| We Will Rise |
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I. The Story of Philip Could I tell you a true story? It’s about a young man named Philip, who was born with downs syndrome. As many children with downs syndrome are, Philip was a happy child, quick to give and receive affection. He attended Sunday school in a small Methodist church, with nine other 8 year old boys and girls. Philip tried to fit in. He really did. But he couldn’t quite do it. He did not want to be different. He just was different. The other kids didn’t know how to treat him; they didn’t always treat him well. One Sunday after Easter the teacher of the Sunday school class had an idea. You know those big egg shaped containers that pantyhose used to come in? Well, the teacher collected 10 of them, and brought them to class. Then he asked each of the children to take one of the eggs, go outside, and find something that symbolized new life. It was a beautiful spring day, and kids were excited. They literally ran outside, eggs in hand, going every which way, spreading over the church grounds looking for something with life. One by one they returned and put their eggs on the table with the hidden treasures inside. When they were all there, the teacher began to open the eggs. The first one had a beautiful little flower. In the second there was a butterfly, now that created quite the stir. One little guy even dug up a worm and hid it inside. Yuck! Some of the other children exclaimed. But one of the eggs, when they opened it, was empty. There was nothing there. The kids said, That’s dumb. That’s not right. Who did that one? The teacher, feeling a tug on his shirt, looked down. It’s mine, Philip said. That’s mine. Don’t you ever do anything right? one child blurted out. Philip just kept looking at the teacher. It’s empty, he said. The tomb is empty. Suddenly there was silence, a long moment of thoughtful silence. Guess what? From that time on, things were different in that Sunday school class. The rest of the kids now saw Philip in a new light. They began to accept him, to include him more completely. Well, Philip died that next summer. His family had known since the day he was born that he might not live a long life. Other things were wrong with his little body. Late in July, with an infection that most children could have shrugged off, Philip slipped from this life to the next. At the funeral, 9 eight year old children marched up to the altar, not with flowers. No, they walked up to the altar together and laid on it an empty egg, an old, empty, pantyhose egg. I always struggle as I prepare my sermon for Easter morning. What kind of sermon do I preach? Which people do I preach for? Do I prepare my sermon for the people who gather here week after week, the regular attendees of our services? Should I be thinking mostly about the visitors, the people who will come only Easter or Christmas or maybe a few times during the years? Usually I choose to focus on the few, on the visitors and occasional attendees. For them I concentrate on what I would call the ‘outer’ meaning of Easter; the resurrection as a proof, a visible and persuasive demonstration that Jesus really is who he said he was. That’s what I did last week. But most of you, who are here this week, are already convinced of the truth of the resurrection. You already believe that Jesus is who he said he was. For you I would rather talk about the ‘inner meaning’ of Easter. Not the resurrection as a proof, but the resurrection as an experienced reality. Not the resurrection as an argument for the truthfulness of Christianity but the resurrection as our personal, living hope, which brings me back to the story of Philip. II. Sure and Certain Hope of Eternal Life All of us have Philips in our lives. People we know and love who die. While most of them are not handicapped like Philip was handicapped, they have all experienced a certain pain in this life. Because we all experience pain in this life, a gap between what life could be, what it should be, what it would have been apart from sin, and what it is. After Easter Service last Sunday John Wolf came up to greet me. We talked for a while, about the service and our dinner plans that day. But through the conversation, I think both of us could feel it. The pain, the pain of going through another holiday with their son, Ian, gone. Cut off from the land of the living in the prime of his life. Easter Sunday, as glorious as it is, had a certain bitter-sweetness about it for John and Peggy Anne. Bitter, because Ian is bitterly missed, every day, and especially on holidays, when the family gathers to enjoy each other’s company. Sweet, because of the sure and certain hope of eternal life. John & I comforted each other with a phrase from a passage of Scripture. We didn’t have to read it; we knew it by heart. We do not grieve as those who have no hope. Let me read that passage to you this morning, because it reveals the inner meaning of the resurrection, it’s deeper, personal meaning. I Thessalonians 4:13. Brothers and sisters, Paul writes, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, that’s the early Christian way of talking about death. Falling asleep, they called it, because they knew we would wake. We do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep or to grieve like the rest of humanity, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left (alive) till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with trumpet call of God, and dead in Christ will rise first. Their glorified bodies will join their spirits in the air, as Jesus comes down to rule and to reign over planet earth. After that, we who are still alive…will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words. Over the years I have presided at scores of funerals. I have stood at the graveside with countless grieving