Does the Resurrection Matter?

I have your Bibles with you today. Turn with me, if you would, to I Corinthians 15.

We're going to be looking at verses 12-20. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. Bow with me as we go to our Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, we pray for Nicole Lowes today as she is still in the hospital, still dealing with some heart issues. We pray, Heavenly Father, that you would have mercy on her and help her that she might get well. We pray, Heavenly Father, also for Ray Green, who was burned very badly this week in an accident.

We pray, Father, that you would have mercy on him and help him to heal quickly. Heavenly Father, our hearts are pounding this morning with joy. We have the privilege of worship, and we aren't worshiping a dead Savior on the cross. We are worshiping the living Lord who has defeated death through His sinless life.

This is Easter morning. We worship you, our living Lord, every Lord's day, but this day we focus on your resurrection. We glory in all the evidence, the stone rolled away, the empty tomb, the eyewitnesses, the changed lives of the disciples. We stand on the truth of your resurrection. It's not just a hope, it's a certainty.

It's not just a promise, it's a reality. We pray for our nation today, Lord. Father, we had a good start. Our founders, for the most part, loved you and wanted to build this nation on Biblical principles. They wanted liberty, and they fought for it. And in your sovereignty, you created a society that was open to produce churches that sent missionaries to the four corners of the earth. We were at one time the most mission-minded nation on earth. We took that for granted.

We compromised with evil, and one by one our freedoms were being removed. Help the church to stop compromising and stand for truth. Lord, grow your church, even in the midst of persecution. Brighten our witness, make us like Christ, for it is in the precious and holy name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.

You may be seated. When I was in seminary, we had a student-led revival. I had the privilege of preaching in one of those services, and in that particular service, they had a young student to come and share his testimony. And right before I preached, and I will never forget his testimony, he came up to the pulpit with tears in his eyes, and he said to us, I could be in hell today. He said, just three years ago, I was flunking out of college. I was drinking like a fish. I was partying like crazy and womanizing every opportunity I got. He said, I never gave a thought to God.

I never gave a thought to eternity. He said one day he'd been drinking heavily, and he walked across a busy road, not looking where he was going, and he got hit by a car. He said he was knocked unconscious, and he was in a coma for a little over a week. He said finally he came out of the coma. He was there in that hospital bed, and he said he woke up, and he was absolutely scared to death, didn't know what to do, didn't know who to talk to.

He said about two days after that, a elderly nurse came walking into his room there in the hospital. She shut the door behind her, and she said, I'm on a break right now, and the Lord has put on my heart to come and talk to you. She said, you could very easily be dead right now, but the Lord for some reason has spared your life. And she said, I just want to talk to you about Jesus.

Can I do that? And he said, yes ma'am, you sure can. And she opened her Bible up, and she shared the gospel with him. And she shared the gospel with him, and the Lord just broke him, and he was deeply convicted, repented of his sins right there, and trusted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he looked out at us, and he said, guys, I want you to know that this was not me just turning over a new leaf. He said, this was not me getting religion. He says, I have encountered the risen Lord, and I will never be the same again. Brothers and sisters, that's Christianity. It is a revolutionizing, life-changing encounter with the Lord. It is not a religion.

It is a relationship. And that's why we are here this morning. We have not come here today to mourn over a dead Savior on the cross. We have come here this morning to hail a conquering king.

We have not come here this morning to study the teachings of a holy man who lived 2,000 years ago, and then died, and his body is decaying in some Judean tomb. We have come here this morning to worship the living Lord on his throne, a living Lord who is sovereign over his entire creation. Folks, there is no greater day for the Christian than this.

This is Easter. This is the day that we proclaim to the entire world that our Savior is alive. Now the very center and the very core of the gospel is the cross of Jesus Christ. But when God the Father raised Jesus from the dead, when that happened, when God the Father raised Him from the dead, glorious things took place. For it was His stamp of approval on everything that Jesus said and everything that He did. Gabe Fuhrer said this, Today we are looking at the greatest chapter in the Bible on the subject of the resurrection. And Paul has asked a very, very important question, and that question is this, Should a person even consider Christianity? There are a lot of demands that Jesus gave for the Christian faith. He said, He said if people have hurt you and people have offended you, you have the responsibility to forgive those people.

He said that we are to go the second mile and turn the other cheek. Now those are things that just kind of go against the grain of everything that our world stands for today. And these are things that our world just doesn't understand that our world doesn't really like. And if it is true that the average lifespan for an American today is about 78 years, that's a very short period of time. And if it's a very short period of time, do we really want to spend this little time that we've got on earth worshiping God, serving Jesus Christ, and serving others? Should we want to do that when we've got the opportunity to really experience a lot of materialism and some great sensual pleasure? Why not just be radical hedonists? Why not just enjoy the pleasures, the sensual pleasures that we have out in the world? Why don't we just enjoy every kind of drug and chemical stimulant that we can find so that we would feel a little bit better?

