The Resurrection: Did It Happen and Who Cares?

John, chapter 20. If you do have a Bible, I was listening to a Bible teacher the other day named Andy Stanley, and he said that the way to really understand something, if you want to understand something, is to go back to its starting point. Everything, he says, everything has a starting point. Every job, every journey, every living thing had a starting point. You, you had a starting point. Some of you were started on purpose. Others of you, it was more of an accident, but we're glad that you're here nonetheless.

Glad that you made it. Romances. Romances always have a starting point. Some of you remember your very first romance. You were nine years old. It was your cousin.

Thankfully, you have moved on, at least most of you, depending on what part of North Carolina you were from. But your faith, our faith has a starting point also. For many of us, the starting point of our faith was what our parents told us was true. Or maybe for you, it was whatever the priest said, or maybe it was what your preacher said, what the Bible says. Growing up in my childhood, we had a saying, the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.

And when you were young, that kind of reasoning worked fine. It was a good foundation for truth. But as you got older, you began to feel a little uneasy with just that as the foundation for what was right.

And you began to ask the question, how do I know what is true about God? Andy told a story that really reminded me of my own experience. Growing up, I was always told the story of where God speaks to Samuel in the middle of the night. Samuel is a young boy who lives at the temple. And when Samuel hears his name called at night, he thinks it's Eli, the older priest. And so he runs to Eli's room and says, what do you need?

And Eli eventually says, you know, hey, I'm not doing this. It must be God. So when you hear your name at night again, say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. And the application was, you know, was always if God speaks your name, you're supposed to say to him, speak, Lord, your servant hears. And I just remember as a nine year old kid thinking, please, Lord, do not call my name out. In the dark at night, do that in the day, because if you do it at night, I don't think my response is going to be speak, Lord, your servant hears.

I think my mom is going to have to put back on the plastic liner back on the bed. And I'm nine years old. I don't want to do that. But bottom line is I've never really heard a voice. I never heard God call my name audibly. So the question for me and for many of you became, how do I really know what God has said? I know that many of you are like that.

And I want to know that, you know, that you've begun to wonder, you're like, just because my mom said so. Or just because the priest said so. That's not a good reason to believe. Well, believe it or not, the apostle Peter seems to have had the exact same questions. Peter, you see, had always been a really trusting guy. He was one of the very first ones to sign on to Jesus. He took Jesus at his word. He convinced other people to follow Jesus. But then Jesus was put on trial and killed.

And in that moment, everything that Peter believed came crashing down. Jesus was not supposed to die. Jesus was supposed to save the world.

How could God, if there was a God, how could he let that happen? And if Jesus was so loving and in control like he said he was, then why would he have left Peter all by himself in such a mess? In fact, Peter's struggle of faith got so bad that he outright denied being a follower of Jesus. He didn't just kind of fall out of church and sort of get lazy with it.

He just said, I don't even know the man any longer. Well, everything changed for Peter early one Sunday morning. The apostle John tells us the story.

In the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one that Jesus loved, which is John's name for himself, and said, they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they put him. So Peter and the other disciple, John, started for the tomb. Both are running, but the other disciple outran Peter. I think it's awesome how John points out he's more athletic than Peter was.

He was a P90X guy, I guess. But he reached the tomb first. He'd been over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there, but he did not go in.

Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place separate from the linen. The significance of that is this was neatly folded up. This was not a rushed job.

It was somebody had taken the time to make sure it was tidy when they left. Verse 8, finally, the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went inside and he saw and believed. Up until this point, you see, they still had not understood from scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. The apostle Peter walked into that tomb a discouraged, defeated doubter. He walked out of that tomb as the most important leader in the new Christian movement. From this moment onward, literally seconds after this is over, the disciples are going to look to Peter to lead them. What was it that changed Peter in that moment? It was not some new flash of insight into Jesus' teaching. Oh, I get it.

I'm like the Good Samaritan. It wasn't, oh, I understand predestination now. No, he came face to face with a place that should have had a body in it, but did not. I want to put you, if I can, in the place of Peter this morning because I know that many of you are like, Peter, you have questions. There are some things about Jesus that just don't add up for you. Maybe like Peter, you feel like he's disappointed you. You feel like he has abandoned you or he didn't show up when he was supposed to, or maybe you feel like you have disappointed him. Peter had denied Jesus so many times that he felt like if Jesus is real, I don't think there's really any hope that we could ever put our relationship back together. I've messed it up so many times.

