OUTLINE
1. OPENING ILLUSTRATION - 28,798 DAYS
2. CONNECTION BETWEEN EASTER AND YOUR MORTALITY
3. DEATH IS THE DESTINY OF ALL
4. RESURRECTION – THE ANTI-AGING GIFT
5. THE STORY OF LAZARUS
6. GOD HAS PLACED ENTERNITY IN OUR HEARTS (THE DESIRE TO LIVE FOREVER)
7. YET WE SQUANDER LIFE BECAUSE OF SIN
8. THE HOLY SPIRIT PROVIDES US ZOE LIFE THROUGH JESUS CHRIST
9. CONSLUSION – WE CAN CHOOSE HOW TO LIVE THOSE 28,798 DAYS
- APART FROM GOD
- OR BORN AGAIN WITH GOD and live beyond the 28,798 days
Today, since it is Easter Sunday, I thought we would start with a resurrection story. But it will be a story that you may or may not be familiar with. It will actually be a story from the book of John starting at chapter 1. It is a story of the resurrection of Lazarus. We are going to be looking at John 11:1. I am not going to read through the whole section, just a few parts of it. Just sit back and listen and enjoy the story. (John 11:1 scripture read here.) Being Easter, I thought I would start out by offering you what I would call an Easter gift. By a show of hands, I suddenly decided I want to offer you $28,798, how many of you might want to take me up on that offer? A few. Don’t rush the stage please. I have to add a qualifier to it. I would like to give you that money, but it has to come with one condition. The condition is that is all the money you are going to receive for the rest of your life. No more wage checks. No more Social Security. No more cash. No more tips. That is all you get. Now it is still a nice chunk of change. You could buy a nice used car. You could buy a new appliance like a refrigerator or a high-definition TV. Maybe you could buy enough groceries for a year. Possibly even put a deposit down on a new house. After that, you would find there is not a whole lot of money leftover and you would be pretty much reliant on the kindness and generosity of your friends and family. The bad news is I am not going to offer you that gift.
The good news is I am going to remind you of a gift that you have all been given and that is the gift of life. I suspect that everybody in this room, with a few exceptions, is breathing today. Their heart is beating. They are breathing. They have been given the gift of life. Some of you are thinking that is nice, Chuck, but what does this sermon still have to do with this $28,798. Really, it doesn’t have a lot to do with $28,798 but it does have to do with 28,798 days, which happens to be equivalent to 78.9 years, which happens to be the average life span in America. We know that is the average. You have people that tragically die young but you have people that live long past that. Some of you know that our oldest living member, Louise Decker, was 109 years old when she died a few weeks ago. When she was born, God deposited not 28, 798 days into her account but 39,000+ days. That is what God does in some sense. The moment that we are born, it is like he deposits this big check and puts it in there and it is 28,798 days. The trouble is he doesn’t tell us how to spend it. He just says go spend it. You can spend it any way you want. As we know, many of us spend it a little bit recklessly. Especially in our younger years because when you are at the age of newborn up to 12, you aren’t even thinking about death. Death is the farthest thing from your mind. You aren’t even thinking about the fact that people age except when those two people come to your house every few weeks and they are bearing gifts and you call them grandma and grandpa. That is their concept of aging. They have no concept of death except when unfortunately one or both of the grandparents pass away and the parent has to explain death to the young child. We know that children are pretty durable. They rise up to the occasion and they have other things on their mind. They have placed to explore. Trees to climb. Ball games to attend to. Video games to play. Whatever it is. Their minds are preoccupied with other things.
Before they know it, they hit the ripe old age of 12 and they have already gone through 4,000 days and their count is down to 24, 418 days. But they don’t care because that exciting rollercoaster age is in front of them that we call adolescence. You get to become a teenager. It is exciting times. We know that teenagers have a little bit more of an understanding of death because, sadly, sometimes they experience a tragic death of a friend in an accident or a shooting of some sort. But again they are durable. They get by. They do a nice memorandum-type thing in the yearbook and they are on to other things because there are so many important things out there like what did you download from iTunes this week or what did you upload to Instagram or where do you get those cool headphones they call the Beats that cost about $100 now or who is taking who to the dance? Better yet, how am I going to get rid of this zit before the dance? Those are the most important things. They just go through life. They are just enjoying it. Then one day they wake up and hit that major milestone, 21 years old. The problem is they have dipped into that account quite substantially. At 21, based on the average, they only have 21, 133 days remaining. But they don’t care because in the eyes of the world, they are adults. The bad news is that, in their mind, they still see themselves as teenagers. They just want to play. They are in the magical 20-something years. Now they are legal. They have an ID and can do just about anything they want so they decide they are going to travel the world or ride across the country on a bike or spend the night down on Carson Street getting smashed out of their mind. They can do that stuff. Until the money runs out and then they begin to realize I can’t just have all these experiences. So what do they do? They move back home into their old room. Dad isn’t really excited about it. Mom is ecstatic but dad can’t stand it. Mom wants the little boy to come back home because she misses him. Dad is like get out of the house.