Why not go that route? Why worry about the poor and the broken and the hurting when we can just focus in on number one, on ourselves? The answer to that question is found in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I remember a few years ago I watched a television movie called The Day Christ Died. And the movie was just about the last days of Jesus, and it was coming to an end, and the soldiers took Jesus, they laid him down on the cross, they tied his hands and his feet to the cross, and then one of the soldiers came over him, took the huge spike, put it on his wrist, and then took the hammer, and BAM! The spike went through his wrist. And that scene, the guy that was playing the role of Jesus just lurched forward in great pain. He opened his mouth as loud as he could and just screaming out in horrible, terrible pain. And then they just brought that one particular shot to a still shot, and they just stopped it right there.

They left it there for just about a minute, and then they brought the two words across the screen, The End. And I can remember screaming at the TV, No! No! That's not the end!

And to say so is just implying a lie. One day an art museum little boy was walking through, checking out the different paintings, and he walked up to one particular painting, and he was looking at it intently, just gazing at it, mesmerized by it. And an elderly man came up to him and looked at him and said, Son, what are you looking at so intently? The little boy looked back at him and said, Sir, this is a picture of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who died on that cross in order that he might pay my sin debt. The man said, Well, thank you, son. And he walked on off, and he went down the hall, was looking at a picture himself, and after just a few moments, he said he felt a tug on his pants leg, and looked down and it was that little boy. He said, Son, what do you want?

He said, Sir, I forgot to tell you something. He didn't stay on that cross. He rose from the dead.

Don't you know? That is the rest, folks, and without the resurrection, Christianity does not make sense. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the very heart of Christianity. I would submit to you today that Christianity without the resurrection is total absurdity. But yet, we have pseudo-theologians all over our world today who are trying everything they can to convince us that Jesus is not alive, that he never truly rose from the dead.

Let me share a few with you. There's a guy named Gordon Kaufman, who's a Mennonite professor at Harvard Divinity School, and he wrote a systematic theology book, and in his systematic theology book, he made this statement that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is nothing more than hallucination on part of the disciples. There's a group called the Jesus Seminar Group, and every once in a while they show them and interview these people on PBS, and the people on PBS call them Bible scholars.

Let me assure you they are not. But let me read you this statement. Jesus Seminar founder Robert Funk is bent on convincing the world that the historical Jesus is not worthy of worship. Said Funk, Jesus himself should not be, must not be, the object of faith. That would be to repeat the idolatry of the first believers. His stated objective is to liberate Jesus. The only Jesus most people know is the mythic one. They don't want the real Jesus. They want the one that they can worship, the cultic Jesus. Fellow co-founder John Dominic Crossan took dead aim at the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Time Magazine reports Crossan's pontification. The tales of entombment and resurrection were latter-day wishful thinking. Instead, Jesus's corpse went the way of all abandoned criminal bodies.

It was probably barely covered with dirt, vulnerable to the wild dogs that roamed the wasteland of the execution grounds. Psalm on Palm Sunday, 2001, Dealworth Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, invited Episcopal Bishop John Spong to come and preach to that congregation. He came and he preached, and he attacked Orthodox Christianity at every venue, and ended his sermon by laughing at the idea of a physical bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Folks, in Romans chapter 10 verse 9, it was the apostle Paul who said, If we confess with our mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in our heart that God has raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. Listen, you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And here's this Methodist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, that brings in a lost man to preach heresy to their congregation. God have mercy on their souls. Even Thomas Jefferson, one of our most famous presidents, not only denied the resurrection, but fought against it.

Listen to this statement. Thomas Jefferson, a great man, nevertheless, could not accept the miraculous elements in Scripture. He edited his own special version of the Bible in which all references to the supernatural were deleted. Jefferson, in editing the Gospels, confined himself solely to the moral teachings of Jesus. The closing words of Jefferson's Bible are these, There laid they Jesus, rolled a great stone at the mouth of the sepulcher, and departed. Thank God that is not the way the story really ends.