I don't even know the way back. I want you to experience what Peter experienced. I want you to have the same change. I want to, number one, confront you with the fact of the empty tomb. I'm going to explain very briefly how we can know that Jesus raised from the dead with certainty, and we'll present you with some reasons for that. Number two, I'm going to let Peter explain to you in his words the implications of that empty tomb.

Here we go. Number one, the fact of the empty tomb, believe it or not, that the tomb was empty that morning when Peter got there is a fairly agreed upon fact. Obviously, not everybody believes that Jesus rose from the dead, but just about every scholar agrees that a man named Jesus really lived, that he was executed by the Romans, that he was buried, and that on the third day, the tomb where he had been laid was found empty.

On that point, there is no substantial disagreement. The question for debate is, how did the tomb get empty? There's really only three options you can come up with. Option number one is somebody stole the body.

Somebody stole it and then the myth grew up that Jesus had resurrected. The question then would become, well, who did it? You've got to come up with suspects. I can really only think of three possible suspects.

For a suspect, you need a means and a motive. Suspect number one would be the Romans. The Romans certainly would have had the means to steal the body. Pilate had ordered a garrison of Roman soldiers to be put in front of the tomb, a garrison with 16 soldiers. The way it worked is four would stand guard and 12 would sit in a semicircle around them. They were all armed and they would rotate every few hours.

Some would sleep and the others would stand guard. You're like, maybe they were the ones that stole him. Maybe they stole him, you know, as a joke. Well, the problem is, is that Pilate had put a seal on that tomb and Roman law said that if you broke the seal, you were to be punished by death. The Romans knew that. In order for them to do this, they would have had to have made a significantly compelling interest. They were the ones who killed Jesus in the first place. You say, well, maybe they were bribed. OK, by whom?

Well, go to suspect number two. Maybe the Jews, the Jewish leaders had a part of this. Well, what would have been their motive? The only motive that I can come up with for them stealing the body is somehow to preempt the disciples stealing it. Maybe they thought, hey, if we steal it first, then when they steal it and say he's resurrected, then, then we'll, you know, produce the body because, hey, we got it.

And the movement will die. And that certainly would have killed the movement. That disciples out there preaching Jesus raised from the dead and they drag out the body and that would have stopped it in its tracks.

But they never did that. So let's go to suspect number three, the disciples. The problem with the disciples as a suspect is really twofold.

One, how did they sneak past the garrison of soldiers? That's where that detail, by the way, of the neatly folded linen cloth comes in. Robberies are not usually, are usually done in a hurry. You don't, robbers don't usually put a lot of thought into the tidiness of the, you know, whatever they're leaving behind. So you have details in there. And think about this.

This is much more important. Would stealing Jesus's body really have served their purposes? In a religious hoax, and there have been lots of religious hoaxes throughout history, but in a religious hoax, the leaders always gained some measurable asset like power or money or sex. They gained something through the deception.

What did this new testimony gain for the disciples? Well, their testimony certainly gained them no power for their entire lives. They were pursued to death.

Every single one of them was tortured and killed for their confession. According to Eusebius, the early historian, both Peter and his wife were crucified. Peter was forced to watch his wife drug off to be crucified.

And then Peter was crucified upside down the next day. Their testimony gained them no power. Their testimony gained them no money. The apostles were notoriously poor.

And any money they did get, they just gave away. Their testimony did not get them sex. They taught that sex was only to be experienced between two people in monogamous marriage. So they didn't concoct this hoax for money or sex or power or the reasons that other religious hoaxes have been come up with. So what would have been their motive? In fact, they would teach Christians, they would teach their followers to live in the world joyfully without money, sex, or power, the three things that the world said you needed to be happy.

They would say, you can live joyfully in this world without any of those things because your kingdom is not of this world and you can put up with misery in this life because you are assured of the kingdom that is coming and the basis of that assurance for them was the resurrection of Jesus. The question you've got to ask yourself honestly is, would they have taught that and would they have lived that way themselves if they knew it was a hoax and they'd just stolen the body? So the theory that somebody stole the body just fails to be compelling to me at all.

