I heard a story this week that I wanted to share with you. It’s about a little boy named Philip. Philip was born with Down syndrome and as an eight-year old, had a hard time finding acceptance, even in the Sunday school class he attended. Through some creative intervention, though, Philip began to be accepted by his classmates, for the most part. One Sunday morning, just after Easter, the Sunday school teacher gave her
students a plastic, hollow egg and instructed them to go outside and find symbols of new life and place them in the egg. Afterwards, they would share what they found with the class. The children ran about the church property in a fury to find an appropriate item. They then returned to the classroom to share their finds. One by one, the teacher opened their eggs and displayed the symbol they found: a flower, a leaf, even a butterfly. The class responded to each with “Ooos” and “Awws” until the teacher opened the last egg. Instead of a beautiful flower or leaf, the egg was empty. “That’s not fair,” one boy spoke up, “somebody didn’t do it!” Philip spoke up in the egg’s defense, “That’s mine, I did that”. Annoyed the other boy retorted, “Philip, you don’t do anything right! There’s nothing there!” Philip responded “I did do it! I did! It’s empty! Just like the tomb! The tomb was empty!”
This evening, we are moving into a season of incredible significance for believers. Today is Palm Sunday, and this coming weekend is Easter. Because we will not be together this coming Sunday, I wanted to take this evening to share together in observing the sacrifice that Christ made for us on the cross and His triumph over death and sin through His resurrection.
So, if you have your Bibles with you this evening, we’re going to read a few passages of Scripture together. These are all going to be familiar passages to you, I’m sure. So if you’ll turn with me first to 1 Corinthians chapter 11, starting in verse 23:
READ TEXT: 1 CORINTHIANS 11:23-26
Next, turn back with me to John 19, starting in verse 14:
READ TEXT: JOHN 19:14-20
And finally, turn to the next chapter, chapter 20, starting in the first verse.
READ TEXT: JOHN 20:1-18
This morning, it is important to remember. We have set aside this season of the year not just for chocolate eggs, oversized, furry bunnies, or marshmallow chickens, but to remember two things: Christ’s sacrifice and his triumph.
You’ll remember when Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was faced with the reality of his position. Here was the Son of God, the Almighty Savior of the World faced with imminent brutal torture and shameful death. He cried out to His Father, pleading to be freed from this sentence. Jesus had a choice to make; make no mistake, it was his to make. As he told Peter in Matthew 26:53 “Do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels? How then could the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen thus?”
Because of His great love for us, Jesus gave up his freedom and his life for to serve and free us. Mark 10:45 says “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many”.
As we go through this Easter season, it is important to remember what Christ gave for us through His death. It’s sometimes easy to forget that He took upon Him our sins. It wasn’t that he had done anything to deserve. He was a man who was blameless; perfect; a mean who had never done any wrong. A man who lived his life to love others, to protect others, to save others. Yet we looked upon Him and condemned Him. He allowed that to happen to take the punishment of OUR sins.
Many of you are familiar with the passages from Isaiah 53. If you’d like to turn there with me, these powerful words were actually written down hundreds of years before Christ was even born, predicting His sacrifice for our sins. We will start from verse four and read till the end of the chapter
READ TEXT: ISAIAH 53:4-12
The amazing thing about the Easter season is that he also need to remember that Christ’s sacrifice was not the end. The story of Jesus would have been short lived had the story had ended in Jesus’ death. What makes Christ’s sacrifice truly amazing is that it did not end in death! The story did not end there. This evening, we not only remember the death of Christ, we remember the triumph of his resurrection!
Remember the words of the Angels when the women discovered the empty tomb “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen!” What makes this season so special and so amazing is that Christ not only gave His life for us, but also that Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
In 1815, the legendary Battle of Waterloo was fought in Belgium between the British and the French. The Duke of Wellington led the British, while Napoleon Bonaparte led the French. After a stunning victory by Wellington and the British, the news of the Battle of Waterloo to England was signaled by a ship in the English Channel to a man on shore, who relayed the word to another on a hill, and so on across Britain. The process was a slow one and the messages had to be signaled one word at a time.
The first word, Wellington, was signaled. The next word was defeated. Then a fog closed in, and the message halted.