With few exceptions, the young man or woman finally raise enough money and the parents give them a gentle nudge and kick them out of the nest, and they finally find their way into society to begin to become a contributing, positive member of society. Then they have to become responsible and they have to spend the next 20 years or so establishing their life. They go out, get married, have kids, get serious about a career. All of a sudden they have three or four kids so the next major purchase is the mini-van. They need that mini-van because they have to ride the kids around to the soccer games and the boy scouts and the girl scouts and the dance recitals and the school recitals. Because all those things cost so much money, the parents are basically broke all the time, so they have to take a second job. By the time they get home in the evening, they are exhausted and have no time for themselves. Someday they wake up and they are at the magical age of 40. They have used half of their bucket. They have 14,198 days left. More than half of their days are gone and it begins to sink in that I am aging. Something is happening here. They begin to get a little panicky. They begin to get self-centered. The kids are basically almost out of the house. They can take care of themselves. It is my turn. I am going to go out and get that college degree. I am going to start a new job. If you are a guy, you are going to buy a Harley or go on a golf outing around the world or whatever you like to do. You are just going to go nuts and enjoy life. Then you hit the age of 50. Now 50 gets really weird because your kids are out of the house, but they begin to look like your peers rather than your kids and you begin to think about all those old rock stars I used to watch in the 70s, now they are like 80. Look at Keith Richards. He is looking pretty bad. Then they start thinking I want to stay hip and young, so I am going to open a Facebook account. Because they have no friends, they try to find all their high school friends. Unfortunately, some of the high school friends don’t look too good. They don’t want to post their pictures. Some of them didn’t age too well. They begin to get really into the internet.
Then they go along and all of a sudden they hit that dreaded age of 60. The count is now down to 6,935 days on the average. That is what you have left when you hit 60. You begin to feel your age. Every ache and pain is like I am having a heart attack. Take me to the doctor. Or you get a pain and really begin to think you are getting ready to die. You begin to plan your days and schedule your days around things like when does the CVS pharmacy close? What is my next meal? When does the evening news with Brian Williams come on? Those are the highlights of your days. You actually begin to enjoy the commercials that advertise everything from reverse mortgages to Viagra. I won’t ask which ones you focus on. Then the thing that you have been trying to avoid for five years is opening up the envelope…AARP. The American Association of Retired People. I fought it and I still fight it. Some of you get to the age of 60 and say I have to open this thing because I really want that free cup of coffee at McDonald’s on Mondays. I have to have that. You get to this age where you begin to say I have to start preparing my will and then I have to start preparing my bucket list. I have a lot of stuff that I always wanted to do and I haven’t done it yet. I have to make that Alaskan cruise. I have to go to the Holy Land. I have to go down to Dollywood in Tennessee or go run the bulls in Spain. You make your bucket list and all that stuff you want to do but you never get around to it.
Before you know it, you wake up and you are 78.9 and you have hit the average age. Now you are on borrowed time. Some of you are well past borrowed time. You begin to appreciate life. You begin to think about every breath is a gift. Every beat of your heart is just a gift from God. You begin to appreciate your family so much more. But time is just running out. Then 28,798 days after you took your very first breath, you take your very last breath. The lights go out. Zero days. It is over. The lid is closed. The gravesite is open. Those 50 people, if you are lucky, that attend your funeral because they haven’t died, they go back to the church and eat some pierogies and potato salad and hopefully say some nice things about you. That is it.
Now I can tell, I am looking at you guys, and you are saying Chuck, listen, this has got to be the absolutely most depressing introduction to an Easter sermon I have ever heard in my life. Right? Good because that is what I wanted it to be. I know for many of you Easter Sunday is just another day. What I really want you to understand is you cannot appreciate the reality of the resurrection unless you first understand the reality of your own mortality. I stand here today and I say I just gave you a phenomenal gift. I did the very thing that the psalmist asks God to do: number his days. Psalm 39 says “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before. Each man’s life is but a breath.” That is amazing. If you leave here today, if anything, I have given you a gift. Go home and enjoy your family. Go home and hug your kids. Tell your wife or husband you love them. Be nice to people. Life is short.