There's nobody that would have had the means and the motive. So let's go on to theory number two, Jesus never really died. Maybe Jesus didn't quite die on the cross. He just passed out and when they put him in the tomb, he revived. Whereupon he snuck out of the tomb and appeared to a few of his disciples. He convinced a couple of them that he had resurrected and then he headed off to France where he sired the Medici family with Mary Magdalene and lived undiscovered until Tom Hanks broke his code a couple of years ago.

A number of problems with this theory other than its other stupidity. Number one, the Romans were experts at crucifixion. They knew when somebody had died.

In fact, Roman law said that if they pulled a person off of the cross before they died, they had to be punished in the same manner. Just to be sure, they pierced Jesus' heart with a spear to make sure he was dead. By the way, there's a little detail that's included that's very medically significant to us but not to them. It says that blood and water came out. We know now that in that area of the body when you die, the blood begins to clot and it separates from a watery serum. So, when blood and water come out, it's the significance. They've been dead for a while. The significance of that is they didn't know that medically back then.

We know that now they included the detail. It shows us that he had been dead for a while. The other problem with the idea that Jesus had just fainted is that he'd been beaten prior to his crucifixion. Most people were not beaten prior to their crucifixion. Usually, you were either beaten or crucified because quite often, beating led to death. Cicero said many men died during the beating. He said most were at least partially disemboweled. There were extreme losses of blood.

Cicero said it was not uncommon to see a rib go flying off a man's frame while he was being beaten. That's probably why Jesus died so much quicker than the other two because they had not endured the beating. The point is, if anybody were to survive a crucifixion, it would not have been somebody who had been whipped that brutally and lost that much blood.

And if he had somehow survived, you've still got the problem of how he snuck past the guards and then appeared to his disciples and manages to convince them in his battered, weakened condition that he's the Lord of all the earth and the judge of eternity. So, option number two, that Jesus didn't really die doesn't seem like a good one either, so that leaves us with option number three, and that is that Jesus really did rise from the dead. It is by far the simplest explanation.

It is the most compelling. Jesus resurrected, he appeared to his disciples, they saw it with their own eyes, and they go around the world testifying to it even if it cost them their lives, and they do it gladly because they had seen him with their eyes, they touched him with their hands, and they hurt him with their ears. You say, well, if that is the simplest explanation and it is the most compelling like you say it is, why is it not universally accepted?

Why doesn't everybody say, well, of course? Then let me answer with the words of the German philosopher, Wolfhard Pannenberg. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things.

First, it is a very unusual event. What he means by that is it's supernatural, and a lot of people are just predisposed against the supernatural. Ironically, they do this in the name of good science or good history as if taking those disciplines seriously means refusing even to consider miraculous evidence. But closing yourself off to certain types of explanations, no matter how compelling they are, is the definition of closed-mindedness.

To simply say in the name of something, I'm going to be closed to this type of evidence because it doesn't fit my category, is the definition of closed-mindedness. He says, so it's an unusual event and they don't want to think about it or, and this is probably more significant, if it's true, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way that you live. If it's true, you have to change because if Jesus rose from the dead, that means he is the Lord over morality. He's the Lord over salvation. He's the Lord over who goes to heaven and hell. He's the Lord over what's right and wrong. He's the Lord over politics. He's the Lord over history. Algeus Huxley, the man who coined the term agnostic, a renowned skeptic, admitted this much.

Listen to this. This is a very insightful, it's from his book, Ends and Means. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning. For myself, as well as most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was a philosophy of liberation. The liberation that we sought was liberation from Christian morality.

In other words, we wanted the ability to do whatever we wanted and not feel guilty about it and that drove our acceptance of this idea that there was no God and that Jesus was not really the son of God. Bart Ehrman says that over here at UNC Chapel Hill, says that the main reason he will not really seriously consider whether this could be true is because the world has so much suffering in it. And he said, I won't even entertain the idea that there's a God who could have raised Jesus from the dead if he would have left so much suffering in the world. Now, again, look at that very plainly. That is not an honest consideration of the evidence. That is a dismissal of the evidence because you've already made up your mind it could not be true because of some other reason. So let me just ask you this question. Have you ever considered the evidence on its own terms?

