The God Who Changes the Unchangeable
Acts 3:13-15
Philip Yancey has described it as one of the ugliest words in our language. It is a word that nearly suffocates all the joy out of life. The word is irrevers¬ible.
You know what it means for something to be irreversible do you?
It’s like the time that Trista and I were first married we took a group of kids to Six Flags. Now there is not a ride in the park that I won’t ride, drops, loops, flips, I love them all. Trista, on the other hand, likes rides that are relatively flat. For some reason that day she felt that she needed to prove how much she loved me and the best way to do that was by getting on the Mind Bender. By the time the bar came down and Trista’s nails were firmly implanted into my left arm, it was a bit too late to get off the decision was irreversible.
Maybe it was not a roller coaster; perhaps you missed the shot with two seconds to play in the district tournament. Or you turned down a job that you wish you’d taken but now is filled by someone else. At one time or another we have all been the victim of Irreversibility.
We all would like to do a few things over, wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t it be nice if real life provided a mulligan, you know those little grace shots in Golf that allow us to take the shot again?
Wouldn’t you love to re-do some things that are now irreversible?
Have you ever written some things in ink that you wish you’d have written in lead so you could erase? Aren’t there a few words you’ve spoken in anger that you wish you could retract?
Maybe you have sent a letter and later wished you could have pulled out of the mailbox? Or maybe you have experi¬enced a relationship where the sweet taste of companionship suddenly turned sour?
Irreversible - it really is an ugly word.
I remem¬ber feeling its painfulness when I was eight and we walked into the house after church, only to find out that my aunt had been hit by a drunk driver. I wished I could be like Superman, a hero who could reverse time by flying backward fast enough to change the earth’s rotation. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t go back and protect my aunt.
I saw its ugliness when as a junior in High School I was told that a good friend of mine committed suicide, leaving two younger brothers, his parents, and a youth group in shock, so irreversible.
Some have suffered the loss of dreams that turned upside down into nightmares: marriages made in heaven that unraveled in purgatory; victims of violent, intrusive crimes who keep wishing they could remove the horror.
Most of us could stand pain if it didn’t seem to be so relentless, so inescapable!
But there is hope because Jesus understands. When God became flesh he experienced, eyeball-¬to-eyeball, the agony of life’s irreversibility.
In Luke 7 we see Jesus approaching the town of Nain and we see that his heart was torn apart when he saw the face of that widow whose only son had died.
In John 11 He heard the tortured cry of a woman whose brother had died: "If you had been here, my brother would not have died" (John 11:21).
Nothing is more irreversible than the grave. Nothing is more hopeless and drab. The crypt tells no tales.
We have "Good Friday" written on our calendars as a memorial of the Day that the Christ died. But it became "good" only in the rearview mirror of Christian history. At the time it was the end of dreams. He was nailed to a cross, taken down, and placed in a cold, damp tomb.
When Mary, the mother of Jesus, cried at the foot of the cross, her pain so deep, she surely felt the greatest measure of hopelessness a woman can feel. Along with his cruel, unjust death, died her hopes and dreams. But this time it was reversible.
Christ is Risen
Have you ever heard the story of a man named Rollo May. He was a famous therapist, who suffered a complete nervous breakdown in his twenties. His road to recov¬ery is documented in his book, The Quest for Beauty, and he describes how that recovery involved continual encounters with beauty.
In one of the stories, he tells of a visit to a monastery on Mount Athos, a peninsula attached to Greece. One morning May happened onto the celebration of the Greek Orthodox Easter. The only light in the sanctu¬ary came from candles. The air was filled with incense. Then at the height of the Easter service, a priest gave everyone three Easter eggs that had been decorated and wrapped in a veil.
The priest proclaimed "Christ is risen!", and each person upon receiving their egg would respond: "He is risen indeed!"
Later May writes about the stirring event: "I was seized then by a moment of spiritual reality: what would it mean for our world if he had not truly risen?"
That is a question that we must all struggle with from time to time. Throughout Scripture we meet a God who inter¬venes in the most unexpected ways to reverse what seems to be irreversible:
The world was so fun of sin it appeared there could never be a new beginning - and then God called Noah.
The promise to Abraham seemed in jeop¬ardy when he and Sarah couldn’t have a child - and then God allowed her to con¬ceive in her old age.
God’s people looked as if they’d be stuck forever doing hard labor in Egypt - but then God raised up Moses.