Across England people wept over the message. “Wellington defeated.” Then the fog lifted. The communication continued with two additional words: “the enemy.” Englishmen celebrated the victory.
There was great sorrow when the body of Jesus was carried from the cross to the tomb. The signal seemed to say, “Jesus Christ defeated.” But three days later the fog lifted and the angel announced, “Jesus Christ defeated the enemy.”
This evening, we can celebrate that Christ has defeated the enemy and is triumphant in his resurrection. What makes it even more amazing is how it is significant in our lives today. The triumph of Christ through His resurrection makes a difference in our world today and in our lives this evening.
In fact, I believe there are three specific ways that ways that Christ’s triumph effects our world and our lives.
#1- Christ’s triumph means that we have hope. When His followers watched as the man they knew as Rabbi and Master was led to the place called Golgotha and nailed to that tree and watched him die, for them, hope died with Him. There was the man they had pegged on the Messiah. The savior of Israel and here He was being crucified like a common criminal. A man who had done no wrong, murdered. What hope was there now? The man that they had believed would be their deliverer, their redeemer, was dead and buried.
But in the instant that the stone was rolled away and Christ emerged, hope came bursting forth with him. Hope was restored. It was as if the fog was lifted and the sun came out in the lives of these people. They now knew that Jesus was who He claimed to be. They knew that now there was a hope for tomorrow. They had hope that all that Jesus claimed in His life were reality. Hope was resurrected with Jesus.
And there is no understanding the importance of hope in our lives and in our world. It was once said that “We can live forty days without food, eight days without water, four minutes without air, but only a few seconds without hope”.
We live in a world today that needs hope. Every day we hear of famine and sickness and war and chaos and terrorism. The world is sinking into a hopeless mess that seems to never end. People are so often faced with a life that seems void of hope. They spiral into pattern of self-destruction that can lead to their own demise.
What is amazing is that the world we live in is not devoid of hope. Because of Christ’s victory over death, we have hope. There is hope that what we see here is not the end. There is hope that the chaos we see on the news is not all there is. There is hope that the attacks that we face each and every day will not win.
1 Peter 1:3-5: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled and that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are kept by the power of God through faith for salvation ready to be revealed in the last time”.
According to His abundant mercy, God the Father has given us a living hope through the resurrection of Christ from the dead as an inheritance. And this hope is incorruptible. This hope is un-defilable and will not fade away. What an amazing promise from the Word of God! We have this inheritance of hope reserved for us in Heaven, kept by the power of God.
Hebrews 6:19: “This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever”.
We have this hope “as an anchor of the soul”. It is the anchor that we can hold on to, even when live swirls around us and our senses can’t perceive a way out. We have this hope as the anchor of our soul.
Matthew Henry, the well-known theologian from the 18th century, once said “All who believe in Christ have hope in Him; all who believe in Him as Redeemer hope for redemption and salvation by Him; but if there be no resurrection, their hope in Him must be limited to this life. And if all their hopes in Christ lie within the compass of this life, they are in a much worse condition than the rest of humanity, especially at that time and under those conditions in which the apostles wrote, for then they were hated and persecuted by all people”.
When you look at the lives of the apostles, they were faced with persecution and hatred from the people around them, but they had this hope that was the anchor of their soul and that hope allowed them to carry on in the face of extreme challenges.
They had the hope of the young baseball player whose team was losing 18-0 in the first inning of the game. A spectator commented “Boy, you must be discouraged right now”. To which the boy replied, “Discouraged? No. Why should I be discouraged? We haven’t even gotten up to bat yet!” This boy had hope that against all odds his team would still be able to win. And we have hope that against all odds, we will receive the promised reward that God’s Word has promised us; this inheritance that serves as the anchor of our souls.
This is the hope that the triumph of Christ’s resurrection provides for us.
There is a second thing that Christ’s triumph gives us. #2- Christ’s triumph means that we have forgiveness. And forgiveness means that we been given grace.
We are forgiven; we are saved, not just because Christ was crucified, but because He was triumphant over death. If the story of Jesus ended on the cross, then the offer of forgiveness dies with Him. The offer of forgiveness; the offer of salvation, hinges on Christ’s victory over death and sin. If we do not have Christ’s victory, we do not have forgiveness.