Or are there reasons that you are predisposed to not even really consider it? You say, for example, well, if the resurrection is true, why is the world such a mess? Why are there so many different religions?

Why did my life turn out like this? Where was God when I asked him this? God, why don't you show up every once in a while in the world? That would be awesome if I would pray and you would just do something.

Or maybe it is that you just don't want anybody telling you what is right or wrong or to do with your money or what to do with your body. I want to challenge you this weekend to be open-minded enough to consider the evidence on its own terms and then redefine your objections and your questions in light of the undeniable evidence and not close your mind to the evidence in light of the questions that you have. So to walk with Peter into that empty tomb means three things. Here's the three implications.

And again, I'm going to let him explain these to us. The implications from the empty tomb. Number one, it means that Jesus is who he says he is. If the tomb is empty, then that means, and Jesus rose from the dead, that Jesus is who he said he is regardless of how it contradicted Peter's perceptions. In Acts 4, Peter gets into a really interesting argument with a bunch of academics and theologians who are explaining to him why Jesus could not possibly be the Messiah. And they bring out reason X, Y, and Z and say, you know, everybody who's smart in the world agrees with us. And Peter, with his GED education, responds in Acts 4 and 19.

Peter answered them, whether it's right to listen to you rather than to God, you got to judge. We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard with our eyes and ears. In other words, look, dudes, we're not saying we're smarter.

You guys got more degrees hanging on your wall than a thermometer. But then again, on the other hand, we know this guy who came back from the dead. And no offense to you, his coming back from the dead trumps your magna cum laude. We had a vigorous discussion backstage, by the way, about whether it was law or law day. I have no idea. Maybe one of you know.

One of our pastors says, for me, it was I graduated, thank you, law day. That's all that I say about that. But regardless, they said, I don't care what kind of summa magna degree that you got, his coming back from the dead trumps all that. Let me ask you to do a thought experiment if you've got a lot of objections, and I know many of you do. Let me ask you to do a thought experiment. Let's just suppose that you were the first one to walk into that tomb, and there you were confronted by Jesus. And whatever your objection is, there's so many religions, there's pain, the Bible says homosexuality is wrong.

These are the reasons I don't want to consider it, all right? Let's say that you were in the tomb, and you have those objections, and there's Jesus standing there, and he looks at you, and he says, I just want you to know that I am who I say I am. I'm resurrected. And I also want you to know I'm not going to answer your question, at least not in this life. I'm going to answer it in eternity, and I just need you to trust me for the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years until you die, and then I'll explain it to you. Here's the thought experiment. Would you be willing to suspend your objections for the next 50 years if you had encountered the resurrected Jesus?

That's what happened to Peter. You say, ah, but J.D., that's the very problem there that you just said. I can't go back and see him. I understand. But see, even today, the evidence is strong enough for you to reach a certain conclusion about it. The breakdown is never in the insufficiency of the evidence.

The breakdown is always in some prejudice that keeps you from considering the evidence on its own terms. Let me be really personal with you. This is how faith worked for me. When I was in college, I had a lot of questions.

Why is there a hell, and why doesn't God do this? And it brought me to a point where I almost lost my faith, and it was this very thing that someone challenged me on that turned the corner for me. This was my Peter moment. Somebody said, if Jesus were to appear to you, if you were to see him resurrected and he were to say, I'm not going to answer your question, but I am going to show you that I resurrected, would you trust him? And I knew the answer to that was yes. And I knew that it was undeniable that Jesus raised from the dead. And from that point on, I said, I'm going to live with some unexplainable things because of the undeniable truth of the resurrection. And that's my favorite definition of faith, by the way. Faith occurs when the unexplainable confronts the undeniable. You've got questions you think are unexplainable. And you know what? Maybe I can answer a few of them.

Whatever cup of coffee, maybe I can answer a couple. Maybe a bunch of them I couldn't because you're smarter than me. The resurrection is a miracle, however, that is undeniable. And when the unexplainable meets the undeniable, one of two things is going to happen. One option is you'll refuse to even consider the evidence until God explains these other things, as if you refuse to even consider the possibility that there is a God who runs the universe, whose wisdom and ways are so much higher than yours, you might not be able to grasp everything immediately.

