In the new series we’re beginning today we’re going to cover one of the most pivotal events in all of human history – the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
But we’re going to cover it from a unique perspective. You’re going to see not only what the resurrection of Jesus means to you for eternity but also how it helps you every day.
For the next five weeks we’re going to re-examine the after-effects of Easter. We’re going to see why Easter has meaning and how that meaning impacts your every-day life.
We’re going to begin today with Easter has meaning because of faith.
Let’s correct a big misconception about faith before we get started with this one.
Faith is not a blind stab in the dark. Faith is not just believing something because it sounds good. Yes, it is believing in some things we cannot see – but we believe in things we cannot see because of things we have seen. Christians don’t follow Christ just because they hope they might get lucky in so doing.
If you listen closely to explanations of faith on TV shows, in movies and in a lot of literature you would get that wrong idea about what faith is. That kind of idea about faith is dead wrong.
"Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation." (Elton Trueblood)
Faith in Christ is based on solid historical and empirical evidence: historical, because the truths of Christ’s life, death and resurrection can be authenticated by the documented record; and empirical, because in the laboratory of the lives of billions of people, faith in Christ has proven true as well.
We’re talking about faith that has a rock-solid foundation. That foundation is Jesus and His life, death and resurrection. But the message today (and this series) is not going to be about proving the resurrection of Christ. That’s a great study. If you want further information on that see me after today’s worship gathering and I’ll be glad to share those proofs with you.
Today we’re going to see why and how the message of Easter has an impact on your faith and why and how your faith impacts your life.
Our Scripture today is from Paul’s first letter to the Christ followers at Corinth in ancient Greece.
1 Corinthians 15:12 (NLV) We preached to you that Christ has been raised from the dead. But some of you say that people are not raised from the dead. Why do you say this? 13 If the dead are not raised, then Christ was not raised from the dead. 14 If Christ was not raised from the dead, then what we preach to you is worth nothing. Your faith in Christ is worth nothing. 15 That makes us all liars because we said that God raised Christ from the dead. But God did not raise Christ from the dead if the dead do not come to life again. 16 If the dead are not raised, then not even Christ was raised from the dead. 17 If Christ was not raised from the dead, your faith is worth nothing and you are still living in your sins. 18 Then the Christians who have already died are lost in sin. 19 If we have hope in Christ in this life only, we are more sad than anyone else.
20 But it is true! Christ has been raised from the dead! He was the first One to be raised from the dead and all those who are in graves will follow. 21 Death came because of a man, Adam. Being raised from the dead also came because of a Man, Christ.
22 All men will die as Adam died. But all those who belong to Christ will be raised to new life.
Let’s break this passage of Scripture down further and talk about the specific reasons the resurrection of Christ, the true meaning of Easter, impacts your life in positive ways.
1. Easter faith means you may live confidently. 1 Corin. 15:12-20
This is a very important and very positive principle. Being able to live with confidence is of great value to every one of us!
Let me show you how these verses give us confidence.
Paul said in verses 14, "If Christ was not raised from the dead, then what we preach to you is worth nothing. Your faith in Christ is worth nothing."
That’s how important this issue of the resurrection of Jesus is. Your very faith hinges on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead.
And in verse 17, "If Christ was not raised from the dead, your faith is worth nothing and you are still living in your sins."
"You are still living in your sins," means you are still walking around with the sentence of death – which is the penalty for sin.
If Jesus didn’t raise from the dead then faith in Him is useless. If Jesus didn’t raise from the dead then your hope is false and any and all of the ways you’ve patterned your life around His teaching is worthless.
But the Bible confirms in verse 20 that "it is true! Christ has been raised from the dead!" Circle that phrase in verse 20.
Now here’s the point. Since the resurrection of Jesus is true, then those who follow Christ have confidence that His ways are the right ways to live here and now. Christ followers have great confidence that the way they are living by following the teachings of Christ is the right way to live!
