Jesus, Raised For Us – Part 2 of 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. All four Gospels tell the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Today, through the eyes of John, we'll see the risen Christ reveal Himself to the disciples, beginning with Mary Magdalene.

Please stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, as we all turn to John chapter 20, I can't imagine seeing the look on Mary's face when she realizes she was face to face with the Lord, risen from the dead. Isn't that a beautiful story, Dave? Here's a woman, of course, who in her past was despised. We suspect that she may indeed have been into immorality, and then she meets Jesus. She's delivered from demons.

Her past is behind her. She loves Him so dearly and now thinks that He is gone forever, dead, never to rise again. She thinks, of course, that she is meeting the gardener, when actually it's Christ, and it's when He says her name.

She knew that it was the risen Christ. We here at Running to Win constantly emphasize the need for people to believe the good news of the gospel, and I've written a 30-day devotional entitled, For Us, and I want to emphasize that today is the last day we're making it available for you. Each day you are given a passage of scripture to read.

You're given a meditation, a prayer, an opportunity for you to begin the day with your mind on Christ. For a gift of any amount, we're making it available for you. Here's what you can do. Go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Take advantage of this opportunity and let us remember that the same Christ who met Mary Magdalene is the one who also redeems and knows us. She is weeping. She's not interested in whom to whom she is speaking. All that she can do is to say, My Lord is gone.

Where can I find his dead body? Has any woman ever wept like this woman? Has any woman ever loved like this woman?

Has anyone ever cared as deeply as this woman did? And so she is in despair. Now the Bible says that she was standing next to Jesus and didn't know it. Verse 14, having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. And Jesus said to her, just as the angels had, why are you weeping?

Whom are you seeking? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, sir, if you've carried him away, tell me where you have laid him and I will come and take him away. Mary is standing beside Jesus in her gloom and in her despair. She does not recognize him.

She thinks he is the gardener. Isn't it wonderful that Mary didn't find what she was looking for? She was looking for the dead body of Jesus. Tragic if she had found what she was looking for. God had something else in mind for her, namely not a dead Christ, but a resurrected one and you here today may not be here what you were looking for.

You may be looking for simply a sermon that inspires you or beautiful music that inspires you and you didn't know that God brought you to this moment, to this hour, to the seat in which you are seated to give you something much better than you thought you would ever get and that is to connect with a risen Lord Jesus Christ. Why was it that Mary didn't recognize him? Well, she didn't recognize him because she was so overcome with her grief and so overcome with her gloom that she couldn't see Jesus though he was beside her.

It's very interesting. She tells Jesus, tell me where you have laid him and I will come and take him away. I mean Mary, get real. Really? You're going to take him away?

Honestly? Did she actually think that she had the physical power to be able to take the dead body of Jesus? My friends, this is love being optimistic. This is love saying I love him so much I can do the impossible and so she wants to ask the gardener where did you put him? Right then Jesus says to her, Mary. Oh, the voice. It is him.

I remember him. It is Jesus and the Bible says that Mary takes and puts her arms around his legs and will not let him go because she has found the savior. Interestingly, she said to the gardener when she thought he was only a gardener.

They have taken away my Lord. She still called him Lord at that time though he was dead. God bless her, but now he's alive and she says Rabboni, which is to say master.

It's a strengthened form of the word rabbi and she holds him there. It's interesting that Jesus says to her, Mary, stop clinging to me because I've not yet ascended to my father. What Jesus was really saying is, Mary, you need to understand something. You need to realize that I'm still going to be here because I haven't ascended to my father.

Jesus knew that he was going to do that in 40 days of time. So what he's saying is you simply realize that you'll have an opportunity to see me. But Mary, there's something else you have to learn.

And what you need to learn is that our relationship is going to change. No longer are you going to think of me as an earthly person. You're going to have to think about me as a heavenly person. So I would say, first of all, this experience for Mary was a learning experience. She had to realize something that when Jesus would ascend into heaven to be with his father, he would then send forth the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit would give us the same intimacy with Jesus that Mary had when she was here on earth. That's the work of the Holy Spirit of God. To bring the reality of Jesus, not just to one person, but to people scattered all over the world, whether in China or India or the continent of Europe or South America, wherever they are found, if they believe in Jesus and trust him, they can have the same kind of fellowship that Mary had.

So Mary, you have to realize here that our relationship is beginning to change. It was a learning experience. But let me tell you, it was also a very affirming experience. This ought to bless anyone. Notice what Jesus said. He said, woman, he said, first of all, he says, stop clinging to me. Verse 17. I have not yet ascended to the father, but go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my father and your father and to my God and your God.

Wow. I mean, talk about affirmation. What he's saying is, Mary, I want you to be the first witness really to the resurrection. I want you to tell my brothers, that is to say my disciples that I'm raised from the dead.

I want you to tell them what I've just told you that I'm going to be ascending to my father who is in heaven. Jesus was so radically countercultural when it came to women. In those days, the testimony of a woman was not even accepted in court of all things.