That's one option. The other option is you humble yourself before God, and you say, OK, God, I will consider the evidence on its own terms. I will realize that you have ways of running the universe, which may not make sense to me. And I will suspend my objections in light of the undeniable resurrection. You see, here's my view of heaven.

And I realize this is not totally accurate, but it'll give you a picture that I think. I view the first 100 years or so of heaven as like a big sixth grade classroom, where Jesus just walks in, sits us all down, and says, OK, Q&A, who's first? And I promise you, if I'm not first, I'll be second or third. Boom, hands are going to go up. And I'm going to ask a question. And it's going to be a doozy. And Jesus is going to explain it. And then I'm going to put my hand right back up and say, follow up, please. And I'm going to keep doing this.

And finally, he's going to have to say, put your hand down, Greer. Somebody else gets to ask a question. Because I got lots of questions and lots of things that I don't quite understand yet.

But we cannot but help what we've seen and heard. The resurrection redefines everything. The question is, I know that you've got questions. I know that you've got doubts.

Here's my question for you. Are you open-minded enough to doubt your doubts? To suppose that maybe there are some things that Jesus has not revealed totally to your understanding yet, but you believe them because he resurrected. That's what happened to Peter. As Peter didn't get an explanation, he got a revelation.

And the revelation was the resurrection of Jesus. Number two, Peter realized in light of the resurrection that his past no longer defined him. If the resurrection is true, the past no longer defines me, Peter said. Like I told you, Peter felt like he had let Jesus down so many times that his relationship with Jesus was beyond repair. But here's what he says in his first letter, the book of 1 Peter. He says, through the resurrection, we are born again into a living hope. One, verse 4, that is kept in heaven for us. There are two things in that verse that totally changed how Peter saw himself, born again and living hope.

Let me start with living hope. Your hope in this context is whatever you believe gains your acceptance before God. Most people believe that God's acceptance of them is based on how good they are, how well they keep the tenets of their religion, like God's big scorecard, or maybe God's got these, like, scale-like things in heaven where he weighs your good works on one side and your bad works on the other. And so your hope is how well that you've lived, and that works awesome until, like, Peter, you fail, and then you start wondering, okay, how good is good enough?

What's the cutoff? Does God grade on the curve? Does he throw out the lowest grades? I mean, that got me through college, right?

Dropped my two lowest grades. I had this moment where I did this and this moment where I did that. If God will drop those two things, maybe I'll be okay. And you start to live with doubt, have I done enough? That's where Peter was, have I sinned too much that I can't get back? The gospel is that Christ earned our acceptance in our place. He paid the penalty for our sin. The way we say it here is he lived the life that we were supposed to live, and then he died the death that we were condemned to die in our place. And the resurrection was God's declaration that he had accepted Jesus' payment on our behalf. In the resurrection, God declares that Jesus' payment for us is sufficient.

And God resurrected Jesus, and he put him at the right hand of God. And there he stands, Peter says, alive, testifying to the fact that my acceptance is settled and the payment for my sin is finished. That's why Peter said, I've got a living hope that's kept in heaven for me.

It's no longer dependent on me. It is standing there by the throne of God. And every time I have a question of whether or not God's going to accept me into heaven, Jesus says, yes, he is, because I've already taken care of your payment in your place. You see, Jesus stands there, and what he is doing for you, if you have trusted him as your savior, is when somebody brings an accusation against you and says, here's why they can't go into heaven. Jesus says, you can't hold that accusation against them, because I paid for that accusation, and I have settled their debt forever. Let me make a bold statement to you that some of you are going to find to be a little abrasive and maybe a little arrogant.

If something went wrong on this stage and I had a heart attack and I dropped it, before my dead body hit the floor of this stage, my soul would be standing in the presence of God, and I'm as sure that I would enter into heaven's gates, as I am sure Jesus is there right now. You say, how in the world could you possibly say that? You really think you're that awesome?

Nope. My wife reminds me often that I'm not that awesome. It's that I know that my salvation is no longer dependent on how I live. My salvation is dependent on what Jesus Christ did in my place. He lived the life I was supposed to live. He died to death.