Let me ask you something. Does it matter? Well, the Apostle Paul believed that it did matter. And the Greeks in his day believed that the body was inherently evil, and the soul or the spirit was separated from the body. And so when a person died, the soul had nothing to do with what the body had done, the evil that he had done in his life, so the soul just went on to joyful eternity. And so they saw no need in a resurrection, and they laughed at the resurrection of Christ. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul wrote the greatest treatise on the resurrection that has ever been written. And I want to focus in on a few verses this morning to show why Christianity makes no sense without Easter. If Jesus is still dead, and there was no resurrection, then there are certain things that will follow.

And I want to share five of them with you today. Number one, if there was no resurrection, then our preaching is profitless. Verse 14. And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is vain. The ESV translates that as futile.

The word literally means empty or meaningless. And folks, what this is saying is this, that if Jesus is not resurrected from the dead, then my life has been a waste. All the time that I spend at seminary, and all the time that I spend each week getting ready and prepared to preach the word of God to you is just absolutely unnecessary. And all the time that you spend coming to this church and hearing the word of God and spending time in the scripture at home, completely unnecessary. You may as well just go to the coast and spend some time fishing. Or go to Lake Norman and get on a boat and have a good time.

Or spend time playing ball with your kids. Because it really doesn't matter if Jesus is not resurrected from the dead. Folks, D.L. Moody, the great evangelist of the 19th century, assigned one of his young preacher boys to come and preach one night in a tent revival. And the boy came, and he preached a good sermon, a powerful sermon on the cross. But at the end of his sermon, he said, I want you to come back tomorrow night. And when you come back tomorrow night, he said, I'm going to be preaching on the resurrection.

Moody took him off to the side after everybody else had gone that night. And he said, young man, you're not even going to be here tomorrow night. He said, I've got you assigned to preach somewhere else. And he said, a lot of the people that were here tonight are not going to be back tomorrow.

They just won't be able to come. And so what you did tonight was you preached to them half of a gospel. And he said, I want you to know that half the gospel is no gospel at all.

People are dead. Redeemer is no redeemer at all. Paul said in Romans chapter 1 verse 4, he said, Jesus Christ was declared to be the Son of God in power by the resurrection from the dead. And as I said before, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was God the Father's stamp of approval on everything that Jesus said and did. If Jesus had not risen, it would have proven that he was a liar, a phony, and a fake. In the first part of this chapter, Paul is telling us and explaining to us what the gospel is.

Does a beautiful job with it. And it's amazing how much time he spends in proving that the resurrection was real. I want to just read you verses 3 through 8 there, the first part of 1 Corinthians 15. He said, For I delivered you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scripture, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve, and then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, lest of all to one untimely born, he appeared to me.

I love what he says there in verse 6. He said, Look, if you don't believe me, there was a time when Jesus appeared in his resurrected body to over five hundred people at a time. He said, If you don't believe me, go ask them, most of them are still living. We're told that Harry Houdini was the greatest escape artist that ever lived. They would take Harry Houdini, they would tie him up, put him in a casket, and he'd escape and get out of it. They would take him and tie him up, put him in a canvas bag, throw him into the ocean, and he'd get out of it. One method after another they used to try to tie him up and to keep him from escaping, and he escaped every time. But in 1922, Harry Houdini died. They took his body, they put it in a casket, they buried him six feet under the ground, and I want you to know that his body is still there, decaying and rotting in that grave.

Death he could not escape. Folks, the resurrection is what separates us from every other religion. Where are the key figures of every other religion? Confucius is dead and in the grave. Muhammad is dead and in the grave. Buddha is dead and in the grave. Shinto is dead and in the grave. But the grave could not hold Jesus Christ.

He is alive. So first of all, if Christ is resurrected and not resurrected, then preaching is just profitless. Secondly, if Christ be not risen, then our faith is foolish. Verse 14 again says, If Christ be not risen, our faith is vain.

Same word that is used to describe the preaching here, vain means empty or meaningless. If Jesus is not alive, then we're fools to believe all this. And Paul desperately wants us to know that he is not a deceiver and that he's not a charlatan. Verse 15 says this, We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.

You see, Paul did not want to leave us with the impression that there was any way on the face of the earth that he could be an error. He said, let me tell you what happened to me. He says, I was on the Damascus road. And all of a sudden, Jesus Christ, the resurrected Christ, appeared to me and he was so glorious and so powerful that I fell down in the dirt, trembling and shaking.

He was so glorious that it blinded me. And Jesus rebuked me for my antagonism against him and against the church. And Jesus told me that I could not win this battle. And Jesus called me at that point in time to be the apostle to the Gentiles. And he said, I was an apostle born out of due time and I saw the resurrection of Christ.

Then there was John, the apostle, who in 1 John chapter 1 said that he saw the resurrected Jesus. He said, I saw him with my eyes. I touched him with my hands.

