Evangelistic sermon
Something to challenge your thinking
Let us open in prayer:
As you know today is an evangelistic service. I was really worried about how to open the message. But then I realised; you guys have come here to have your views challenged. You did not get out of bed to have your current beliefs confirmed; you already know what you believe. Instead you drove 30 minutes in the cold to get here to have your views challenged. You have sacrificed 1 ½ hours of a precious Sunday morning to be here. I hope I can honour your time, and use the next 20 minutes to challenge what you believe and I thank you for giving me the privilege of standing in front of you today.
By the end of today, I am going to ask if you want to come up the front for prayer. Maybe for the first time to commit your life to Jesus, maybe to ask Jesus to deepen your faith in him, or maybe you have something else you would like prayer for. But always have that in the back of your mind, I am going to ask you to consider coming up the front for prayer.
The four points I am going to argue today are:
1) Did Jesus really exist?
2) Did he rise from the dead?
3) Does it work?
4) What do I do with this?
1) Did Jesus really exist?
John 14: 9 ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.’
If Christianity is to be taken seriously, Jesus must exist. If you cannot prove that Jesus existed beyond reasonable doubt we can all end the conversation here and go home.
Jewish sources
(a) Flavius Josephus began life in Jerusalem in about AD 37. He was an educated man who commanded Jewish forces in the rebellion against Rome. After defeat, he became a friend of the Roman Emperor.
He devoted the second half of his life to writing books on the history of Jews. He said this of Jesus:
Now, there was about this time Jesus, a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works — a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.
(b) Jewish literature. The Jewish Talmud notes Jesus’ execution, which he was not accepted by Jewish authorities, that he hung on a tree on Passover eve and that he did ‘miracles’.
The Jewish sources are clearly the best external evidence, as it is unlikely they are based on hearsay or Christian propaganda. They are an independent record.
Pagan literature
(a) Pliny the Younger was sent to Bithynia to reorganise the affairs of the province and in about AD 110 he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan. He confirmed his persecution of Christians and gave a portrait of the early Christian community as worshippers of Christ who sang to him as God.’°
(b) Cornelius Tacitus, a Roman historian, in AD 112, stated Jesus was put to death by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.” In the same paragraph he records that Nero tried to blame the Christians for his famous fire of AD 64 and that he tortured them relentlessly.
(c) Suetonius, the official historian of the Imperial house, in AD 120 described the expelling of the Jews from Rome and their allegiance to Chrestus. (Latin for Christ)
From the Jewish and pagan, we learn the following information about Jesus:
• he had a brother, James;
• he was called the Christ (Messiah);
• he was known to be a teacher;
• Many believed he was a doer of “miracles”;
• He had followers;
• He was not popular with the Jewish religious leaders;
• Pontius Pilate put him to death and this happened on a Passover during the reign of Tiberius Caesar (AD 14—37);
• Many believed he rose from the dead;
• Christianity spread quickly to Rome and often persecution followed.
Now we get to the interesting part.
2) Did he rise from the dead?
1 Corinthians 15: 12 - 19
The resurrection of Jesus is a major historical problem, no matter how you look at it. Most modern scientists have made the assumption that miracles simply cannot happen, and this makes the claim of the resurrection highly problematic. However, if you disbelieve the resurrection you then have the difficulty of explaining how the Christian church got started at all. It is the world’s largest religion and one in three people across the world identify themselves as Christian.
If Easter means Jesus Christ is only raised in a spiritual sense — [then] it is only about me, and finding a new dimension in my personal spiritual life. But if Jesus Christ is truly raised from the dead, Christianity becomes good news for the whole world. Take away the resurrection and Karl Marx was probably right to accuse Christianity of ignoring problems of the material world. Take the resurrection away and Freud was probably right to say Christianity is wish- fulfilment. Take it away and Nietzsche probably was right to say it is for wimps.’°
Several years ago I was diagnosed with a small skin cancer. It was treatable and was removed successfully with minor surgery. However, to paraphrase the British author Samuel Johnson, the ‘cancer’ word pronounced over you under any circumstances gives you concentration and makes you think.
When thinking about the resurrection it became quite clear to me how much more than a historical issue this was. It is that, but it is much more. If it happened, it changes our lives completely.