An unmarried virgin became pregnant and the object of ridicule - and then an angel announced that the child was God’s Son.
The greatest act of God, however, was his resur¬rection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Paul staked his faith on that act in 1 Corinthians 15:14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.
Peter recalls the drama in Acts 3:13-15:
The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, glorified his servant Jesus, whom you delivered over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.
Death looked like a period.
On that Sunday, when rumors that Jesus’ body was missing were flying around Jerusalem, even his own disciples couldn’t believe it. They were conditioned only to accept the irreversible. But soon they were con¬vinced that this was something new. These same people who had crawled away from Golgotha were found preaching to large crowds in the temple courts. Jesus’ death had only been a semicolon: "But God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this," Peter explained.
The resurrection of God’s Son forever offers the unmatched promise of reversibility. Nothing – no act of childhood cruelty, no experience of shame or remorse, no failure, no shattered dream, no physical or mental disability, not even death-is final!
Those who believe in the resurrecting God can never again be the same. They believe in pain and even experience it, but we know that it is not ultimate defeat.
We believe in death and will experience it, but we know that it is not ultimate despair.
Like Paul, we have to learn to live with open, honest doubts, fears, and pains. We join with the whole creation which groans like Paul writes in Romans 8:21 to be "liberated from its bondage to decay".
We are realistic enough to know there’s enough sorrow to stretch from here to the farthest galaxy.
But we also affirm with Jurgen Moltmann, author of Theology of Hope: "God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him."
In other words, we no longer have to believe in irreversibility. As we live between the first and second comings of Jesus Christ, we must never lose hope.
What Would It Mean?
When we lived in Flowery Branch the local paper had a daily devotional written by area preachers. Most people read it not because of the devotions but because of the typo’s that were always found in them. Apparently the paper wasn’t interested in spell checking the religious section.
One of the worst ones, I remember came when a preacher ended the devotional by quoting from the old song, "One step at a time, dear Savior." But the typo that was printed said "One step at a time, dead Savior." It was a resurrection rebuttal!
Tonight I want you to ask the question what difference does it make? Or as Rollo May asked, "What would it mean?"
It meant everything a couple of years ago as we struggled through the miscarriage of our first child.
It meant everything as I watched my Paw loose strength, hair, and his life to cancer.
It meant everything to those families at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, in Nashville as we walked the halls trying to share a little joy to the patients and their parents with bleary eyes, their siblings with nervous, awkward laughter, and many kids with IVs and bald heads trying to be brave.
Oh, yes church, it makes a difference whether the Palestinian tomb was occupied or vacant that morning! It gives us hope that we will all have a better life in heaven.
Saved by a Resurrecting God
For all those who have mourned loss, whether it is loss of life or relationships, it is terribly relevant that we serve a resurrecting God.
For those who’ve had to sell their houses to pay creditors. For those who’ve been gutted by a divorce. For those who’ve stood on a military airstrip to tell their husbands, wives, sons, daughters, daddies, and mommies good-bye. For those who have faced every day with pain. It’s relevance is astounding.
We read the promise in John 11:25 "I am the resurrection and the life,"
Either he is or he isn’t. The promise hinges on what happened that weekend in Palestine. For those who believe that he was raised by his Father, we are filled with wild hope. Suffering and death do not have the final word!
And we, like Mary, will live through to the resur¬rection! Life did not end at the Cross! All is not lost just because it seems so at times. We too will have our day of resurrection! Jesus died, but he conquered sin and death with his resurrection so we may live and be victorious in life.
Paul writes in Ephesians 1:19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might
We don’t have to be conquered by sin-by the temper, rage, and detestable behaviors that can well up inside us when things go wrong. We only need to utilize the power he has already given to us!
Scripture promises us that Jesus’ blood has redeemed us from our empty way of life. Life is not irreversible because he has given us the power to change.
When Winston Churchill’s funeral was held at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, the service was conducted according to his instructions. After the blessing, a bugler positioned high in the dome played taps, signaling the end of the day. But after that, a bugler on the other side played reveille, signaling a new day has begun.
What a glorious morning that will be! It is the time when those who have hungered and thirsted for the presence of God will be filled beyond imagina¬tion. It is the time when this God for whom we hunger, the resurrecting God, will call - and all the universe will answer.
Death is reversible, God has made it so.
Offer Invitation