1 Corinthians 15:16-17 says “For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!”
And verse 20-22: But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
The triumph of Christ through His resurrection means not only do we have hope, but we have the assurance of forgiveness through Him.
Forgiveness is a truly amazing thing, isn’t it? What is amazing about the forgiveness that we are given through Christ is that we’ve done nothing to deserve it. No matter how “good” we think we’ve been, our goodness, in all reality, means nothing. It’s not even close to enough to buy our forgiveness. In fact, Isaiah 64:6 even says that “our righteousness is like filthy rags”. There is nothing that we could do to win our forgiveness.
The amazing thing is, though, that because of Christ’s triumph, we have been given the grace to receive forgiveness. And that grace can really change our lives.
Some years ago, two teenagers with a long history of crime and delinquency robbed a YMCA in New York City. On the way out they saw a young man at the telephone switchboard.
In their panic they assumed he was calling the police. They grabbed him and beat him savagely with brass knuckles and a steel rod. Thinking that he was dead, they hid him behind a radiator near the swimming pool and escaped. While he survived, Donald lost an eye because of the attack
The two teenagers were apprehended and brought to trial. Their past records assured that both would get long sentences but at the trial, Donald did an amazing thing; he requested that the judge allow the two young men to be paroled to his charge. He wanted to give them another chance because he believed they could change.
One of the boys blew his opportunity. He committed another crime, was caught and sent to jail. The other boy, however, was responsive to Donald’s kindness. He went to college and then, eventually, to medical school. He became one of America’s leading surgeons, an eye surgeon, nonetheless..
A reporter, writing about Donald‘s amazing story of forgiveness, said of the surgeon’s accomplishments: “I wonder if he ever performs one of those delicate eye operations without thinking of that night in the YMCA and the young man whose confidence and forgiveness changed his life”
Though we may not seem like the type of people the young men in this story are portrayed, we each know that we did nothing to deserve this grace so amazing. We all know the words to the profound hymns “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me”. And I’ve heard of the words being changed when its performed in some churches. Instead of the word “wretch” they’ve replaced it with the word “soul”. “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a soul like me”. You know what happens when you remove the word wretch from that line? You remove what’s so amazing about grace. What’s so amazing about grace is that we were wretches! We were worthless! And it is because of this amazing grace that we once were lost, but now we’re found; was blind but now we see!!
This grace, this forgiveness is only possible because of the amazing triumph of Christ through His resurrection. Paul declared in Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification”. What an amazing thing to know that we are justified because Christ was raised to life! His triumph over death allows for our forgiveness.
There is one more thing I’d like us to share this evening. A third promise we have because of Christ’s resurrection.
#3- Christ’s triumph means we have power.
Christ’s resurrection means that we not have forgiveness for our past sins, but it means that we have power in our day to day lives. Because we serve a risen Savior, we are empowered to live day by day for Him.
The apostle Paul in Ephesians 1 shares that believers are entitled to “what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.”
God has given us the exceeding greatness of His power because of the triumph of Christ on the cross. Because of this power, we are equipped to live our lives in obedience to Him. We have the power to be free to live for Him.
Galatians 2:20 declares that “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me”.
Because of Christ’s triumph through His resurrection, we have the power to be new creatures; not us living, but Christ in us. As it says in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”
On our own, we would not have the ability to live the kind of life that pleases God, but because of the power bestowed on us, we have been given the power to walk daily in obedience to God’s word. He have been given the power to be more than conquerors through Jesus Christ. This is the power given to us because of the triumph of Jesus Christ through His resurrection.
This evening, we celebrate Christ’s victory over sin and death through His death and resurrection. We celebrate that because of his triumph we have hope. Because of His triumph we have forgiveness and because of His triumph, we have power.
As we go about our week, let us cling to the promise of the Word in Romans 8, starting in verse 37: Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I’d like to close this evening with the hymn “O Victory In Jesus”, as a hymn of celebration because of the great triumph that our Saviour had when he rose from the dead. This Easter, let us take time to remember his sacrifice and great victory over Satan and sin and death that has given us hope and forgiveness and power in His name.
Closing: Jude 24-25”: “To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy— to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen”