I hurt him with my ears. And then it was Peter who said, I ain't fish with the resurrected Christ. On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he put his arm around my shoulder.

We walked down the shore and he asked me three times, Peter, do you love me? Then on that first Easter morning, Peter got to the tomb. And when he got to the tomb, the stone had been rolled away. The scripture tells us that he ran into the tomb and when he did, he saw the grave clothes of Jesus there. And the grave clothes were lying there and they were not unraveled. But they were deflated like a balloon. You know, the grave clothes were kind of like a mummy. They had a shroud that was wrapped around Jesus and they took long linen strips and they wrapped them around and around and around. And when he got there, the strips were not unraveled at all. It was like a deflated balloon.

What happened? When Jesus was resurrected, he just came right up out of those grave clothes. And when he did, he walked right through the rock of that cave, of that tomb. And he just walked out. A lot of people have the idea that the angel came and moved the stone away to let Jesus out.

Oh no, he didn't have to do that. He rolled the stone away to show everybody that Jesus was not in there. And I want you to know that Peter saw the resurrected Christ ascending back to glory to be seated at the right hand of God the Father.

It was Thomas who said, I saw the nail prints in his hands and in his side. Then in John chapter 21, Jesus, the resurrected Christ, appeared there on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. And a couple of the disciples were out fishing and they were coming back in their boat. They hadn't caught anything. Jesus screamed out to them, Did you catch any fish?

They said, No, nothing. And he said, Well, go back out a little bit. Take your nets and throw them on the right side of the boat and you'll catch fish. And they threw the nets on the right side of the boat and when he did, they brought in 153 large fish, so much they could hardly get the nets in. And I love what John says here.

I thought it was very interesting. He says, None of the disciples dared ask him, Who are you? For they knew it was the resurrected Christ. So friends, don't think that the disciples may have just been in error concerning the resurrection, for they are telling us with everything that's in them that they knew that Jesus Christ was alive, that he had risen from the dead. You may say, Well, maybe it was all a hoax. Maybe they were in cahoots to start a new religion. Well, I know that's not true because of how they died. They were martyred for their faith. And by that time, Judas Iscariot is already out of the picture.

He's committed suicide. Eleven disciples left. Now that those eleven disciples, all of them were martyred but one, and that was the apostle John, and he was thrown into a vat of boiling oil and lived through it. How were they martyred? Some by crucifixion, some by being killed by the sword, some by being stoned and some by being burned at the stake, but it was all horrible, horrific martyrdoms. They went through a difficult time.

One of the things that the Lord has shown me in my life here on this earth is this, that sometimes a man would be willing to live for a lie, but no man will purposely, willfully die for a lie. Folks, the apostles were not deceivers. They were flaming witnesses to the resurrection of Christ. And the prison itself could not stop them from talking. And flogging could not shut them up.

And even death couldn't shut them up. For here we are 2,000 years later, and what are we doing? We are testifying to the fact that these apostles believed and knew that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.

Alright, point three. If Christ is not risen, then sin is sovereign. Look at verse 17. Verse 17 says, If Christ be not risen, then you are still in your sins. You see, your sins cannot be forgiven if Jesus is still in the grave. The death of Jesus on the cross without the resurrection is not worth half a hallelujah. In Romans chapter 4 verse 25, Paul said it this way, Jesus was delivered for our fences, but he was raised for our justification. In other words, if the resurrection is a hoax, then salvation is not even a possibility. Fourthly, if Christ be not risen, then death has dominion. Look down at verse 18 with me. Verse 18 says, If there is no resurrection, then they which are fallen asleep are perished.

In other words, all those Christians that have died are now in hell. My grandmama lived to age 94. She died back in 1976. She had a tremendous influence and impact on me. I saw Christ in her life like I didn't see Christ and about anybody I knew back at that time. She loved the Lord.

I looked forward to talking with her again and fellowshiping with her again. But if Christ is not risen, then my grandmother is in hell today. I had a sister who didn't live but two days. She died still in the hospital. I never got to see her.

Her name was Karen. And my mother and dad have talked about her to me a lot. And I've looked forward to that time where I can meet with her again and talk with her again. And I've looked forward to that day, but if Christ be not risen, she's in hell today. My dad died 15 years ago.

I have missed him horribly. I've looked so forward to the future where dad and I can fellowship together again and together worship the Lord Jesus Christ. But if Christ be not risen, my dad's in hell today. Bob Beecham died a little over two months ago. He died one of the most peaceable deaths that I've ever seen any Christian die.