“My question — that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide — was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man. . . a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?
—Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Sometimes people approach me and say, ‘I really struggle with this aspect of Christian teaching. I like this part of Christian belief, but I don’t think I can accept that part.’ I usually respond: ‘If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.’ That is how the first hearers felt who heard reports of the resurrection. They knew that if it was true it meant we can’t live our lives any way we want. It also meant we don’t have to be afraid of anything, not Roman swords, not skin cancer, nothing. If Jesus rose from the dead, it changes everything.
People at the time of Jesus did not have our modern scientific knowledge about the world. Maybe they believed in magical and supernatural happenings. ‘they could easily have fallen prey in to reports of a risen Jesus, because they believed that resurrections from the dead were possible. Jesus’ followers were heartbroken when he was killed. Since they believed he was the Messiah, they may have begun to sense that he was still with them, guiding them, living on in their hearts in spirit. Some may have even felt they had visions of him speaking to them. Over the decades these feelings of Jesus living on spiritually developed into stories that he had been raised physically. The resurrection accounts in the four Gospels were devised to bolster this belief.
So let us look at the Empty Tomb and the Witnesses
The first accounts of the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses are not found in the Gospels, but in the letters of Paul, which every historian agrees were written just fifteen to twenty years after the death of Jesus. One of the most interesting texts is
1 Corinthians 15:3-6:
Here Paul not only speaks of the empty tomb and resurrection on the ‘third day’ (showing he is talking of a historical event, not a symbol or metaphor) but he also lists the eyewitnesses. Paul indicates that the risen Jesus not only appeared to individuals and small groups, but he also appeared to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of his writing and could be consulted for corroboration. Paul’s letter was to a church, and therefore it was a public document, written to be read aloud. Paul was inviting anyone who doubted that Jesus had appeared to people after his death to go and talk to the eyewitnesses if they wished. It was a bold challenge and one that could easily be taken up, since during those times travel around the Mediterranean was safe and easy. Paul could not have made such a challenge if those eyewitnesses didn’t exist. We know the book of Luke was written by Dr Luke for his rich Roman sponsor Theophilus who actually wanted to know if the claims about Jesus where true. Dr Luke was paid to investigate the life of Jesus.
Additionally, the accounts of the resurrection in the Bible were too problematic to be fabrications. Each Gospel states that the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection were women. Women’s low social status meant that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court. There was no possible advantage to the church to recount that all the first witnesses were women. It could only have undermined the credibility of the testimony. The only possible explanation for why women were depicted as meeting Jesus first is if they really had. The accounts of the first eyewitnesses of the resurrection would have been electrifying and life-changing, passed along and retold more than any other stories about the life of Jesus.
In the first century there were many other messianic movements whose would-be messiahs were executed. However, in not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew better. Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest themselves, had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was.
There were dozens of other messianic pretenders whose lives and careers ended with crucifixion. Why would the disciples of Jesus have come to the conclusion that that his crucifixion had not been a defeat but a triumph — unless they had seen him risen from the dead?
The Explosion of a New Worldview
After the death of Jesus the entire Christian community suddenly adopted a set of beliefs that were brand-new and until that point had been unthinkable. The first Christians had a resurrection- centred view of reality.
Paul’s letters show that Christians proclaimed Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the very beginning. That meant the tomb must have been empty. No one in Jerusalem would have believed the preaching for a minute if the tomb was not empty. Sceptics could have easily produced Jesus’ rotted corpse. Also, Paul could not be telling people in a public document that there were scores of eyewitnesses alive if there were not.
Whatever else happened, the tomb of Jesus must have really been empty and hundreds of witnesses must have claimed that they saw him bodily raised.
Resurrection and Immortality
There is, therefore, very strong evidence that the tomb was empty and there were hundreds of people who claimed they saw the risen Christ. That much is ‘historically secure’. ‘But surely’, someone can respond, ‘that doesn’t prove Jesus was really resurrected. Surely the followers desperately wanted to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. If anyone had stolen the body in order to make it look like he had been raised, many sincere people could have thought they’d seen him, and maybe a few others went along with saying so for a good cause.’