They were definitely second class citizens. And here Jesus says, I am entrusting to a woman, the most important message that the church will ever hear, namely of my resurrection. Now, of course, later on the disciples met Jesus for themselves, but at this point it was given to marry a woman and not just any woman, a woman who had been very troubled, very troubled woman at one point in her life.

Can you imagine the affirmation, but it doesn't end there. Jesus said, go tell my brothers that I'm ascending to your father and my father. Now, if you and I share fathers, if we have the same father, we are brothers. And what Jesus was saying to her is, yes, my disciples are my brothers most assuredly, but you now marry are my sister.

You're my sister because I'm ascending to your father and my father. I don't know whether or not Mary Magdalene had a family. The Bible doesn't indicate that she was married. I don't know whether or not she had siblings. I don't know whether or not her parents were alive and even if they were, whether she was living with them. But at this moment that didn't matter that much because she had become a part of a more important family, the family of God. And she would be a sister to the Lord Jesus Christ and a daughter of the living God. Obviously also it was also a very redeeming experience, wasn't it?

It was redeeming. We have to back off for just a moment and ask ourselves, how did Mary Magdalene get from point A to point B? How does a woman who is inhabited and struggles with voices and darkness and evil spirits, how does she get from point A to point B being a daughter of God and being used by God?

How does that process work? I'd like to suggest that there are some elements that are very important because we need to know how the process works because we're in the same predicament. Oh, our details may change, but we need to know too how we can be reconciled to God. First of all, her relationship with God was a very honest relationship. She knew who she was. She knew that there was no way that she could cure herself, no way to get rid of the demons, no way to have her conscience cleansed from her sins, no way to have the self condemnation and the self hate stop. She would need help. She would need a savior. And I'm speaking to you very candidly today.

If you and I think that we do not need a savior, if we have learned to manage our sins and if we are content with the way we are, then Jesus is of no value to us because we bear our sin on our own and it becomes a messy, ugly experience. So she was very honest. She knew, she knew that she had a need, no question about it.

Secondly, I would say that her relationship was very personal. Don't you love it that Jesus spoke her name? Jesus said, Mary, talk about a personal relationship. And I need to tell you today that if your relationship with Jesus is not that personal, you will not be saved. Oh, we don't hear our names.

I've never heard my name spoken by Jesus, but I know through the study of the word and my own fellowship with God that Jesus and I are intimate and there are hundreds and hundreds of you who can say the very same thing. You see, people don't get saved in bundles. It's not something that you grow into. It's not something that you are baptized into. You must personally receive Christ as savior as an individual, understanding what you are doing.

That's the way in which we are saved. One day a man came to me and said, you know, my father's dying in a nursing home. He's in hospice care. He's gone to church all of his life. He's listened to sermons.

He's sung songs. And now when it comes to die, he's terrified and doesn't think he's ready to meet God. How can I give him comfort? I'm trying to comfort him. And I said, you know, maybe one of the worst things you could do is to give him comfort because it might be a false comfort. Whenever somebody has doubts as to whether or not they're ready to die, always take those doubts seriously because there may be a reason why they're doubting. They're doubting because they have good reason to doubt because they aren't ready. What you do with somebody like that is to help him to understand that no matter what has happened in the past, if he now embraces Christ as savior, if he is saved and receives Jesus as a sin bearer, he can have that assurance right now, no matter where he is in his path of spiritual experience. Christianity, by the way, is just bottom line.

It has to do with the possessive pronoun. Think for a moment about the phrase, Jesus is a savior. I would think that the majority of people who are listening, whether you're listening here or by way of internet or radio, I would think that the majority of you would say, I agree with that. Jesus is a savior. But I do need to remind you that even the devil can agree with that too.

He can say Jesus is a savior, but think of how different it becomes when we say Jesus is my savior because I've received him as my sin bearer and will participate in his victory. Think of how differently that statement is, how different it is. So it was a personal relationship that she had. It was also a God given relationship. It was a God given experience. You see, only God can really shows the truth of what I'm preaching here today and only God can open our hearts because when we receive Christ as savior, it is not just that our sins are forgiven and our consciences are clear. Thank God for that.

But it's even better than that. God does a work within our hearts and changes us so that we begin to love God. We can't turn love for God on and off like a faucet. You can't wake up and say, well, today I'm going to love God. What happens is when we receive Christ as savior, that love is birthed in our hearts as God changes our desires.

Something else happens and that is that Mary might not have fully understood, but it's clear in the later pages of the New Testament that what God has to do is to supply us with the kind of righteousness that God accepts so that we can stand as spotless in God's sight and only that can be given to us by Jesus. There's nobody else out there, no other teacher, no other guru, no other prophet, no other leader. Jesus stands alone. He's the only savior this world has. Whether it's east or west or north or south, there is nobody else out there with the qualifications to be a savior. Now I've told this story and some of you have heard it before, but I need to tell it again.

