Anchors For Your Soul

Anchors for Your Soul

(1 Corinthians 15:3-5)

(Easter, Hope, Resurrection)

(Deductive)

Lucado writes,

Funny how Easter and taxs often fall on the same week.

They did this year. I began this week with 2 major tasks

Prepare an Easter Sermon and pay my taxes.

With apologies to the IRS, one seems very heavenly , the other very earthly

One minute I’m at Calvary, the next the checkbook.

One reminds of how God paid it all, and the next reminds me of how much I have to pay.

Both leave me grateful, first for Jesus dying for me and second for my 3 little tax-deductions.

Then it hit me! What a time to study God’s masterpiece plan to save his children.

For if the cross and Easter do not make senses on a common week full of common tasks, when does it make sense?

That is the beauty of the cross. And the relevance of the empty cave.

They both occurred in a normal week involving flesh and blood people and a flesh and blood Jesus.

It was an ordinary week packed with kids being dressed by impatient parents rushing off to work.

A week of dishes being washed and floors being swept.

Nature gave no clue that the week was different than any other thousand before

The sun took it’s habitual route. The clouds puffed the Judean Sky.

The grass was green and the cat-tails danced in the wind.

Why did God do that? Why did he make it in a ordinary week?

No pomp. No parade. No lights . No warnings.

I think I know why?

Because He wanted this holy week to be an anchor of your ordinary week.

A week full of hurts and disappointments.

He wanted the Cross and Easter message to be 2 anchors for those who have ever:

Felt the weight of yesterday’s failures.

For those who are tired of being slapped by the waves of broken dreams.

For the young mother who had been traded for a younger model.

For those who have had the policeman make a knock on the door.

For those who have crossed a line they thought they would never cross

For those who are familiar with the funeral songs as they lose their loved ones.

He wanted to give hope for those who feel like giving up? For those who want to wave the white flag of surrender?

For those who live with a constant fear of failure and the finality of death.

If you relate to any of those feelings. Then this message has been custom –tailored for you.

The Apostle Paul in our text today gives talks about the to F’s on the human report card of life.

Two burdens that are too big for any back, and too heavy for any biceps.

But in today’s text Paul gives us hope to turn these two F’s into an A

And that A stands for an anchor for our souls. Two anchors for an ordinary week.

Turn with me to 1 Corinthian 15: 3-5 and let’s retrieve this two anchors from the word for our souls.

Read the text.

The first anchor Paul gives for our souls in is verse 3

Because of the cross…

1.) My Failures are Not Fatal

Verse3

That is our first anchor and our first F’ word is Fatal.

Some of you may be saying, ” Why the cross? Easter is about the empty tomb."

Let me tell you cannot have Easter or an anchor for your soul until you have the cross.

The first anchor was polished when Christ died for our sins.

He died for our failures.

Our failures are not Fatal because of the cross.

Jesus took the blame for our failures.

And the punishment for our sins when deserved the fatality of our lives.

At Friday’s Good Friday service I told the audience that the Gospel writer Matthew had a camera at the cross.

And in his photo album. We can find three different pictures

In one of these pictures you can find your face in the crowd.

The first Photo was of those who were

Forced to the cross.

People like Simon of Cymene. Simon was forced to carry Jesus’ cross

I always said that even the few times I went to church I became a drug addict. Because my mom and grandmother drugged me all the way there.

Some of you are in that picture. The husband who comes out of obligation for his wife.

A mother that comes for her children. Others who come out of tradition.

Others who only come to make their community profile more polished.

They are all forced.

Here was the lesson from the first picture

They touched the cross but never let the cross touch them.

Simon had the horizontal beam of God’s love across his back, but was never changed by it.