I was condemned to die. He did it for me as a gift, and he gave it to me, and I've got a living hope standing now at the throne of God, and my salvation is as sure as him. And as long as he's there, I am guaranteed that I will enter into heaven, because he has become my salvation. Most people in our culture say things like, all religions teach the same thing. And truthfully, many religions do about many things. On this one, the gospel is totally different, because the gospel says, no, it is not how well you do that earns your place in heaven, because you could never do enough. It is what Jesus has done. And Peter says, in the resurrection, I got a living hope now. And the other thing is, I'm born again. God, through the resurrection, has started that process of new life in me. And the same power that brought Jesus out of the grave, turned Peter from a Jesus-denying coward into Peter, the rock of the church.

That is the same power that can work in you. There are many of you that are in this place at one of our campuses that you feel like Peter. You're like, I don't even know how to get back. And you look around at all these other people, and you're like, man, their lives sure look like they are together. These people look like everything's perfect, and they're all dressed up.

And look, I'm going to church at Abercrombie and Fitch, and it's how everybody's dressed up in their styles. And I can never fit in in this group, because I'm too messed up. I've been pastor of this church for 13 years, which still blows my mind. I know some things about these people sitting around you that you don't know, and you would not be sitting as close to them if you knew some of the things that I knew. There are some people listening to me right now who are very active members of this church, who at one point in their life were on drugs. There are some who were unfaithful to their spouses and destroyed their marriages. There were some who got kicked out of school for cheating. There were some who spent time in prison. There were some who were filled with bitterness and racism and hate. But God changed them, not because they were decent people who just needed a second chance, but because they were dead people that Jesus made alive. You feel like you're too messed up for God to be interested in you? You feel like your mistakes are too severe?

You feel like your addictions are too strong? God breathed life into a dead body. God breathed courage into a cowardly Peter. He breathed love into a murderous Paul. He breathed self-control into a lustful Augustine when you believe he will breathe new life into you. Your past does not define you, because Jesus has settled the payment for your sin. He has washed it away through his blood. He has given you his righteousness. And he started the new process of new life in you when you trust him as your Savior. Here is the third implication of the empty tomb.

Peter said, because of it, I know my future is secure. Peter says, through the Resurrection, we now have an inheritance that can never perish, never spoil or fade. One of the depressing things you learn as you get older is that everything in your life spoils. Your riches spoil. Even if you manage to hang onto it until you die, you give it to your kids, and then it spoils them and they fritter it away.

Your health spoils, even if you're an awesome specimen. I told my wife the other day, when I was 22 years old, it just makes me mad. I could drink, like 10 o'clock at night, drink an entire two liter of Mountain Dew and eat a whole bag of chips and a sleeve of Fig Newtons and go right to sleep, wake up the next day, and never gain a pound. I could do that every night, never gain a pound. Now I look at a muffin in Starbucks and I gain a pound. My wife is like, you've got to start measuring your body fat percentage content.

You've got to get one of those little machines. I'm like, I know how to measure the body fat content. I get out of the shower, I stamp my foot, and I start counting. When the last part of me quits jiggling, that's my body fat content.

I don't need your machine. When I was 20, in my 20s, I'd play four hours of basketball. Four hours of basketball at night, get up the next morning, be fine. Knock it out of bed, and my wife was like, what did you do yesterday?

I'm like, I watched a movie? I don't know, it just hurts. I am not looking forward to my 35th birthday because you just get older and it just hurts. Your family, your family fades. We love our families, right?

But here's something I've learned as a pastor. Everybody's family is screwed up. You look at somebody else, you're like, man, I wish I had their family.

No, you don't. You just don't know them well enough. Everybody's got the crazy uncle, everybody's got somebody in their family. They're like, oh, they'll talk about so and so. If you're sitting here and you're like, there ain't nobody like that in my family, then you are the crazy uncle.

They're thinking that about you right now. No matter what you try to hold on to, it all fades. It all spoils. And the life of belief and unbelief are probably never more contrasted than in how the believer and unbeliever approach that reality. Bertrand Russell, who wrote the book Why I'm Not a Christian, Why I Am Not a Christian, I read this several years ago, said that as he near death, he said, I'm realizing the darkness that I've always feared is finally overtaking me. There is no justice.

