God - The Irresistible Force - Life of Christ Part 110

I don't know how many of you read this past week in Time Magazine about the new diet drug that's come out called Redux. It's the first new diet drug in 23 years to be approved by the United States government. And just three months after its approval, physicians are writing 85,000 prescriptions a day for this drug. Time Magazine said, what we have here is probably the fastest launch of any drug in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.

And projections are that Redux sales will hit one billion dollars a year by the year 2000. How does this thing work? Well, the way it works is that it encourages the production of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is a hormone that makes you feel full, makes you feel satisfied, satiated, so therefore you don't eat anymore. I mean, what the drug really does is it tricks your brain into thinking that you're really fuller than you are. You say, wow, sounds like the miracle drug to me.

Where can I get some of this stuff? Well, hold on just a second. There are some problems. There are some reservations being expressed about the drug. For example, it has killed laboratory animals.

Well, that's a minor problem, even if it doesn't kill you. The other concern that people have about it is that the drug, the active ingredient in Redux has been used before and when they used it before in a different drug, what they found was that after a while it begins to wear off. In other words, after a while it begins to lose its effectiveness so that you don't feel as full as you used to feel and you develop a tolerance to the drug. And then when you go back off the drug, when you come off of it, they found that people ballooned right back up to where they started and sometimes worse. Time Magazine quoting, despite the arrival of Olestra, NutraSweet, 1% milk, low calorie foods, over the counter medications, and record health club memberships, the flab still remains. And then they go on to say, we will try anything it seems to lose it except giving up our overeating couch potato habits.

End of quote. I was a chemistry major in college and when I took physics classes, we often talked about this one particular phrase. We talked about an immovable object encountering an irresistible force. And when I read this article, I thought, you know, putting on weight, calories and all that stuff is kind of an irresistible force.

That's what this article is really saying. And the irresistible force has a name. It's called too many calories and too little exercise. And all these things we throw at it just seem to be immovable objects that this irresistible force just knocks out the way and says, so what? Can you think of any other irresistible forces in the universe? Did you read the article the other day about this whale that got hit by the Queen Elizabeth II over in Portugal? I mean, if you're a fish, then I guess a 70,000 ton ocean liner would qualify as an irresistible force, huh? What about if you're Saddam Hussein? A cruise missile qualifies as an irresistible force?

I would think so. If you live in North Carolina, Hurricane Fran probably qualifies as an irresistible force. Well, I want to talk to you today about the most irresistible force anywhere in the universe. And you know who I'm going to talk to you about? I'm going to talk to you about the living God, because he is the most irresistible force ever. And there were some people who tried to set themselves up as immovable objects and say, we're sorry, something that you want to happen is not going to happen. And God said, Oh, yeah, well, you may think you're an immovable object, but you have just met the irresistible force.

Let's look at it together. Verse 57. And his evening approach, there came a rich man. Now, Jesus has just died on the cross.

He's still hanging there, but he's dead. There came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. We know that this man not only was rich, but from other passages in the Bible, we know that he was a prominent Jewish religious leader. We know that he was a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish Religious Council. But we also know that he was a closet Christian. He was a secret saint. He was a covert convert. And he was like an F-117 that had so far evaded all the radar.

But here he comes out of the closet. And it says in verse 58, that he went to Pilate, and he asked for Jesus's body and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. The Romans had control of the body of Jesus, because they were the ones who had crucified him.

His body, Jesus's body, was in their control. And the Romans were not really very careful about getting bodies off the cross promptly. They didn't care if the bodies stayed up there and rotted. They didn't care if birds ate the bodies or animals ate the bodies, which happened often.

They just frankly didn't care all that much. So I don't know why Pilate was willing to give him the body so quickly. Maybe Pilate felt a little guilty that he'd put Jesus there to start with. But anyway, he gives Joseph Jesus's body right there on the spot. And Joseph goes to the cross, has it lowered, pulls the nails out of Jesus's hands and feet, picks his body up, and then he says here, verse 59, he took the body and he wrapped it in clean linen cloth. There was a fellow who helped him do this, John's gospel tells us, named Nicodemus, whom you may remember from John chapter 3. And Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, according to the ritual practices of the Jews, John 19 says, took his body and they wrapped it in cloth with spices to prepare it for burial. So when Jesus's body went into the grave, it looked like a mummy wrapped up tight in grave clothes in pieces of cloth. Now that's really important for us to remember for next week, because next week that figures critically in the events of what happened. So just hold on to that.

