Sermons

Easter Sunday! We meet in celebration of the reality of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Three women followers of Jesus had gone all the way to the cross with Jesus. They saw where Jesus was buried and the manner in which he was buried. They went back to the tomb at dawn on Sunday with a purpose.

Jesus died on Friday. Since the Passover was to begin on that Friday evening at sundown, the body of Jesus had been hurriedly buried. There was no time to do it properly. On Sunday, the first day of the week, at dawn, these women brought spices to the tomb to finish preparing the body of Jesus for burial.

It was believed that the person’s spirit had not gone from the body until the body began to decompose. This was thought to begin on the fourth day after death. Sunday was the third day. They went to the tomb believing that the spirit of Jesus would still be present. They believed he would know they had come to honor him.

When the women arrived, the tomb was open and the body of Jesus was gone! They stood there puzzled. A few moments earlier, they were wondering if they could get the stone rolled away to open the tomb and if they had brought enough spices, and now there was no body.

The way in which he died was terrible, but now this? This was just too much! In their religion there were three things that were considered too terrible to even imagine: to have your body burned; to have your body go unclaimed; or to go unburied, exposing the flesh to the possibility of being eaten by wild animals.

Jesus had done so much good. He was so misused and misunderstood. Their beloved Master had suffered such humiliation and pain, and now his body was missing? This was the ultimate insult.

Suddenly, what looked like two men in glowing garments appeared in the tomb and asked the women a question, “Why are you looking for the living in the cemetery? Would someone who is alive hang out in a tomb? Didn’t he tell you that he would be handed over to sinners and crucified, and rise to life the third day?”

When they remembered those words, they hurried from the tomb to tell the eleven disciples, most likely leaving their spices behind. This was such Good News! The day they had marked as the saddest of their lives was now to be marked forever as a day of great celebration and gladness.

They went running to the Upper Room to tell the Good News. Trying to catch their breath, they exclaimed “Jesus is alive! We went to the tomb to embalm the body, the tomb was open, the body was gone, and two angels told us that he had risen from the dead and that we should come and tell you.”

The disciples thought, “Women! What will they come up with next?”

In that society, women were not trusted to give an accurate testimony in court. They were regarded as too emotional and often given to hysteria. This was certainly an example of emotion and hysteria. Some labeled their story as an “idle tale.” The male disciples saw reality. They knew Jesus was dead. They knew for certain that Jesus had lost the battle. The One in whom they had placed their hope was now history.

There was no “new covenant” as Jesus had talked about just last Thursday evening in the Upper Room. They would have to go back to the “old ways.” They would have to go back to an old religion weighed down with laws and impossible regulations, back to living under the curse of sin and having to make sacrifices in payment for their sins, hoping to avoid the punishment of God.

Jesus back from the dead? It was just wishful thinking, an “idle tale.” Jesus was alive? Poor delusional women! How could that be?

There are many today who believe that the resurrection of Jesus is myth, made up, an “idle tale.” In fact, when the religious leaders heard about Jesus’ missing body, they devised a cover-up.

While the women went on their way, some of the soldiers guarding the tomb went back to the city and told the chief priests everything that had happened. The chief priests met with the elders and made their plan; they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers and said, “You are to say that his disciples came during the night and stole his body while you were asleep. And if the Governor should hear of this, we will convince him that you are innocent, and you will have nothing to worry about.”

The guards took the money and did what they were told to do. And so that is the report spread around by the Jews to this very day. (Matthew 28:11-15, Good News Translation)

The religious leaders knew that, if Jesus had been resurrected from the dead, the old system of religion built around keeping commandments and making sacrifices, which made them rich and powerful, was indeed under threat. They had to protect that old system at all costs.

The resurrection of Jesus says we are released from living under the domination and restrictions of the law. The resurrection of Jesus means we are no longer living under the curse of sin and without being able to do anything about it. We don’t have to fear the overwhelming temptations that destroy the possibility of ever knowing God. Temptations call to us in nearly aspect of our lives.