N. T. Wright does an extensive survey of the non-Jewish thought of the first-century Mediterranean world, both east and west, and reveals that the universal view of the people of that time was that a bodily resurrection was impossible. Why? In Graeco-Roman thinking, the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt and defiling. To them the physical, by definition, was always falling apart and therefore salvation was conceived as liberation from the body. In this worldview resurrection was not only impossible, but totally undesirable. No soul, having gotten free from its body, would ever want it back. Even those who believed in reincarnation understood that the return to body meant that the soul was not yet out of its prison. The goal was to get free of the body for ever. Once your soul is free of its body, a return to re-embodied life was undesirable, unthinkable and impossible.’
Others have put forth the conspiracy theory, that the disciples stole the body and claimed he was alive to others. This assumes that the disciples would expect other Jews to be open to the belief that an individual could be raised from the dead. But none of this is possible. The people of that time would have considered a bodily resurrection to be as impossible as the people of our own time, though for different reasons.
However, the Christian view of resurrection, absolutely unprecedented in history, sprang up full-blown immediately after the death of Jesus. There was no process or development. His followers said that their beliefs did not come from debating and discussing. They were just telling others what they had seen themselves. No one has come up with any plausible alternative to this claim. Even if you propose the highly unlikely idea that one or two of Jesus’ disciples did get the idea that he was raised from the dead on their own, they would never have got a movement of other Jews to believe it unless there were multiple, inexplicable, plausible, repeated encounters with Jesus.
The subsequent history of the church gets even more difficult to account for. How could a group of first-century Jews have come to worship a human being as divine? It was absolute blasphemy to propose that any human being should be worshipped. Yet hundreds of Jews began worshipping Jesus literally overnight. What enormous event broke through all of that Jewish resistance? If they had seen him resurrected, that would account for it. What other historical answer can do so?
There is one more thing to keep in mind. As Blaise Pascal (the inventor of the modern calculator) put it, ‘I [believe] those witnesses that get their throats cut.’ Virtually all the apostles and early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it is hard to believe that this kind of powerful self-sacrifice would be done to support a hoax. Why would you die to support something you knew was not true.
It is not enough for the sceptic, then, to simply dismiss the Christian teaching about the resurrection of Jesus by saying, ‘It just couldn’t have happened.’ He or she must face and answer all these historical questions:
Why did Christianity emerge so rapidly, with such power?
No other band of messianic followers in that era concluded their leader was raised from the dead — why did this group do so?
No group of Jews ever worshipped a human being as God. What led them to do it?
Jews did not believe in divine men or individual resurrections. What changed their worldview virtually overnight?
How do you account for the hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrection who lived on for decades and publicly maintained their testimony, eventually giving their lives for their belief?
N. T. Wright (New Testament Lecturer, Oxford University):
The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the meetings or sightings of the risen Jesus ... Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion experience would have invented it, no matter how guilty (or how forgiven) they felt, no matter how many hours they pored over the scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and enter into a fantasy world of our own
3) Does it work?
People want to know not only if something is true, but whether it works. We have considered the testimony that confirms the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and, by so doing, have stimulated our minds.
However, we are whole people and there is more to life than legal evidence and the rational. If Jesus is the truth, we would expect him to touch our basic human needs and enable us to experience some of the joy and liberation he claims to bring. What are some of the privileges that belong to those who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord? We need something everyone who is a Christian in this room can confirm is true.
“Why have I come to Australia? Well, if Dr Salk had kept quiet about the vaccine he had discovered to help polio sufferers, what a tragedy that would have been! And when I have found Jesus to be the answer to the problems we have, both personal and national, I must share it with others.” Sir Lionel Luckhoo: the world’s most successful lawyer according to the Guinness book of records. (Lionel Huts of the Simpsons is named after him)
(a) Strength. Life was not meant to be easy! Often we wonder why we bother. Jesus offers strength for the living of life. The apostle Paul declared, ‘I can do anything through [Jesus who gives me strength.’9 This was not an empty cry. In 2 Corinthians 11, verse 16 to chapter 12, verse 10, we read how Paul faced severe emotional, physical and spiritual struggles and yet he could still proclaim: ‘That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weakness, in insults, in hardships, in persecution, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.’ Christ brings strength for the tough days.