We'll come back to that. But he looked like a mummy when he was put into the grave. And verse 60, and he placed Jesus's body in his own new tomb that he had cut out of rock, and he rolled a big stone in front of the entrance of the tomb and he went away. In these days in Israel, most people were buried just putting you six feet under the ground.

But rich people didn't do it that way. They often took hillsides that were solid limestone, and they had them cut out, kind of like little mausoleums, and inside of the hillside, they would make a burial chamber that would take two, three, four bodies and even would have room for you to walk inside of there. And that's what Joseph had done. And then they would put a big old stone that was designed and milled perfectly to roll right in front of the opening to protect the tomb from robbers and animals and all kinds of other things.

Now a poor person could not do this. This was a rich person's tomb, and only a rich person like Joseph could afford to make a tomb like this, but he had one close by and he deposited the body of Jesus there. Now why was Joseph the one who had to do this? Why didn't Peter do this or James do this or John do this? Well, the answer is Peter and James and John and all the other male disciples had headed for the hills.

They weren't anywhere to be found. And so it was just Joseph standing there who did this, and he kind of ended up with the job by default. But you know, in the beauty of God's plan, it really wasn't by default, it was all by design, because in doing what he did, Joseph unwittingly, I'm sure he didn't realize this, fulfilled a prophecy of the Old Testament that was almost 800 years old. Isaiah 53 verse 9 says this, that he, the Messiah, would be assigned to die with wicked men. Well, didn't he die between the thieves on the cross? Didn't he die between two criminals? And then it says, yet he will be with a rich man in his death, Joseph of Arimathea.

Well, it didn't stop there. Look at verse 62. And the next day, the one after the preparation day, the chief priests and the Pharisees, the rabbis, came to Pilate and they said, now Pilate, listen, we remember that while he was still alive, that deceiver said, after three days, I will rise again. Don't you find it interesting that these rabbis knew exactly what Jesus was claiming?

I mean, we sometimes look at these guys and we think, they didn't know anything. Folks, they knew everything. They knew everything about what Jesus has said, everything about what he had taught, everything about what he claimed. That's why Paul in Acts 26 says to King Agrippa, King Agrippa, these things did not happen in a corner.

Everybody knew what was going on. These rabbis knew Jesus had claimed he was going to rise from the dead and they didn't want it to happen. Look, they said to Pilate, so give us an order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal away his body and tell people that he's been raised from the dead.

And then the last deception is going to be worse than the first one. These guys understood that if Jesus rose from the dead, or even if his body disappeared, that even more people would believe in him than before they killed him. And they didn't want that to happen.

They were determined that was not going to happen. So what better way to stop it from happening than to post a garrison of Roman army troops right in front of the only entrance, remember there's only one way to get into this grave, post a big old Roman army garrison right there. Remember, if you're a Roman soldier and you lost your prisoner, even your dead prisoner, you know what they did?

They cut your head off. So these people, the soldiers, would have a vested interest in making sure that body didn't go anywhere. And that's exactly what the rabbis wanted.

They wanted somebody who was going to take this job seriously. They wanted the Marines to do this job. So they went and got the Roman soldiers and said, now can we have some?

And Pilate, look, Pilate says, verse 65, take a guard, go make the tomb as secure as you know how. And that's what they did. And I'm sure they said to the soldiers before they left, hey, fellas, don't forget, you lose that body, we cut your head off.

So stay awake, guys. But you know what? Those rabbis didn't even trust the soldiers.

You say, how do you know that? Because it says in the next verse, they went and made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone, as well as posting those guards there. In other words, they took a big old glob of hot wax and they put it right on the joint between the stone and the side of the wall on the cave. And then they fixed it with their personal seals so that even if the soldiers decided to go into cahoots with the disciples and accept a bribe and let the disciples come and get in, that seal would have been snapped when the stone was rolled and the rabbis would have been able to prove there'd been some tampering going on. Man, these guys thought of everything, didn't they? And so here we have the rabbis and the Romans combining forces to make sure that Jesus Christ stays in that tomb.