If you happen to be one of the ones whom fortune fills their lives with tragedy, then you just got to live as one of the losers. I contrast that with one of my heroes of faith, Joni Eareckson Tada, who is still alive. But when she was in her teens, I think she was 14 years old, she had a diving accident, broke her neck. For 50 years, she's been a quadriplegic, paralyzed from her neck down. She says, when I got right with God, 17 years old, and I would look around and I would see all my friends running and jumping.

I used to be on the swim team, the diving team. I would get so angry that I couldn't do that anymore. And she said, it really came to a head one morning in church. She said, in one morning in church, the pastor asked everybody to kneel.

And there I am in my wheelchair. And I thought, I will never be able to kneel. And she said, then it hit me. She said, one day, the first time that I'm going to have the strength to kneel, I'm going to be in the presence of Jesus. And she said, what's going to happen? My first action that I'm going to take as I stand on my new sanctified legs is to drop to my new sanctified knees and just thank Jesus for saving my soul. And then I'm going to jump up and I'm going to do a backflip. That is the difference of somebody that approaches life with the understanding of the Resurrection and somebody who approaches life without it. Here's the question for you. What are you going to do?

What are you going to hope in when death overtakes you? I have three daughters. So of course, the very first weekend it was out, we were all there to see Cinderella. If you haven't seen the movie, you probably know the story. Cinderella was a very beautiful girl who, though she had been born and privileged to a family who loved her deeply, was forced to live with a wicked stepmother and her two wicked stepsisters who turned her into a slave and made her feel ugly. One night, you know the story, her fairy godmother shows up, gives her a dress and a pumpkin carriage, and she goes to the ball where she experiences the love of the prince. And everything for those few hours are like it should be. But then the clock strikes midnight and she is swept back into her old situation.

All that's left of that glorious few hours are the glass slippers. In the movie, she's got one and the prince has one. Best part of the story is that the prince never forgets her, refuses to forget her, and he won't rest until he has found her and brought her back to the palace. So he goes house to house looking for her until he finds her. They all live happily ever after. And I'm watching that in that theater and I think, you know, the resurrection is a lot like that glass slipper.

I'm in a theater with 150 10-year-old girls. I had to theologize to keep my sanity. We live in a world that is under the influence of a wicked stepmother, the devil. We are oppressed by her two wicked daughters, the world and our flesh, who constantly beat us up and constantly tell us that we're worthless. But in the gospel, we have met the prince and now we've got the shoe.

The resurrection is that shoe of God's promise of what he is making us into and the promise that he's going to return for us. So what do you do when the wicked stepmother or your stepsisters treat you poorly? What do you do when they make you feel worthless? You defy their lies with that glass slipper. You tell yourself in the resurrection that this dirty dungeon is not your home. That wicked stepmother and those wicked stepsisters are not your family. This drab existence is not your future. You are loved by the prince.

You are cherished by the prince and the prince is coming back for you. Faith has a starting point. Faith has a basis.

That basis is the resurrection of Jesus. When the apostles chose one word to summarize their entire message, it wasn't chastity, it wasn't purity, it wasn't give money, it wasn't even cross. The one word that summarized their message was the resurrection.

Why? Because the resurrection was everything. The resurrection was how they knew what they knew. The resurrection was how they knew what to experience in the present, the new life of Christ. The resurrection was how they knew what to expect in the future.

This was what was coming for them. The resurrection was the assurance that as he had left, he was gonna come back. The resurrection was the core of their faith. It was the starting point. It was the basis.

It was everything. And the best part of the resurrection for them is that it was offered to anybody who would receive it. It was a gift. It was a gift that God gave to you when he took your place and died in your place and then gave you this as a gift, but you have to receive it personally. It's not automatically applied to you.

You have to choose to make it your own. It's a gift. The question that I have for you this weekend at all of our campuses is have you ever personally received it? I'm not asking if you come to church every once in a while.

I'm not asking how much money you give. I'm not asking how good of a person you are. It's very possible to be in church all your life and never have actually made this your own, but you can this weekend if you want.

Why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses if you would. If you have never trusted Christ as your savior, if you're not sure you have a personal relationship with him, it's simply receiving the gift. It's two things, repentance and faith. Repentance means you surrender to the control of Jesus. You can express that right now in a prayer. These are not magic words, but a prayer from your heart. Jesus, you're the Lord and I surrender to you. Faith means you receive the gift that he's offering.

