,000 from one boy’s lunch, which pointed to His claim to be the Bread of Life. He healed a blind man, which pointed to His claim to be the Light of the world. He raised Lazarus from the dead, which pointed to His claim to be the resurrection and the life. The miracles were like dramatized claims to be something other than a mere man.

So there are all these claims that somehow we have to account for. It would be easy to dismiss them, and Him, if it were not for the resurrection. Because as the Bible says, Romans 1:4, Jesus, “was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead.” The resurrection proves that Jesus is who He said He was. Anybody can claim to be God. Only Jesus came back from the dead to prove that He is God.

Finally, the resurrection matters to us today. It is not just an interesting historical fact of 2,000 years ago, like saying Pontius Pilate ruled for the Romans in Palestine from A.D. 26 – 36. So what? That really doesn’t affect our lives. But the resurrection of Jesus matters to us, because it means, first of all, out past can be forgiven.

Some people can't get on with life because their guilt keeps them dwelling in the past. They are haunted by ways they have screwed up their own lives, or the lives of people who were close to them. There was an article in the paper the other week about a man who was driving a car that went off the road and killed two of the passengers. What does he do with that guilt? Most of us haven’t done something that bad, but the memories haunt us anyway. We live with regrets, and don’t know what to do with them. Our culture tries to convince us that there are no absolutes, that we can do anything we want, it doesn’t matter. But we know it isn’t true. Our conscience reminds us of that daily.

But that is the whole reason Jesus came to earth—to deal with the sin of our past. The Bible says that when Jesus died, He suffered the punishment that you and I deserve for our sins. But He rose again to show that His sacrifice on our behalf was accepted by God. The Apostle Paul said in 1 Cor. 15:17, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” But since Christ has been raised, your faith is not futile, and your sins are gone. It was the resurrection that proves that Jesus was who He said He was, and therefore that He was able to pay the penalty for the sin of every person who ever lived.

Maybe your kids or grandkids have used one of these toys (MagnaDoodle). It’s a screen that you use a magnet to draw pictures, and then erase them by wiping it off like this. We often sin just as casually as a child might doodle on this slate, but there is no way to get rid of that past guilt except through the work of Christ. [Write the word SIN on it, show it to the congregation, then erase it.]

You know, people come to church on Easter for all sorts of reasons, and with all sorts of needs. Maybe today, this is what you need. You need freedom from a guilty conscience. You need to know for sure that all the big and little sins of your past can be forgiven. Today is the day you can be sure of that. Just ask Jesus Christ to forgive you, on the basis of His death on the cross. Tell Him you’re not going to pretend any longer that you haven’t sinned. Just ask Him to wipe your slate clean like that MagnaDoodle. You’re tired of carrying all that guilt around, and today is the day to lay it down.

On your way in today, you got a card that says, ”The Resurrection of Jesus Christ Matters to Me.” I’d like to ask everybody to take that card out, and read the first point on it. If that’s true for you, just check that first box. If you know that you need His forgiveness, go ahead and tell Him that, by checking the first box on that card.

A second reason why it matters to us that Christ rose from the grave is because it means our present life can be managed by someone far more capable than we are.

There was a couple in this church who had five children – Bill and Peggy Warnock. Peggy used to tell the story that when they were first married, they had five theories about raising children, but now they had five children and no theories. There’s something to that. As one of my engineer friends told me, “The tidiness of theory is no match for the messiness of reality.”

Many people just try to manage all the messiness that life throws at them by themselves. They somehow think this is the sign of maturity, that they can do it all. But in fact, we often can’t. That’s why in 2004 U.S. sales of antidepressants totaled almost $10 billion[2], and 43 million sleeping-pill prescriptions were written by U.S. doctors last year[3], and alcohol abuse ruins millions of lives each year. People can’t manage life, so they resort to chemicals to help them get through it. But that is always a short-term, incomplete, and ultimately ineffective fix. Stress causes high blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks, heartburn, and insomnia, and somehow Americans have come to think of those things as the price of success. Folks, that’s too high a price.

We can't manage all that life sends us, but God can if we give him control of our lives.

God offers us wisdom to choose wisely in the many challenging decisions of life. As hard as it is for us to believe sometimes, Jesus really does know more about how life is supposed to work than we do. We would do well to consult His wisdom.

Jesus told a story about two men who built houses. One built the foundation of his house on the sand, and the other built on rock. When the storms came, the house that was built on the sand collapsed, but the other one remained standing. The punch line was this: Matthew 7:24, "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. Notice: the course of wisdom is to put the words of Jesus Christ into practice in our lives. That is the key to a stable, unshakeable life in the storms that come to all of us.