That is really not where I wanted to end. I want you to understand the reality of death. Death is the destiny of every man and every woman. Nobody gets out of here alive. Some people say that a funeral is a great place where you can learn to appreciate life. There is a passage in the Bible in Ecclesiastes. He says “You learn more at a funeral than at a feast. After all, that is where we end up. We might discover something from it.” You learn a lot at a funeral that you never learn at a party. It sounds morbid but if you have been at a funeral, you are paying attention. That is why I like doing funerals. I don’t like doing weddings too much because everybody is looking at the bride. At funerals, they are all looking at me and they are listening to me. They are listening for some sense of hope. As a side note, I wasn’t going to use this thing about 28,798 days as my illustration. I wanted to bring a casket down the aisle and set it right here. I actually had it set up to do. That is one way to get people’s attention. Sitting at a funeral, I guarantee you are riveted on what is being said there. Easter Sunday is just another day. Been there, done that. Give me the T-shirt and I will go on. You have no understanding or appreciate of the resurrection because you have no understanding of death. People who go to a funeral that are listening take something from it. They learn something. Some people never do. They go there and they come away with an appreciation for life. But what they do is they decide they are going to really go after life wholeheartedly in a selfish manner. Like the Epicureans. The Epicureans were a group of wise Greek philosophers. Their whole goal in life was to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Their slogan was eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow you are going to die. That is not wisdom. That is stupidity. The smart people go the funeral and they come away with a fresh appreciation for Easter Sunday because they know that through the resurrection of Jesus Christ God has given them an incredible anti-aging gift. That is called the resurrection. That is what it is. It is an anti-aging gift that you all should be aware of.
The passage I just read spoke of that. In case you weren’t listening, I will just paraphrase it. You had Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus. They were friends with Jesus. Lazarus got sick and ended up on a deathbed. Martha and Mary sent a messenger to get Jesus and for some reason Jesus hung back for two days. As the story goes, he is coming into the village and Martha comes up all frantically saying Jesus where have you been. If you had been here my brother wouldn’t have died. What does Jesus reply? He says “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” Then he goes on and does an amazing resurrection miracle. He goes up to the tomb where Lazarus is and tells people to roll away the stone and pray up to God. He calls out Lazarus and he walks out grave clothes and all but fully alive. If I had time to get a little deeper in the story, you would see that I think that story is really meant to be a preview of Jesus’ resurrection but also our own personal resurrection. More importantly, I think in the story, what Jesus is trying to say is I am the resurrection and the life. He is not saying I will be resurrected. He is saying I am the resurrection and the life. Basically resurrection and life is the same thing. He is saying he is the life. He is the very source of life. It is not just any life. It is not just what we would think about as biological life. There is a Greek word for the life he is talking about. He is talking about Zoe life. The underlying word here is Zoe, which has the sense of an abundant life. The abundant life that is only available from God through Jesus Christ. It is a life that is eternal because it is connected up to God, and because God is eternal, those who have that Zoe life have eternal life. Everyone wants eternal life. Even an atheist wants eternal life. I don’t think anybody really wants to die. I really think that people want to live forever. In Ecclesiastes it talks about it. It says that God has placed eternity within our hearts. We have a desire to live eternally but not simply alone but connected in a relationship with the God who created us.
But yet we have developed this wall. This thing called sin that has blocked off that relationship. It has made it impossible for us to stay connected to God. The apostle Paul refers to this as the sinful nature. I think in other places he refers to it as the old man, the old nature. The nature that submits to the world’s ways but would not submit to the Creator’s ways. Everybody has that nature inside them. Some have been able to restrain it better than others. Eventually that old man creeps up and pretty soon they are committing some sort of sin in thought or word or action. Again, it could be something as mild as thinking a bad thought about somebody or something as major as an abusive action or violent action against somebody like we saw recently over in Franklin High School or down in Fort Hood with those shootings again. That is tragic. That is all a function of the sinful nature. As bad as that is, the tragedy is that people who submit to the world and submit to that sinful nature basically are choosing to live a life that is far, far inferior to the life that God wants to give them. There is something in them that says there has got to be something better out there. I know there is something. So they begin to seek it out in many different ways. Some seek it in relationships. They jump from person to person or bed to bed. They seek it in drugs and alcohol. In Colorado it is marijuana. Locally, it is heroin. Then what happens is they destroy their bank accounts and they destroy their body in the process. Then there are people that seek it through accomplishments and status and recognition. Climbing the corporate ladder of success. All the while, they never quite get that sense of significance that God wants to give them. They don’t get it. They know as they get older that their days are numbered. They don’t know the number but they know that they are headed for the grave. In many ways, they are really dead men walking. It is a term that speaks of the people on death row. Basically, their next stop is death. They are walking around and somebody says Dead Man walking. That is really what I would say most people in the world are. Dead men and woman walking, going down to the grave. All the while, Jesus is back there saying I am over here. I am the resurrection and the life. I am here what you want. I am everything you need. I offer you that Zoe life. I offer you exactly what you have been looking for. But people just say no thanks. Don’t need it.