(b) Defeat of anxiety. This is an era of stress. Our world changes quickly and much is uncertain. Is there a resting place for an anxious spirit? The apostle Peter who knew both fear and failure exhorted, ‘Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”°
(c) Friendship. Loneliness darts into our lives in times of grief, separation from loved ones and when there is friction in relationships. It is a common experience. The writer of Hebrews reminds us that God gives us this promise: ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ The resurrected Jesus, the One who came to reveal God the Father, offers us his constant companionship.”
(d) Inner satisfaction. In the last few years Western society has experienced a massive disillusionment with materialism as the answer to life. It simply has not satisfied, particularly as the Western world is thrust into deeper recession. People are searching for a spiritual dimension to life. Peter, in the first Christian sermon ever preached, promised the presence of God within all those who follow Jesus:
‘And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Paul reminds us what tangible benefits the Holy Spirit brings to our lives: ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Jesus, not New Age philosophy, Eastern mysticism or the pursuit of materialism, is alone capable of quenching our inner longing, sense of cosmic orphanhood and search for meaning.’
(e) Beyond the why. How often do we experience things that we cannot understand— a tragedy, a failure, persecution or a broken relationship? A disciple of Jesus does not have all the answers, nor are they excluded from hurts, but they can live beyond the ‘why’, because they can discern a deeper purpose to life’s inexplicable events and mysteries.
As the apostle Paul reminds us: ‘...in all things God works for the good of those who love him.” A Christian realises God takes our disappointments and produces good even out of evil. That is a tremendous promise.
(f) Forgiveness. Guilt and wrong doing are enormous problems. We know we have fallen and that we are in need of mercy. In Jesus, there is acceptance and complete forgiveness.
In that first Christian sermon, we are told to repent — admit our failures and turn from them — in order that ‘your sins may be forgiven’.’ Guilt and failure are dealt with when we hand ourselves to Jesus as he paid the price for us on the cross. Unlike other religions, Christianity rests on an act of love and we do not face the frustration of trying to earn our salvation through good deeds. No matter what we have done, Jesus is there for us.
(g) Certainty. Many people give themselves to a religion and remain children of doubt. The Bible promises that if we truly hand ourselves to God, he will bring us conviction that Jesus is the answer.
(h) Servanthood. The wider society is consumed by ‘me-ism’. Such an ideology is without compassion and a heart for justice. It is not real in the face of so much oppression and poverty.
To be a servant to others is a rich experience and is the only authentic way to live. Jesus is the perfect model and motivation for servanthood. Jesus said, ‘My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no-one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’
(i) Eternal life. Death is a universal enemy. It is humanity’s ultimate tragedy. However, it need not be the end; rather it can be the opening to a new beginning — a point made in this verse: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”9
Eternal life speaks of a quality of existence that is never ending — a life minus pain, tears, disorder and mourning. It is a life we can be certain of as Jesus, by his resurrection, showed that there is life beyond the grave.2’
(j) Guidance. Today people are looking for guidance, for absolutes on which they can base their life. A Christian has direction in the Bible and it can be trusted. “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
4) What do I do with this?
John 10: 9, 10
9I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. 10The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.
I said at the beginning of this sermon I was going to ask if you want to come up the front for prayer. Maybe for the first time to commit your life to Jesus, maybe to ask Jesus to deepen your faith in him, or maybe you have something else you would like prayer for.
We are going to pray the sinners prayer together, for those who want to, and then I am going to ask if anyone wants to come to the front for prayer during the next song.
Note for prayer: “Father, I know that I have broken your laws and my life has separated me from you. I am truly sorry, and now I want to turn away from my past wrong toward you. Please forgive me. I believe that your son, Jesus Christ died for my sins, was resurrected from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus to become the Lord of my life, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send your Holy Spirit to help me obey You, and to do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus’ name I pray, Amen.”
This sermon draws from the work of ‘The reason for God’ by Timothy Keller and ‘Leading lawyers case for the resurrection’ by ross Clifford
The attached powerpoint can be accessed by emailing pastor@southperthbaptist.org and i will send it to you.