It was a sweet, sweet death. But I want you to know that if Christ be not risen, then Bob Beecham's peace that he had was nothing but a false peace, for he's in hell along with every other Christian. The Apostle Paul and James and John and Peter and John Calvin and Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards and D.L.

Moody and Charles Spurgeon and James Boyce and R.C. Sproul and all these Christians who we love and looked up to are in hell today if Jesus Christ is not risen from the dead. Don't tell me the resurrection of Christ does not matter. Folks, if Jesus Christ is not alive, then this life is nothing but a bad joke.

I guess we could say it this way. If Jesus Christ is still in the tomb, then nothing really matters. But if Jesus Christ came out of that tomb, then nothing but that matters. 1 Corinthians 15, 25-26 says, For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Death, let me just read this to you. Death is the ultimate enemy because it takes everything away from us. Think of all the things we strive mightily to preserve and keep from losing, and death steals them all.

Sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell. The capacity to speak, to communicate, to enjoy any kind of pleasure, all gone. The ability to move about, to exercise control over our surroundings, to influence others, friends and family, gone. Our possessions are divided up and given away. Our friends and loved ones abandon us and find other companions, and we are put into a box on the ground. Death is not a friend. Death is an enemy. The enemy of death will absolutely be destroyed.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead showed that the power of death over mankind has been broken. When he returns, we will be resurrected also. We will be restored to life, and this life will not be subject to death. It will be eternal.

Here's the application. We no longer need to fear death. We can freely enjoy life knowing that the time and manner of our death is in God's hands. More importantly, we know that death is not the end. We can obey God even when obedience involves the risk of loss, knowing that we cannot lose that which is most precious, life. In Christ, we have won the battle with death.

Or as Jim Elliott said, a man is no fool to give what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. I held a funeral service 42 years ago for a lady in my first church in Creedmoor, North Carolina. And I'll never forget being in the pulpit preaching the funeral service, and I looked at her 80-year-old husband, and he was amazingly composed. Every once in a while, a tear would roll down his cheek, and after the service was over, I walked outside with him and put my armor around his shoulder, and I said, Norman, you seem to be doing well.

Are you all right? And he said, oh, I'm fine. He says, because Anna is with Jesus now. He said, she has looked forward to this day for 65 years, and I didn't want to mess it up by feeling sorry for myself. Praise God, Norman Tucker could rejoice when he felt like grieving.

Why? Because Jesus Christ lives, and because Jesus Christ lives, so does Anna Tucker. You see, if Jesus was still dead, then death has dominion, but if he's alive, then he has conquered death. When Jesus was hanging from the cross in the last seconds of his life, in the last breaths, he cried out and he said, it is finished. When he said it is finished, then the demons all rejoiced, and they said to themselves, we've won, it's over.

And for the next three days, as Jesus' dead body lay in the tomb, there was just a kind of a black, dark cloud that hovered over the entire world at that time. And then on that Easter morning, that glorious Easter morning, Jesus rose from the dead, and he rose from the dead with a message, and that message was not Jesus defeated. That message was Jesus defeated the enemy.

And folks, one of the great enemies, the last enemy, is death. Point five, if Christ be not risen, then the future is fearful. Verse 19, if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied. Now Paul didn't mean that the Christian life is not happy and joyful.

What he meant was this, if you call yourself a Christian, and you're going to spend your time worshipping Christ and coming to church and reading your Bible, and you're going to study all about heaven, and you're going to spend all this time doing all that, and it's never going to happen, you're not going to heaven, and Jesus is not really alive, then we're nothing but a bunch of poor, deluded fools. But if he is risen, we can rejoice, because our future is certain. Without the resurrection, it isn't just Christianity that doesn't make sense. Life doesn't make sense.

But here's the truth. Jesus Christ is alive. Jesus wins. Jesus wins. And no matter how tough this life might get, no matter what kind of persecution we might have to endure, folks, Jesus is alive. And when we see Him face to face, it will be worth it all. Amen?

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we as your people need God sent, Christ exalting, sin destroying, life changing revival. We need the fire of the Holy Spirit to make us holy. Lord, the truth of the resurrection of Christ should change us forever. If Jesus came out of that tomb, then everything He ever said and did are true and life changing. We get excited about ball games and movies and TV shows and concerts, and yet we fail to revel in the glory of the fact that Jesus Christ is alive.

He rose from the dead and is right now reigning from His throne in glory. Forgive us, Lord, and help us to be so excited about being your servants that all the junk that usually rings our bell would pale into insignificance. Thank you for the privilege of worship. May we never take it for granted. We love you, Lord. We thank you for loving us, for it's in the precious and holy name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.