Christ followers need not be doubtful or gloomy! If you are a follower of Christ you don’t need to live in the shadows of insecurity and paranoia. You don’t need to withdraw from situations or settings when you feel inadequate and inferior. We all feel those ways sometimes. If you follow Christ you can live confidently! If you are a follower of Christ you have a right to be confident and glad!
As the Bill Gaither song says, "Because He lives all fear is gone!"
Doubts come when we feed on the fears of our human nature and its weaknesses. Confidence comes from following Christ.
Because Jesus is alive – because He conquered death, hell and the grave you can face life’s challenges …challenges like marriage hurdles.
I remember when Deb and I first got married. We’ll be celebrating our 29th Anniversary this spring and we’re more in love now than ever, but when we first got married in some ways we were a mess.
Most young couples starting out have to work to understand how the opposite sex thinks. We had great emotional highs but sometimes we had challenging emotional lows. It was like nitroglycerin - it’s got the power to move mountains but at the same time its very explosive and dangerous! That’s how we were sometimes.
Then we had three children in four years! We love our children. They’re all grown and living for Christ. But parents make sacrifices for kids – all parents know that. We sacrificed some of our time together. We sacrificed financially so Deb could stay home with the kids. We started getting into debt, one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life. Debt weighs a lot of marriages down.
I was pastoring my first church and probably should have started out on somebody’s staff somewhere instead. But our small church did start growing and with that growth we had all the problems of new believers to contend with. Stress was piling up. Then my mother died of cancer and for the first time I decided to deal with the death of my dad from alcoholism ten years earlier. I’ve told you some of this stuff before.
But what I want to tell you today is, that through all of it I remember how weak and inadequate I felt inside. I was unsure of myself so many times I couldn’t possibly count them all. I mistreated Deb and she mistreated me.
Honestly, after hearing of the minister’s wife in Tennessee who recently shot her husband, I thought to myself, I don’t think Deb would ever have shot me, but I’m glad we’ve never had a gun in our house!
Add to all the normal stresses of marriage the stresses of a ministry marriage and it can be difficult. Especially if you let fear and feelings of inadequacy prevail.
The only way Deb and I got through those difficult days, the way we have grown so much stronger, and the reason we are so immensely happy together today, was by having the confidence that if we followed the instructions of God’s Word we would make it. We made some mistakes but we still believed in following Christ with all of our hearts.
That’s precisely the right posture to take in life! We knew we could have confidence in the teachings of the Bible because we had a living Savior! If Jesus weren’t alive today you could throw this Bible on the trash heap. Just toss it. But He is alive and His Word is better than solid gold!
When you feel inadequate or inferior – when you just don’t know what to do in your relationships, in raising kids, on your job, wherever, where can you find the confidence you need to thrive? Follow the teachings of a LIVING SAVIOR and trust Him for the outcome!
If you hit a bump in life you don’t have to worry. If you’re following Christ’s directions and doing what He told you to do in His word you can leave it all in His hands.
Because Christ conquered death as the fulfillment of numerous prophecies and with verifiable documented testimony - the Christ follower has unshakable confidence in the message of Christ! You may walk down the path that follows the instructions of Christ with the absolute assurance that you are going in the right way in life!
To know that the teachings of Christ are true and that when you follow them you don’t have to wonder whether or not you are doing the right thing is invaluable!
People pay big bucks to have others tell them what life is all about. They spend lifetimes trying to find meaning and purpose and all along Jesus provides these things.
You don’t need to go on a pilgrimage to a holy site. You don’t need to seek a maharaja sitting on top of some snow-covered mountain. You can have certainty that how you are living in your relationships and on the job and at school and in your community and in the church are right as long as you are living the way the Word of God instructs you to live.
Christ followers should not be more sad than anyone else, as Paul said we would be in verse 19 if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead. We should be more glad than anyone else because Jesus has conquered death, hell and the grave!