That would sound something like this. Jesus, I receive this gift of salvation and resurrection as my own right now. I take it as mine. Yes, Lord Jesus.

Yes, I take it. Father, I pray for the many who right now at one of our campuses just trust to join the many this weekend who trust in Christ. I pray for the many who trust in Jesus. I pray for the many this weekend who trust in Christ as their savior. I pray, God, that this would become the moment that their lives totally transform. And I pray, God, that you would give them the courage to do what I'm gonna ask them to do next. I pray and ask this, God, in Jesus' name.

Amen. Everybody at all campuses, if you'll look up here at me for just a moment, I'm gonna give you an invitation to do something we've done now for the last several Easters and that is give you a chance to express your faith, express your trust in Jesus Christ through baptism if you never have. Baptism was what Jesus commanded for every follower of Jesus after they had trusted Christ as their savior, trusted him as their savior. You see, in baptism, you reenact the resurrection. Just like Jesus was put in the earth, you go down in the water and just like Jesus was brought out of the earth, you come up out of the water demonstrating that you have taken his death and his resurrection on your behalf as your own. It's a public proclamation that you have received Christ. Jesus gives it as a command to everyone who has followed him and we got basically three groups of people in this church. We got, number one, this group of people that you trusted Christ and you've already been baptized. We got another group that you just trusted Christ just a few moments ago. For the first time, the message made sense and you just began a personal relationship with Jesus.

You prayed that prayer with me. And I'm gonna ask you in just a minute, when we all stand at all of our campuses, I'm gonna ask you to do something very bold. I'm gonna ask you to step out into the aisle at your campus and I'm gonna ask you to come forward and there'll be somebody there that's gonna grab you and they're gonna, we're gonna go and they're gonna answer any questions you have and if you don't wanna get baptized at that point, there's no pressure but they're gonna give you a chance to be baptized. There's a third group and that's some of you that were trusted Christ a long time ago and your relationship with God is sincere but you've never expressed that through baptism and we're gonna give you a chance to do that today as well. You say, well, is it really that important?

I mean, you know, it just seems like a hassle. Jesus commanded it and so it's important. You say, well, I got the main thing right. I got my relationship with him.

Yes, you have the main thing right but if Jesus commanded it, you should do it. You say, well, I don't wanna go home wet. It's kinda cold outside. See, this is where we're awesome. We already have everything that you need. We got a change of clothes. We got every possible thing that you would need. We got all kinds of product. I mean, there ain't nothing you think of that we ain't got. You come, we'll take care of that.

We got towels and we've got that taken care of. You say, well, I think I was baptized as a baby. You know, we think that's awesome. Your parents baptized you in the hopes that one day you would grow up and follow Jesus. Praise God for that and we wanna celebrate that. The baptism in the New Testament is supposed to be a declaration of your own faith. And so it's time for you now as an adult to ratify your parents' faith. They expressed faith when they sprinkled you as a kid. Now you're gonna express faith by saying, I trust in Christ in my choice and I'm gonna ratify what they did through baptism. Every year at Easter, we have whole families get baptized.

It's awesome. I don't know how many have already, last night it was 30 some and there was a bunch more in the first services this morning so I'm gonna invite you to, if you've never taken that step, to do it this weekend. It's bold, I know, and you maybe weren't thinking of it, but we're ready and you're ready.

So quit making excuses and let's just do this, okay? And all of our campuses in just a minute, when I stand you up, don't wait, don't wait for somebody else to move. Just in one motion, you stand up and just move out to the aisle. You make your way forward and somebody will greet you there.

There'll be somebody standing right here to my right and to my left. They'll greet you there and they'll take you, all right? Father, I pray that in this moment, you would give people the courage to obey what you were telling them to do. And I pray, God, that they would obey this impulse that you were putting in their heart.

I pray in Jesus' name, amen, amen. At all of our campuses, let's together, let's stand in unison, our worship teams are coming. You step out right now. There'll be somebody that greets you here at either side. You step out right now at your campus and you make your way down and they will take you. Don't wait on somebody else.

Go now. The person besides you will move out of the way. They'll step back. You come down and somebody will greet you and take you. Let's put our hands together all of our campuses. Our worship teams will come.