Sermon - Resurrection
(Video Presentation �The Painting� before talk)
Resurrection
The cross was not the end, but only the beginning! The tomb of Jesus is empty! There is resurrection!
(News paper headline in 2002) �Cryogenics and frozen heads in
�A man of 46 who lives in
Another Newspaper head line read. �Movement to turn back aging, live forever. �Current research says we if we live over 85 we are doing very well. Life expectancy has risen in the West, but many people feel death is unnatural and some way must be found to conquer it.� The Bible agrees! God worked out a way to conquer it before the world began!
When God created the world, everything he created was good. Dying was not part of creation. Only after mankind's disobedience did death become "natural." (Gen 3:19.) The Bible says death is our enemy. (1 Corinthians 15:26.) It is appropriate to hate death, to fear it and be angry about, and at it. Jesus wept at Lazarus' tomb. (John 11:35) He wept at the thought of his own death. (Heb 5:7)
�During the days of Jesus� life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.�
In his humanity, Jesus, like us, wept that he had to die, and I believe he weeps still today that so many reject him and have to die not only physically, but spiritually for every!
Dying may be unnatural, and the result of our rebellion, but the Bible tells us it�s not God's last word! Resurrection is God's last word. There is hope for the elderly man who on his sick bed in hospital facing death, said, �I feel like a pebble about to be dropped into the ocean."
Jesus is the first fruits, the guarantee that we who have put our trust in him, having died, will rise to new life. �But the truth is that Christ has been raised from death, as the guarantee that those who sleep in death will also be raised.� (1 Corinthians 15:20)
Resurrection is a promise of the Bible. Without the resurrection of Jesus, Christianity has no meaning. Our faith is pointless. (15:14b) The Bible is false. (15:15) The dead are gone for good. (15:18) Christians are to be pitied, (15:19) we should �eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die!� But Jesus rose from the grave and over 500 saw him and millions, over the last 2000 years, have felt his resurrection life in their!
The soul of man is an eternal creation, so what resurrection will we rise to? The joy of God�s presence for all eternity in new bodies in a new world without sorrow, sadness, tears, pain or death, or as a soul separated from God for all eternity? The choice is ours!
What will we look like in eternity? Like Jesus. He still has the human body in which he walked this world, but it�s now a glorified new body. The Bibles says we will have new glorified, spiritual, immortal, eternal bodies, we will therefore be like Jesus! The Bible also indicates that we will know each other in heaven as we know each other on earth! Specialists have learned how to project what faces of young children will look like in future. They use computers and an understanding of facial growth patterns. Two children were abducted by their father 10 year ago in
There is a new and wonderful resurrection life waiting for everyone when this life ends, but it is limited to those who believe in Jesus Christ now and live in obedience to God. Through the acknowledging of our need of forgiveness for a life lived in ways unacceptable to God, forgiveness secured for us by the death of Jesus on a cross 2000 years ago, we can have that life, and we can have a taste of it for the remainder of our existence in this world. Eternal �Life�, life with a capital �L�, begins the moment we believe and live for Christ! When we follow Jesus Christ, the Spirit of God gives us a tangible awareness and assurance in depth of being that we have received new life, a new life that the death of this present body can never take away!
Easter, the cry of Jesus, �It is finished!� the empty tomb and the cry of Mary �I have seen the Lord!� remind us of a completed plan full of grace and love, a plan to rescue mankind who choose to accept Jesus as the only way to God and freedom from death and the consequences of disobedience towards God. If we have never done so, we need to accept Jesus today, this Easter, while there is still time! We do that through repentance, being sorry about our life lived without God and lived in ways he would not have us live; by believing and following Jesus Christ and accepting he is God�s Son and the only way to get into a relationship with God; by being baptised in water as a believer and by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit into our lives as a guarantee, a tangible witness in our innermost being, that we will rise to new life, just as Jesus rose to new life after his death!
�For God so loved the world he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him, will not die, but live forever.� (John 3:16.)
I never cease to be amazed at God�s grace and love for this world and for me! Are you amazed?
(Video Presentation. Song �Your love amazes me� at the end of the talk)
27/3/05
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