Living confidently is one of the birthrights of the believer! If you are following Jesus you are on the right road!
Have you ever been traveling somewhere far away from home in unfamiliar surroundings and for miles and miles you just don’t see the landmarks you think you’re supposed to see and you begin to doubt if you’re on the right road? You wonder if you’re going in the right direction? That’s a crummy feeling. The feeling that you’re lost.
If you are following Jesus you don’t have to experience that lost feeling! You don’t have to doubt. Landmarks may be few and far between sometimes because life occasionally stinks, (I’ll admit that) but because Jesus is The Way (John 14:6) you don’t have to worry or be afraid!
Somebody at Corinth was trying to get the believers off of the right road and Paul was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to tell them to stay on course. They were losing their confidence about the very thing about which they should have been confident!
1. Easter faith means you may live confidently!
2. Easter faith means you should live gratefully. 1 Corin. 15:21
Look again at verse 21 with me.
21 Death came because of a man, Adam. Being raised from the dead also came because of a Man, Christ.
Trace your roots back to Eden. Your forefather Adam decided to disobey God. He decided to sin – even after having been forewarned of the consequence of sin, which is death. And you and I inherited his sinful nature. You inherited the inclination or the predisposition to sin.
I think Bill Cosby’s comedic routine back in the 80’s personifies our tendency to say and do things that get us into trouble about as good as anything.
He said he knew that when his mother was angry she would always start with the words, "I am just sick and tired."
Cosby says, "Worst beating I ever got in my life, my mother said, ’Well I am just sick,’ and I said ’And tired.’ I don’t remember anything after that."
Have you ever wondered why sinning comes naturally to you? You think and say and do wrong and hurtful things without even having to try. It is thinking and saying and doing the right things that often takes effort, at least until you have matured and begin to respond correctly out of the habits you have formed in your life. And even then it takes the Supernatural power of the Holy Spirit to assist you in living right.
This problem stems from your membership in the human race. You are a son or daughter of Adam. And the Bible emphatically states that death came because of a man, Adam.
But the Scriptures immediately follow that bad news with good news! Being raised from the dead also came because of a Man, Christ.
You owe your ability to conquer death and to conquer the lifestyle that leads to death, to Christ. Once you make a faith commitment to Him you are given the power to overcome the penalty of sin, which is death. You are given the power to live a resurrected lifestyle!
But before that power becomes yours – you must admit that it was your sins put Jesus on the cross.
"Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us, we have to see it as something done by us." (John Stott)
My sins nailed Jesus to the cross. Your sins put Him there. The whole world is guilty, every one of us. Therefore each of us deserves the penalty for sin – death. But Jesus loved you so much He took sin’s penalty for you. Greatest love ever known is the love of God displayed on the cross on Skull Hill.
That kind of love should be returned with gratefulness.
One stormy night in Lake Michigan, a side-wheeler steamboat was rammed by another boat. The steamboat sank just a mile offshore from the village of Winnetka, Illinois. Out of 393 passengers on board, 279 drowned.
A man named Edward Spencer after seeing the situation unfold plunged into the lake and swam to the drowning people. He towed one person to shore and went for another. In all, he brought seventeen people to safety. However, the strain on this young man caused him to collapse. The nerves in his legs were so completely destroyed that he could never walk again. He was an invalid wheel chair victim for his entire life.
On his eightieth birthday, someone asked him to relate his most vivid memory of that dreadful day. He replied, "Not one of the seventeen returned to thank me."
Don’t live without thanking Jesus for the sacrifice He made for you!
1. Easter faith means you may live confidently.
2. Easter faith means you should live gratefully.
3. Easter faith means you may live hopefully.
1 Corinthians 15: 22 All men will die as Adam died. But all those who belong to Christ will be raised to new life.
When you read in First Corinthians which was written in the first century you realize that doubts about life after death aren’t new. For centuries man has wrestled with the concept of immortality. Is this life all there is? Or is there something after? The Bible clearly teaches that this life is only temporary but it will be followed by eternal residence either with God or apart from God.