It's a true story. A number of years ago when I was in Washington, D.C. with two of my daughters, Rebecca could not be with me at that time. We were in a church and I was speaking at a church and a secret service agent was there and asked me later, would you like to go to see the president's Oval Office on Monday? It was at a time when the first President Bush was president, so it was a time when security perhaps was not as heightened as it would be today. Well, you know, when he gave that invitation to see the Oval Office, I never even prayed about it because there are some things that are so clear, you don't even have to mess with it.

You just say, yes, we'll be there. That day we went there and as you know, the little huts where the secret service agents are, they saw us and then they saw that we were with this agent and they in effect said, okay, well, if you're with him, you can go on in. When you get to the door of the White House, there are more agents and there there were some agents who looked at us and they saw that we were with this secret service agent and they recognized him and they said, okay, if you're with him, you can go in. Inside the White House, in the halls of the White House, there were more agents and they looked at us and then they looked at him and they said, okay, go in. When you get to the Oval Office, standing right at the door of the Oval Office, there was one more agent standing at attention, but he did glance at us and he glanced at the agent whom he knew and so he said, you can go in, but we could not go to the president's desk.

We could only put our foot into the Oval Office. What I'd like you to do is to use your imaginations for a few moments. Let us suppose that all of us were to die together and let us suppose that we were to find ourselves on the other side of the curtain and there on the other side of the curtain, the resurrected triumphant Jesus meets us to take us all the way to the Father's house.

After all, the Bible says he alone can do that. He's the way to the Father. So there we are and I want you to also visualize that along the way there are centuries, there are groups of angels positioned to guard the path to the heavenly city and I can imagine that we are now with Jesus and the angels look at us and then they see Jesus and they say, oh, you're with him. You know, go on in and then we get to another group of angels and they say to us, oh, you're with him. Just go on in and then in the distance we begin to see God.

Now God exists everywhere, there he is localized in the Bible says unapproachable light. We see God as we have never seen him with such clarity and beauty and holiness. We can scarcely, we can scarcely imagine it and when we see how holy God is, we say to ourselves, we can't go in and we begin to have flashbacks because among us there are some men who have committed crimes and sexual sins that are horrid. Among us there are women who've aborted their preborn infants and those of us who perhaps have been spared such sins, when we think of our thought life, we discover that we too, we too are unworthy to go in and as we begin to think about our past prior to accepting Christ as savior, as we begin to think about our past, we say to ourselves, we just can't, we can't go in. We just can't go in because God is so holy as we are reminded of our sins. But there's an angel there who looks at us and says, well, you're with him, go on in. And there we find ourselves in the presence of the living and the holy God and the son says to the father, thank you so much and these, oh father, are your sons and your daughters and I am their brother. And I can imagine the father saying to the son, thank you so much for dying for them, for redeeming them and thank you for bringing them to me as I love them.

And I have thoroughly inspected them and I find no fault in them. I see no sin in them. You see, that's why we as Christians sing clothed in his righteousness alone, faultless to stand before the throne. God says in the place of their uncleanness, I accept the beauty and the holiness of Jesus. In the place of their deceit, I accept the truth and the veracity of Jesus.

And in the place of all of their sins, I accept the sacrifice of Jesus and in the place of their death, which they should die eternally, I accept the resurrection of Jesus saved by his grace on his behalf. But it's not automatic. You don't grow into it.

You don't kind of drift into it. You receive Christ by faith. As many as received him to those he gives the authority to become the children of God, even to those who believe in his name. Mary Magdalene did that.

You can do that too. To be brought from darkness to light, from gloom to hope in the presence of the resurrected Jesus who died for sinners just like you and me. Let us pray. Father, we love you because you first loved us. We love you because your son died for us. We love you because we will belong to you forever as we participate in his triumph. We ask that the Holy Spirit would work mightily and that many people today will believe and be saved. Amen. Well, this is Pastor Luther and I can't help but think that I'm speaking to someone today who has not trusted Christ as savior, who has many different excuses.

I pray that those excuses will vanish. Come to the Christ who can save you. This is the last day we're making available for you a devotional I've written entitled For Us. This is a 30-day devotional that has to do with the events surrounding the death of Jesus Christ, the betrayal of Judas, Gethsemane, the cross of course, and also the resurrection. For a gift of any amount, we're making it available and I want to emphasize one more time that this is the last opportunity for you to receive it through this ministry.

Here's what you do. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. And I trust that you'll be able to go to church this Sunday as together we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the triumph of Christ over death, and because he triumphed, we triumph as well. What a marvelous savior. Let us worship him with adoration, appreciation, and the deepest of our thanks. Once again, go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let us remember it's always about Jesus.

You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Erwin Lutzer, concluding, Jesus Raised for Us. The final message in our series simply called For Us. Next time, don't miss a series that reveals ten lies about God, relevant answers to some of life's biggest questions. This is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.