We know sin is real. Satan never says, “Follow me, as I lead you into a life of the absence of God, misery, suffering and death.” Instead he says, “Try this just once. You will find it is really great. Eat this, smoke this, drink this. Come on, just one kiss; no one will find out. It is just a harmless little experiment. What can it hurt? If you don’t like it, you can easily get out.”

There are some who believe that there is no such thing as sin. We simply make poor decisions that later hurt ourselves or someone else. When we stop making those decisions, we have a better life.

That is one of Satan’s best deceptions. Satan doesn’t want you to know that those so-called poor decisions creep up on us until they take over.

This week as I was thinking about the glories of Easter and the wonders of God’s love rescuing us from sin by the death and resurrection of Jesus, I was reminded of just how subtly sin creeps upon us. I was reminded of a little song children sing. Let's watch this video.

This little song is a good illustration of how subtle sin can be. Giving in to sin is very gradual. It begins innocently: “You put your right hand in,” you can always “take your right hand out”; it is such a catchy tune and everyone is doing it. We do the Hokey Pokey victory dance that says, “I wasn’t hurt a bit by that little experiment.”

We can, in fact, put our left hand in and take our left hand out, put our left in and shake it all about and again do the hokey pokey victory dance; the process continues until we have put our whole self in.

That is when we give sin first priority in our lives and then, with our whole self in, the devil joins us in the victory dance and the song ends. The song ends in a declaration, “That’s what it’s all about.”

That is the goal of Satan, to get us in all the way. We feel we are stuck; there is no way out. We begin associating with others who are in the same trouble or worse and soon we begin feeling worthless and a long way from God. So far as Satan’s plan, “that’s what it’s all about.”

God isn’t going to let us stay there with our whole self in, dancing with the devil. God wants us out. How are we going to get out? The song ends with the whole self in. We are stuck in our sin. Sin is never a match for God’s mercy. When we want out, that is when God sends in his Son, Jesus, who is the Christ.

God is working in our lives, lining up circumstances and events to call us back away from our sin into a closer relationship with God.

What does it mean to have a relationship with God? For some, having a relationship to God is much like having a relationship to a strict parent. They believe disobedience brings harsh punishment. That translates to mean God punishes us for our sin and it is because of that punishment that we turn from our sin. We are afraid of God and don’t want God to do something even worse to us. We live in fear, so we must stay away from sin.

If that were the case, surely God has the power to punish all of us into total compliance. When we put our right hand in, God would chop it off before we could pull our right hand out.

God could demand that kind of obedience, but God doesn’t want that kind of obedience. We obey because we recognize God’s love and want to respond to it. Obedience is our response to God’s love.

God has loved us so much that God has sent his only begotten Son to earth to become the payment for our sin, even though we deserve punishment for our disobedience as Isaiah 53:6 tell us: “All of us were like sheep that were lost, each of us going his own way. But the Lord made the punishment fall on him, the punishment all of us deserved.” (Good News Translation)

Today we celebrate what was once considered an “idle tale” as the “pivotal point” of our faith. We have a Savior, One who not only died as the payment for our sins but rose from the dead. He proved he has power even over that which ultimately threatens each of us every moment of our lives: death.

In gratitude, we live in a relationship with this God who loves us so much! In gratitude, we want to know as much about this God as we possibly can, and the more we want to know about God, the more God wants to reveal himself to us.

The closer we grow in our relationship to God, the more direction we have in our decision making, and the more we yield to those directions, the more blessings come our way.

The more blessings that come our way, the more opportunities we have to praise our God, and the more we praise our God, the closer we grow to him.

There will still be times when we are tempted to put our right hand in and pull our right hand out, but when we remember God’s love and the opportunities we have to respond to that love, we know we don’t want to get stuck in our sin, we don’t want the song to end with our whole self in.

God has loved us so much that he has sent his Son, Jesus, to die, so that whoever would put their faith in him could know God. He has conquered death and offers life beyond the grave to all those who trust in him.

That is not just an “idle tale.” That is the “pivotal point” on which our entire relationship to God rests.