relatives. I have prayed with them and for them as they have said their final earthly goodbyes. Let me tell you: at times like that we need more than happy thoughts. We need more than the power of positive thinking convincing ourselves that our spirits will rise. We need more than balloons disappearing into the air, or the platitudes of well wishing friends. We even need more than the words of a human preacher. We need a sure, a certain hope of eternal life. We need to know there is someone more powerful than life and death itself, someone who holds the power of life and death in his hands and we need to know that his power is directed toward the ones we love. That the ones we love who are lying there in the grave will not be finally defeated by the power of sin and death, but will rise to live forevermore. We need what Paul offered the Christians in Thessalonica. We need the “Lord’s own words,” as he puts it. We need the words of someone who is risen from the dead. Someone who has ascended on high and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, someone who is coming again to judge the living and the dead and to bring God’s kingdom to earth. We need the words of someone who has the power and authority to say, I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; he who lives and believes in me shall never die. That is what we need; and that that is what we have. We have the testimony of the resurrected Jesus Christ passed on to us by those who witnessed him alive from the dead. The testimony of the Son of God and Savior of the world, who once stood at the tomb of a dead friend and cried, Lazarus come forth! Like Lazarus, when we hear the command of Jesus and the trumpet call of God at the end of the age, we will rise. Between now and then, as we who believe in Jesus die, our spirits go to be with the Lord. For as Paul wrote in Philippians, to be absent from the body is to be present with Christ. But still we wait, we wait as those who sleep in the conscious presence of God; we wait for the resurrection of our glorious new bodies. We wait for the day when we will live forever with the Lord and each other in a glorious new heaven and earth. This Sunday is resurrection Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter. On this day I hope to begin a new tradition in our church. Every resurrection Sunday from this day forward, I hope to take a moment in the service and remember those who have gone on before, those who have fallen asleep in Jesus and whose bodies will rise first at the coming of our Lord. This is the way we will do it. I will move my hand across the congregation. As my hand moves you will speak the names of your loved ones who have died believing in Christ. Those words will rise like prayers, a sweet aroma into the very throne room of God, as I say, Christ is risen; He is risen, indeed. Hallelujah! But before we do that, could I take you a bit more deeply into the inner meaning of the resurrection? The resurrection of Jesus means more to us than a sure and certain hope of eternal life. It means more than a promise for the future, an important as that is. It also means a power for the present, if we have to see. III. Alive Together With Christ Ephesians chapter 1, verse 18. Paul is praying for us, for the Ephesians, actually; but I am sure he would pray the same for us. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened. I love that phrase, the eyes of your heart. I pray that God may give your heart eyes to see and light to see by. To see what? To see all that you have been given in and through Jesus Christ. First, Paul speaks of what is yet to come. That you may know, verse 18, the hope to which God has called you and the riches of his glorious inheritance for his saints. In other words, all that God has in store for those who believe in the ages to come. It is more than eye has seen, ear has heard, or has ever even entered into the mind of any man. But that’s not all that God has for us. Because in verse 19, Paul prays that the eyes of our hearts may be enlightened to see, not just the glory of what is to come, but the power that has already come, and is already at work in our lives. That you may know his incomparably great power for us who believe, he says. That power is just like the power, verse 20, that God demonstrated when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. The power of God to raise Jesus from the dead and to put him in the position of supreme authority over everyone and everything in heaven and earth, that power, Paul says, is at work in us right now. It is at work in us precisely because of the death & resurrection of Jesus Christ. Fortunately Paul explains what he means in the very next chapter. Chpt 2, verse 1: As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world…When you, verse 3, were gratifying the cravings of your sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. If you are going to understand what God has done for you in the resurrection of Christ, and understand the power that is now at work in your life, the first thing you need to know is that you were dead in your sins. Now that is hard for us to grasp. We know what it means to stand in front of a coffin or at a graveside and say, This person is dead. He is not alive; he has no life. But what in the world does Paul mean when he says all of us were once dead in our trespasses and sins? Well, one thing he means is that we were as good as dead, because we were under God’s judgment. We were by nature, verse 3, objects of wrath. We were destined for the judgment of God; in fact, we are already under that judgment. Romans, chapter one, we have been turned over by God to pursue our own selfish desires; and we are already reaping the consequences of that sinful pursuit, in death and everything smells of death in our lives. That is the