Even when things really fall apart, God is there, holding our hand, giving us endurance and courage to keep going. Often, when I visit people in the hospital, they will say to me, “I don’t know how people make it without the Lord!” They can see what a difference He makes for them.

You may be in the middle of a storm yourself. It could be a job issue, a marriage problem, conflict at work, financial worries, who knows? They come to all of us. But how do you manage all that? You can ask God for His help. The fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead means that He is available to you right now to help you with whatever you are facing. Stop trying to go it alone. If you need help, say so. Your pride that wants to pretend you can handle it is only going to give you a stroke.

So everyone take that card again, and if that’s where you are today, check the second box. By checking that, you are telling Jesus that you need His help to manage your life. He loves to be asked to help!

A third reason why it matters that Christ rose from the dead is that our future can be secure.

The Bible says that God has put eternity in our hearts. That’s why everybody wants to know: "What's going to happen after I die?" Some people tell themselves that we just cease to exist, but the consensus of the entire human race throughout all of history is that there is something –some kind of existence—on the other side of death. A U.S. News & World Report article stated that more Americans than ever believe in heaven and hell.

The question is, what do you have to do to get to heaven? Lots of people think that the standard is other people. In other words, if I’m better than the average person, then I’ll make it to heaven. And polls consistently show that almost everyone sees themselves as better than average. We all think we live in Lake Wobegon, where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.

But the Bible says heaven is a perfect place, and therefore we have to be perfect in order to go there. The situation is like this: Imagine that the entire human race is lined up at Long Beach, California and told to swim to Hawaii. How far you get is determined by how good you are. Some people—the Adolph Hitlers and the Osama bin Ladens of the world—will die in the surf. They are really bad people. Others get a couple of hundred yards out, some—maybe like yourself—get a few miles out from the coast. And a very few—like maybe your grandmother, or Mother Teresa—get all the way to Catalina, 26 miles away. But nobody can swim to Hawaii! Nobody is good enough to get to heaven.

Praise God, He’s got a Plan B for us imperfect people: if we trust Jesus Christ as our Savior, God will forgive all our sins—wipe the slate clean. Then He gives us the perfection of Christ Himself, and we will live forever in the loving friendship of God. We can’t earn it; we don’t deserve it. It’s called grace. Really amazing grace.

A man dies and goes to heaven, where St. Peter meets him at the pearly gates. St. Peter says, "Here's how it works. You need 1000 points to make it into heaven. You tell me all the good things you've done, and I give you a certain number of points for each item, depending on how good it was. When you reach 1000 points, you get in."

"Okay," the man says, "I was married to the same woman for 50 years and never cheated on her, even in my heart."

"Three points?" he says. "Well, I attended church all my life and supported its ministry with my tithe and service."

"One point? Golly. How about this: I started a soup kitchen in my city and worked in a shelter for homeless veterans."

"TWO POINTS?!" the man cries. "At this rate the only way I’ll get into heaven is by the grace of God!"

The Bible says, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” As long as you are trying to have something to brag about, something you can point to that says you earned it, you can never be saved. But the moment you stop trying, and trust Jesus Christ to have paid the penalty for you—at that moment, you will step into the kingdom of God, and your future will be secure. It costs you nothing but your pride.

Is this what you need today? You need to know that when you die, you are going to be instantly in the presence of God, who will welcome you with open arms into His eternal fellowship. Maybe you’ve thought a bit about what happens when you die, and you have some anxiety about that. Well you should, if Christ is not your Lord and Savior. But that’s why He came, and died, and rose again – to show that He is more than able to handle what comes after death. He is on the other side, waiting to receive you, like family waiting for people to get off an international plane ride, or return from a long cruise. And He will receive you, if you have received Him, if you’ve asked Him to be your Savior.

So again, please take that blue card, and if you want your eternal future to be secure, if you want to live forever in God’s fellowship, check that last box. As you do, just tell the Lord that you believe Christ rose from the dead to secure your place in heaven, and you want to take Him up on that offer.

If this is the first time you have ever told God any of these things – that you need Him to forgive your past, or to help you manage your life, or to insure your place in heaven – if this is the first time you’ve ever said that to Him; OR if you would like to talk to someone about any of those points, please PRINT your name and phone number at the bottom of the card, and hand it to an usher on your way out this morning. The ushers will be at the doorway with an offering plate, and you can just drop your card in there, and we’ll contact you later this week to see if we can explain anything further, or encourage you in your relationship with Christ.

[1] Jack Hayford, at http://www.christianitytoday.com/bcl/areas/worship/articles/031306.html

[2] http://www.pharmalive.com/News/index.cfm?articleid=325208&categoryid=24

[3] http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/03/03/BUGB7HHBOM1.DTL&feed=rss.business