I love what the commentator Matthew Henry said about this. He said, to guard the tomb against the disciples was needless. I mean, these guys have scattered like a bunch of scared rabbits. They didn't have enough guts among the 11 of them put together to come mess with this tomb. To guard the tomb against the disciples was needless. And I love what he goes on to say, and to guard the tomb against the power of God was folly. Well, that's the end of our passage, but of course it leads us to ask the most important question. What is it? Thank you. These guys are about to find out that even though they have stationed themselves as an immovable object right in front of that tomb, they're about to meet the irresistible force in the universe.

They're about to learn a lesson that they're not as immovable as they think they are. I was having breakfast this past week with a major politician here from Northern Virginia area. He said, oh, really? Who was it? Tell us.

Who are we eating with? Well, see, I'm not going to do that. And I'll tell you why. Because if I tell you and you know that the person is a Republican, you would say, see there, I knew all the time that he was one of them. And if I tell you and he turns out to be a Democrat, you'd go, uh-uh. So I'm not going to tell you.

I'm sorry. But anyway, he was a politician. And we were talking a little bit about his rise politically. And here's what he said to me.

Now, he also happened to be a fine Christian who knew Christ personally. And here's what he said. He said, you know, my being where I am today is so unlikely. The odds were just so against it.

This was never what I set out to do in life. And I said, well, how did you feel about all this happening? He said, you know, Lon, I got to tell you the truth. I never fretted about it. I never worried about it. He said, I decided if God wanted my political career to go somewhere, it was going somewhere. And if God didn't want it to, it wasn't.

And what I did wasn't going to make a whole lot of difference. So he said, I just ran if I felt God wanted me to run for something. And he said, I had the confidence that nobody and nothing was going to stand in the way of God getting me where he wanted me to be.

I think that's great attitude. And you know, really, that's nothing more than the attitude of the Bible, when it comes to God telling us about himself, and about the circumstances of our lives. What God is trying to tell us in the Bible is that he is the Lord, he is the ruler, he is the creator of the universe, and of everything in it. And that all the rabbis and all the Roman soldiers put together, all the wax seals and all the schemes of men put together have no chance of stopping something when God decides it's going to happen. Folks, God is the ultimate irresistible force in the universe. And when God's on the move, there is no such thing as an immovable object. The Bible is full of examples of people who learn this the hard way.

Can I show you a few of them? How about Nebuchadnezzar? Would you turn with me to Daniel chapter four. Now Nebuchadnezzar was the king of the Neo Babylonian Empire. This is a an empire that arose out of nowhere very quickly, and took over the entire ancient Near East, including Jerusalem and Israel. When Nebuchadnezzar was still a very young man, all of the ancient Near East was his.

Now that's a pretty heady deal. And that can go to your head. And it went to his head. And he began to think of himself as the ultimate immovable object in the ancient Near East. Look at this, verse 28. All of this happened to King Nebuchadnezzar.

And verse 29, 12 months later, as the king was walking on the roof of his royal palace of Babylon, he said, Is not this the great Babylon that I have built as the royal residence by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty? Think this has gone to his head? Think he sees himself as an immovable object?

I do. God's about to teach him about the irresistible force in the universe. Watch verse 31. And the words were still on his lips when a voice came from heaven and said, This is what's decreed for you, Nebuchadnezzar. Your royal authority has been taken from you.

You will be driven away from people, you will live with the wild animals, you will eat grass like cattle. Seven years will pass for you until you are willing to acknowledge that the most high is sovereign over the kingdoms of men. And he gives those kingdoms to whomever he wishes. Not you, pal.

He. God says, I'm going to teach you a lesson, my friend. I'm going to teach you that I'm the irresistible force in the universe, not you. Did he learn his lesson?

You betcha. Look at verse 34. And at the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes towards heaven, and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the most high God. Well, that's kind of different because when this started, he wasn't praising anybody but himself. Then I praised the most high. I honored and glorified him. And here's what I said, verse 35. All people of the earth are regarded as nothing by him.

He does what he pleases with the powers of heaven, with the peoples of the earth, and no one can hold back his hand or say to him, What do you think you're doing? Did he get the message? You bet. You know who else got the message? A guy named Pharaoh. Remember our friend Pharaoh? Moses shows up and says, Hey, I'm here representing God.

And God says, Let my people go. You remember what Pharaoh said? I'm reading to you from Exodus chapter five. Listen, and Pharaoh said, Who is this Lord? This Lord never heard of him. Who is this Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go? Moses, you don't get this, do you buddy? I am the king of the mountain. I am the immovable object in the ancient Near East right now. And I don't know any Lord that you're talking about. And buddy, I'm not letting anybody go. You got that.