judgment of God. What is more, we are headed for a day of divine reckoning, when God will render to each man according to what he has done and assign to each our eternal destiny. Now I know this is not a particularly popular idea in our day and age. Even Christian teachers, like Rob Bell, are calling it into question. But what Rob Bell is calling into question is the clear teaching of the church in all of its forms, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, through all of its history. It is appointed once for man to die, and after that, the judgment. Without the forgiveness of sin available through the death of Christ on the cross, there is only a terrifying expectation of judgment. That judgment will either take the form of perishing, of ultimate annihilation, or of eternal conscious separation from God and His goodness. But in either case, we’re as good as dead. But we’re not just as good as dead, according to Paul. We’re really dead. We’re dead to the things of God in this life. That’s the point of his comments in verses 2 and 3 of Ephesians chapter 2. He expands upon those comments later in chapter 4, verse 17. So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity with a continual lust for more. Martin Luther once described the human condition apart from Christ as man turned in upon himself. In the absence of the Spirit of God, man lives by himself and for himself. In that state, Paul says, his mind is darkened, his thinking is futile, and his heart is hard to the things of God. He is insensitive to spiritual things; he is captivated, even controlled, by sensual, worldly desires. That state of existence Paul describes as being dead in sin. BUT, but because of his great love for us, Ephesians 2:4, God who is rich in mercy made us alive with Christ even when we were dead. When you and I believe in Jesus, when we turn to him as our Savior and Lord, something happens, something supernatural. God sends His Spirit into our lives and we experience a new birth. This new birth is like a resurrection, or to speak more precisely, it is a death followed by a resurrection. Paul often describes becoming a Christian in terms of being made into a new man. The old man is man is who we were apart from Jesus. We were… OLD MAN NEW MAN Separated from God United with Christ Turned in on Self Indwelt by God’s Spirit Unable to Please God New Heart and Mind But when we trusted in Jesus, we were born again. We became a new man…united with Christ…indwelt…new heart & mind. In fact, Paul says in 2 Corinthians chapter 5 that we are a NEW CREATION. The old things have passed away and the new have come. That’s precisely what is pictured in our baptism because that is what happens in our salvation. When we are baptized into Christ we are united with him in his death. His death becomes our death. Our sins are washed away in the water of his death and, we die to our old, fleshly and merely human way of life. When we come out of that water it is a picture of our resurrection, being made alive with Christ, alive to God by his Spirit, alive to live a whole new life as a new man, a new woman. The power that raised Jesus from the dead and seated at God’s right hand above all rule and power and authority is the same power that raises us in the water of baptism. It is the same power that causes us to be born again to a whole new life so the resurrection of Jesus is not just our guarantee that we will rise with glorified bodies at the coming of Christ to earth. It is also our guarantee that we will rise from the spiritual death in this life and become a new creation. It is by the power of the resurrected Jesus that we become new men and new women. It is because of his resurrection and by his resurrection power that we no longer live enslaved to our fleshly desires. It is because of his resurrection and by his resurrection power that we are filled with his Spirit and bear the fruit of his Spirit, the fruit of love and joy and peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self control. That is the inner meaning of the resurrection of Jesus to those who believe. This is what it means to experience the resurrection, not as an idea, but as a living reality. This, my friend, is what true Christianity is really all about. IV. Have You Been Raised? Which raises one absolutely essential question: Have you been raised? Have you been made alive together with Christ? Have you been saved from your slavery to self? Has the Old Man been buried in the waters of baptism and have you been raised by the power of God’s Spirit to live a whole new life, alive to God? Are you sensitive to Him? Do you love him and want, in your heart of hearts, to obey Him? Because if you have not been raised with Christ by faith in this life, then you will not be raised in the next, at least not raised with a glorified body to live forever with the Lord. Future resurrection is not automatic. Every spirit who dies is not immediately present with Christ awaiting the resurrection of a glorified body. Resurrection is not a right we receive by virtue of our birth into the human race. It is a privilege we are granted by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. John chapter 1: Jesus was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. They remained dead in their sins. But to all who received him, that is, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right (the power and authority) to become children of God, born again, if you will, children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born again of God. Have you believed in Jesus? Have you bowed the knee of your heart to Jesus as savior and Lord? Have you called out to him, Lord have mercy on me, a sinner? Have you passed from death to life through the death & resurrection of Jesus? You may, you know… |
| Last Updated on Monday, 09 May 2011 20:43 |