Your preparation needs to be focused on spending that residence with God. And you also need to do everything that you can to get others to spend their eternal existence with God.
Why should you believe this? Why should you believe what the Bible says about life after death? Isn’t this "pie in the sky" stuff just the fanciful by-product of man’s wishful thinking? Don’t you have to be a weak person to believe in an afterlife because you’re naïve and you fear death?
Before we answer that question let me ask another? Aren’t people who don’t believe in an afterlife engaged in wishful thinking? It could be that they are hoping that there is no accountability when they die and that there is no authority over their lives before that time.
Psalms 10:4 (CSB) In all his scheming, the wicked arrogantly thinks: "There is no accountability, [since] God does not exist."
Non-belief in God is a convenient way for the agnostic and the atheist to stick his or her head in the sand. God won’t go away just because people don’t believe in Him.
Suppose tonight a burglar breaks into your house. As he steps into your bedroom, thinking you are asleep, you take your gun out of the drawer in the nightstand and say, "Stop right where you are or I’ll shoot."
Now suppose the criminal replies, "But I don’t believe in the existence of guns." Will his disbelief do him any good? I don’t think so.
Are the teachings of heaven and hell just intricate dogmas concocted by church leaders to keep people in line? Isn’t the Bible just one of many holy books? What makes Christianity distinctive? WHY SHOULD YOU BELIEVE?
For one thing, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is a distinctive of Christianity! And that’s why faith gives Easter meaning.
"Death is man’s greatest enemy, and it has conquered all men but Christ. No matter how brilliant or rich or strong he may be, no man is wise enough to outwit death or wealthy enough to purchase freedom from death or strong enough to vanquish death. The grave always wins the victory, and man sooner or later returns to the dust.
"In fact, the…triumph of death applies not only to man, but to all things. Animals die and plants die, and even whole species become extinct, and then fade away. Cities and nations, like people, are born and grow for a season, and then fade away. Homes and automobiles and clothes wear out and must eventually go back to dust, just as do their owners. Even the universe itself is running down…" (Many Infallible Proofs, Henry Morris)
Death is such a universal absolute that the Bible says in Romans 8:21 (NLT) All creation anticipates the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.
Freedom from death – that is what Jesus offers!
If you are a follower of Christ you are going to live forever! If you’re in what is commonly referred as mid-life, don’t sweat it. The other day it occurred to me – since I’m going to live forever, there’s no such thing as midlife! If you’re in your senior years remember that you’ll be young again in heaven! Forever!
In his book, "God Said It, Don’t Sweat It," The Christian Psychologist Neil Clark Warren tells about a Christian man who came to his office contemplating suicide because his wife was leaving him. Warren shared with this client the promise of eternal life in Christ and how it trumps even the serious and weighty problems of life.
And then he wrote something in his book that fascinated me. He said that through the years of counseling thousands of clients not one of them had committed suicide. He kept pointing his clients toward the hope of heaven and where’s there’s hope there’s always a reason to go on!
Easter faith means you can live hopefully.
1. Easter faith means you may live confidently.
2. Easter faith means you should live gratefully.
3. Easter faith means you may live hopefully.
The most important question to ask your self then is, "Do I have Easter faith?"
Have I placed my trust in what Jesus did by dying for me on the cross?
I want to give you an opportunity to do that today. Let’s bow our heads for prayer together. If living confidently, gratefully and hopefully appeals to you and if you want to make a faith commitment to Jesus today – pray something like this silently and sincerely from your heart today: "Jesus I thank you for dying on the cross in my place. I realize that you took my place. I’m a sinner but I want to become your follower. Forgive all my sins and give me eternal life. Give me the confidence and the hope that I need to face not only eternity – but every day. In Jesus’ name."