Now you go put that in your pipe and smoke it, friend. He goes on to say, I do not know the Lord, and I will not let Israel go. Hello, irresistible force display about to happen.

Huh? Did God teach him who was really the irresistible force in the universe? He thought he was.

Boy, by the time it was over, I want to tell you something. I'll bet you Yul Brenner was sorry he'd ever seen any Israelites. And what about Haman?

You remember Haman in the book of Esther? Didn't like the fact Mordecai wasn't bowing down to him. So he said, not only am I going to kill Mordecai, but as the prime minister of all of Persia, I am the immovable object. I walk through the streets, people bow down to me. I say, jump, people say, how high?

I am the man. And not only am I going to kill him, but you know what? I think I'll kill all his people too. And just to make sure I kill him in grand style, I'm going to build this big old gallows bigger than any gallows in Persia. No other gallows is good enough for Mordecai.

I'm going to build it 75 feet high so I can hang him on it. I am the immovable object. We ought to read the end of the story.

It's kind of humorous actually. You know what happened? By the time God got through demonstrating to him that he wasn't such an immovable object at all, but he had placed himself right square on the collision path with the irresistible force of the universe. You know what they did?

They took him out and hung him on the gallows he built to hang Mordecai on. Hello, irresistible force. One more person, Jezebel. Say, yeah, I've heard of her. Who is she? Well, she was a Canaanite princess who King Ahab of Israel married. And she came to Israel bringing all of her idolatry with her. And she came with an agenda.

Her agenda was to wipe the worship of the living God out of existence, to exterminate the worship of God off the map. And this lady was not a nice person. This lady was ruthless. She was mean.

She didn't stand for the national anthem and she didn't cry when old Yeller died, friends. This lady was bad. And Elijah was her enemy. And Elijah killed 850 of her prophets at Mount Carmel. And when she heard this, listen to what she said.

This is 1 Kings chapter 19. She said, Elijah, here's my message for you, friend. May my gods deal with me ever so severely if by this time tomorrow, I don't make your life like one of the life of those prophets you just killed. You know what she's saying to him, don't you? She said, I'm going to kill you. And if you think that the worship of the true God is going to survive, I'm telling you the only way it's going to survive in this country is over my dead body.

Okay. God can arrange that. That's not hard for the irresistible force of the universe to arrange. This woman setting herself up as an immovable object, you bet, and she's about to meet the irresistible force. You know, by the time it was over, if you read the story, her servants threw her out the top floor window of her house. She died when she hit the street. The dogs came and ate her body in the street. And by the time the wild dogs were done with her, there was nothing left but her skull, her hands and her feet.

That's all they had left to bury. Hello, irresistible force. You say, well, Lon, this is great. And I know the rabbis and Roman soldiers are going to meet the same force next week.

That's right. You know, if we're all here next week, that's what's going to happen. But you say, what's the point? I mean, what's the point here? Well, here's the point, folks. When you become a Christian, when I become a Christian by personal faith in Jesus Christ, one of the things that we get, do we get eternal life?

Sure. But one of the other great things we get is we get what Peter called God's great and marvelous promises, promises for provision and protection, promises for guidance and for grace. And you know what? God says, I'm going to keep these promises to you. But as you go through life and as I go through life, isn't it interesting that our world is full of people who see themselves as immovable objects and they say, uh-uh, there's no way that promise of God's coming true for you, buddy, not as long as I'm in the way, because I'm the immovable object. We got a lot of bosses like that. Going to the office, man that boss, as far as he's concerned, he is the immovable object in that company.

And wherever your career is going to go in that company is not going where you think it's going because he's standing there. We have neighbors like that sometimes. We run into relatives like that sometimes.

There are coworkers like that, competitors. Maybe you got a professor or teacher in school that's like that who sees themselves as that immovable object. Maybe it's not even a person. Maybe it's just circumstances that look impossible, that there's no way God could keep his promises to you. Well, the truth is what King Nebuchadnezzar said, God is the one who does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and with the peoples of the earth and no one can hold back his hand. Folks, God is the ultimate irresistible force in the universe.

And I don't care what self-declared immovable object may come across your path, it does not matter. God's bigger and God can handle it. And God can get you exactly where he promised he's going to get you.