It is no news to Jesus. John wrote about it in the early chapters of John where he writes “He (being Jesus) came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” He came and they said no thanks. Don’t need you. Then he goes on to say something pretty amazing. He goes on to say “Yet to all those who receive him, to all those who believe in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural decent nor of human decision nor a husband’s will – but born of God.” That is an amazing, amazing thing. Born of God. He is talking about a different sort of birth here. He is talking about a new birth. What we would call the born-again experience. In a nutshell, it basically says all this stuff that I hear about, the cross and the resurrection and Jesus, I believe it. I believe it is true. Not only do I believe it, I want to commit my life to it. I want to submit myself to that Lord. I want to make him Lord of my life. That commitment is then followed through with what we would call baptism as a symbol of that commitment. You are basically saying yes I identify with Jesus Christ. I identify with his death. I identify with the resurrection. That is what we view as the salvation experience. We also believe that somewhere along that line, somewhere in that conversion process, we don’t try to pin it down, a person who has received Christ in their whole heart receives the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is really the transmitter of that Zoe life that God wants to give. All of a sudden, they feel that new life. They begin to feel differently. They begin to view themselves differently because they see that God looks at them differently. It says that God has given them a new ID card. On that ID card it says Child of God. They don’t get their identification from the friends they hang out with, the job they have, the successes they have, or any of that stuff. That is garbage because they have received the highest recognition that they could ever get directly from God himself. A Child of God. From that point on, they go through life with a whole sense of purpose. A renewed sense of values. They know that their responsibility is to begin to work out in the world what God is beginning to do inside them. God has given them an incredible purpose in life. He has given them a place in the kingdom. They are able to go and truly begin to realize their total potential, their total calling. I said it in the first service. Think what your life would be like if you lived your highest potential. Your greatest potential. If you got all that stuff out of your mind. All the crap that society has put in your mind and you were just like a newborn baby only you know everything you know now and then you were going to be your fullest potential. It is an exciting thing but it is a scary thing. But really that is what God is saying. I am giving you that Zoe life.
As good as that sounds, it is not as good as it gets. Now we are children of God, but the best is yet to come. In fact, John says later, he speaks of this. He says “Dear friends, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is.” That is deep stuff. You are going to look like Jesus. You are going to look totally like Jesus. Who wouldn’t want that? When a Christian or somebody who believes, a born-again person, gets to the end of that 28,798 days, they have no fear of death. Sure they are going to miss their family, but they have no fear of death. The Bible talks about that the stinger of death is gone. In fact, they are anticipating it. They know when they get to the other side that old shell of a broken person, the sinful nature, and really the broken body is going to be replaced with a glorious mind and a glorious body. Paul talks about that in Philippians where he says “Jesus Christ who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that you will be like his glorious body.” That is a promise you can hang your hat on. That is an awesome thing to think about. You are going to be like Christ and you are going to be glorious like Christ. Whole new body. Whole new set of thinking. A whole new way.
You may thing that is cool, but what is in store for me after that? What can I expect after that? There is a lot of speculation about what heaven is going to be like. Is it going to be the mansion on the hill. The pearly gates. The golden bricks. Whatever it is. It is fun to speculate, but I think it is foolish to a certain degree because our minds are too little to comprehend the wonders of God that awaits for us. Paul speaks about that when he says “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him.” You can’t even imagine it. But one thing you will know is you will be the person that you never were on this earth. Full of so much potential. So much possibility. Possibilities as numerous as the stars in the universe. That is what awaits you.
As I close, I know that you all have important things to do like go home and eat ham and deviled eggs and that sort of thing, but I close by basically saying I stand here and I give you two choices. Choice A is a life of 28,798 days. Basically that is it. You enter into your grave. The best thing you can hope for is you die in your sleep. The worst thing you can fear is that you spend eternity away from God in total isolation and whatever that looks like. That is Choice A. Choice B looks a lot better I think. It is that Zoe life that God wants to give you. It is the life that you begin to receive when you receive Jesus as Lord and when you have that born-again experience. You are infused with the very life of God. You become a child of God with purpose, direction, and hope in this world with a very specific thing to do in the kingdom contribution that begins in this world. Then when that day comes, whatever day it is, and you head off to the glory land wherever that is, Jesus is standing there with your new coat. He gives you your new coat and says you are looking good. You look just like me. You say thank you. He says now go. The clock has stopped. But actually the clock is going backwards. Every day you experience in eternity, there are that many more that await you. You walk off into eternity. Again, choice A or B. Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” Let us pray.