He's bigger than your boss, your teacher, your neighbor, your relative or any circumstance. And God's going to get you exactly what he said and God's going to do for you exactly what he promised. No seal, no stone, no soldiers, no nothing are going to stop God from doing what he promised you. You say, well, Lon, what are you talking about?

Some kind of fatalism here, you know, caesara, sarat. No, I'm talking about a living personal God directing his personal universe to keep his personal promises to you if you know Christ. And I think when you're a Christian and you're willing to see God the way he is in the Bible like this, man, I think it changes our life. We can relax. We can be calm even in the most threatening and impossible looking circumstances because we know something. And what we know is what Revelation 3 verse 7 says, that God opens doors nobody can shut and God shuts doors nobody can open. We know that God is sovereign, God is omnipotent, which is just a fancy theological way of saying that God always gets the last word. He always gets it.

And that means you can relax because God's going to be the irresistible force for you. You know, I went to Johns Hopkins for graduate school. I went to the Near Eastern Studies Department. I was the token evangelical I think that they let in.

I think they needed it for, you know, racial diversification or something. So they let me in. And when I went, I had people warn me that, you know, this was not going to be the easiest place in the world to graduate from and navigate through if I wanted to maintain an evangelical position. But you know, I really felt in my heart God was leading me there. I really felt in my heart God was telling me to go there.

So I went there. We had a guy, one of the professors there, there were only four or five professors in the whole department. And he was from Texas.

In and of itself, you know, that doesn't mean he's automatically bad. But anyway, he was from Texas. And he's about six foot three, wore these cowboy boots and jeans and big old, you know, rodeo buckle all over campus, had his big old 10 gallon hat that he wore. He had gone to Abilene Christian College, which is a very conservative school, and then to Harvard. And when he was at Harvard, man, he traded in everything he'd ever believed for the whole liberal line. And he was at Hopkins teaching. He was one of my professors. And he had a bone to pick with anybody who even smelled like an evangelical.

Well, I kind of tried to keep my distance from the guy and whatever. But every Wednesday, we had a class called seminar. And what you'd do is you'd go into this class, and the whole department would sit around this big old table, big old long seminar table, and all the professors would be in there.

You'd be assigned a paper at the beginning of the semester, and then you would every Wednesday, one person would read their paper, and the whole department, the professors, and the students would comment on it. One year, we were studying Isaiah, and here's the paper I got assigned. Isaiah 1 18. Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord. Even though your sins are as scarlet, they shall be white as snow. Even though they are red like crimson, they shall be wool.

A great promise of forgiveness from God. But there are many liberal commentators who take this as a rhetorical question, not as a statement, but a rhetorical question. Come now, let us reason together. Even though your sins are scarlet, shall they be white as snow? No way. Even though they're red like crimson, shall they be as wool?

No way. And my paper was study the Hebrew grammar and the Hebrew syntax and decide, was it a rhetorical question, saying I'm not going to forgive your sins, or was it the way the King James Bible translates it, a statement saying, God, I am going to forgive your sins. So, man, I went to work on rhetorical questions.

And I studied them in Hebrew, and I studied them in Syriac and in Phoenician. Folks, I may not know a whole lot, but I want to tell you something. I know rhetorical questions. I know rhetorical questions. And I researched all these things, wrote my paper, and you know what I found? I found that in all of Hebrew grammar, Phoenician grammar, Syriac grammar, there wasn't a single rhetorical question in the grammar and the syntax of the one in Isaiah 118, which meant Isaiah 118 is not a rhetorical question.

It is a statement of forgiveness, just the way the English Bible takes it. I went in, read my paper. I was proud of myself.

It's a good paper. So when we're done, you know, it's time for questions. And this guy's sitting all the way at the end of the table.

He's looking eyeball to eyeball for me with about 30 people in between. And he says to me, Mr. Solomon. Yes, sir, Dr. Jones, not his real name. He said, are you mean to tell me in the entire Hebrew Bible there's not one single rhetorical question in the form that we have right here? I said, no, sir. He said, Mr. Solomon, I am sure that there is some rhetorical question somewhere in the Bible that's in this form. And I said, well, Dr. Jones, I have looked at all of them.

And if you can find one, I'd appreciate you sending it to me because I'm telling you there isn't. He said to me, Mr. Solomon, let me tell you something. He said, my theology demands that this is a rhetorical question. He said, so frankly, I don't really care what the grammar in the syntax says. This is a rhetorical question as far as I'm concerned. Do you understand? Now, that's where I should have probably said yes, sir.

But I didn't. I said, well, Dr. Jones, if we're going to look at the clear grammar and the clear syntax of a passage and say it says one thing, but then we're going to discard that because your theology says that we need to make it something else, then it seems to me we ought to forget about studying grammar and syntax here at Johns Hopkins and we just ought to study your theology. And we had these big old Hebrew Bibles. They weighed about two pounds and he stood up all six foot three of him and he slammed his Bible together. Wham, he slammed it on the table. He pointed his finger at me at the other end of the table and he said, Mr. Solomon, he said, so help me. As long as I am at this university, you will never get a degree from this place.

Picked up his Bible, put it under his arm, walked out the door and everybody was sitting there going, oh, so I get home that day and Brenda says, how was your day? I said, Brent, I'm not going back. You know, I'm done. I'm finished.

It's over. Well, anyway, I called a friend who was a godly man and he said, Hey, Lon, it's not over till it's over. Yogi Berra said that give God some space, you know, just keep on going.

You felt God led you there. Just stay with it. He didn't throw you out.

Stay with it and just see what God does. I said, all right, so I finished out the year. We went away for summer break. Now Hopkins has this unusual policy. Let me cut to the bottom line. When you go there as a professor, you sign a document that says if you don't have tenure in 11 years, you got to leave the university. It's kind of a nice way to fire you without firing you. They just don't give you tenure and you got to go. So guess what year this guy was in? You'll never guess.

Number 11. And even though he was well published, he had a PhD from Harvard. He had guys from all over the country, scholars who had written in recommending his tenure. The university, Johns Hopkins in the late 70s was thinking about downsizing the liberal arts department for budget reasons. One of the things they were planning to do was to cancel the Near Eastern Studies Department and move the professors into classics. They didn't want any more tenured professors than they already had because they got to deal with those guys. So in spite of everything he had, he didn't get tenure.

And when I came back in September, guess who was still there and guess who wasn't. And folks, I have a degree from Johns Hopkins University today in my possession. Now here's the point.

Here's the point. That guy set himself up as an immovable object and said, I don't care whether God or anybody else led you here. You are not getting a degree from this place. And God said, okay, we can solve that.

If as long as you're here, he's not going to get one, we can solve that real easy. You're not here. You're gone. And that really happened. Dear friends, let me tell you something. When you walk in your office tomorrow, or you walk into that family gathering, or you walk into that classroom, or you walk into that doctor's office, or you confront those circumstances that look impossible, it doesn't matter how impossible they look or how immovable they've set themselves up to be. The God of the universe said, I will never leave you. I will never forsake you. And if you know Christ, the God of the universe wants you to be able to say like in Hebrews 13, therefore, I will say, what do I have to fear?

What can man do to me? I got the irresistible force of the universe on my side. That's the bottom line of this. I cut out a quote a couple years ago, and I put it up on my wall in my study at home. And it's meant a lot to me. I want to leave you with this quote as I close.

It says this. It is impossible for that man to despair, who remembers that his helper is omnipotent. Listen to that again. It is impossible for that man or woman to despair, who remembers that his or her helper is omnipotent. And if you know Christ, your helper is omnipotent. And if your helper is omnipotent, he's the irresistible force in the universe. I don't care how bad it looks, there's no reason to despair. Give him some space, trust him, and God will fulfill everything he said to you he would fulfill. There is no immovable object that's going to stop you.

Let's pray. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for reminding us from the Bible today of who you are and of your power. Power that you demonstrated to Nebuchadnezzar, to Pharaoh, to Jezebel. Power, Lord, that you have demonstrated and will demonstrate to these people who tried to make this tomb so secure that Jesus couldn't come out.

And power that you've demonstrated down the centuries to men and women in so many fabulous ways. And Father, for those of us here who know Christ, I want to pray that you would change the way we live and the way we see people who set themselves up as immovable objects, the way we see circumstances that set themselves up as immovable objects. Change the way we react to them. Take away the despair and give us a confidence and a calm that comes not from thinking that we're smart enough to scheme our way around these things, but rather a confidence and a calm that comes from knowing that the omnipotent God, the irresistible force of the universe, is on our side. And He will accomplish what concerns us. I pray that you would change the way we live because of what we heard here today. And I ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen.