Stop, Look, Listen & Live! Series

This world is a dangerous place. If there’s any lesson the congregation of Risen King may have learned over the past three months or so is just how vulnerable we human being are to tragedies that may overtake us very suddenly.

That the world is a dangerous place is something that most of being to understand when we’re very, very young. I remember it being emphasized, even as many of you do, in those first days and years that I began attending school—as a kindergartener and first-grader in Southern California, at Mira Linda Elementary School in Buena Park California, in the late 1950s. For it was there, as a tiny new student, that I learned a clever phrase which would be repeated by my teachers over and over again whenever we approached bus tops and cross walks, a phrase that has served me well ever since, “Stop, Look and Listen.” Most of you are familiar with that refrain, having heard and learned it yourself. Every time you approach a street, and consider crossing it, first, stop, don’t go running across without a thought. Look. Look to the right and to the left for any approaching traffic that might mow you down in a second. Finally, Listen. If you don’t see anything, open up those ears, just to make sure that if you can’t see something that there isn’t something or someone coming that is out of sight, before you make that fateful step into the street, and possibly into harm’s way.

This morning I want to suggest to you that the same wise reminders can be extremely important in the spiritual realm when it comes to addressing the issues of life and death, and how to find eternal life and a right relationship with God. In our busyness as adults, especially in modern society with all its demands and now all its technological distractions, it’s hard to find a moment in which we stop and consider anything God has said or done. It’s hard to take time, serious time to look into the evidence that resurrection and eternal life are real options which people may take hold of for them. And finally, with all the racket from cell phones, i-phones, TV and radio, it seems impossible at times, to listen to the promises of God and give them our serious attention.

But the spiritual realm, in terms of it dangers, is no different from our physical world. What is at stake for those who will not Stop, Look, and Listen to the things God has provided for us actually risk even more than those who send their children out without instructions about how to cross a street. For it can be a matter, and is a matter, of spiritual life or death, even eternal destruction versus eternal life.

And it was on, coincidentally, a Sunday morning now 2,000 years ago that three special people discovered just how necessary it is to Stop, Look and Listen for their own eternal welfare. The three were among the half-dozen or so people who were most devoted to the Lord Jesus Christ during his earthly sojourn. Two of them were men, Simon Peter, the most prominent of the disciples, and the humbly Apostle John, who described Himself in his own eyewitness account of his time with Jesus, the Gospel of John, as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Indeed, each of them was a member of that intimate inner circle three of Jesus’, and each were destined to become reckoned as leaders among the Apostles of Jesus Christ. And then there was Mary Magdalene, whose devotion to Jesus Christ was perhaps only rivaled by Mary of Bethany—who with John was among those select followers of Jesus, including Jesus’ mother Mary, who stood next to and closest to the cross of Christ as their beloved Savior uttered his last words and gave up his life. It was Mary Magdalene, the apparent leader of the women who followed Jesus, who then remained behind to see what would happen to Jesus’ body, and followed Joseph of Arimathea to his tomb to watch as He and Nicodemus would prepare Jesus’ body for burial by wrapping in linen strips filled with burial species for his eventual, and apparent, final resting place in Joseph’s. For Mary Magdalene had a plan—once the Sabbath day had passed, on that third day, Sunday, after Christ’s death on the Passover—that she and other women would return to the burial site to honor Jesus’ body with even more burial spices before they said their final good-byes to the one she so dearly loved.

Now before we go any further with the story, I want to ask you a question—for you personally. What assurance do you have of eternal life? When loved ones have experience what all of us are destined to experience, death, have you had any hope, any confident expectation—that you might see them again. Or is there just some vague, and perhaps, superstitious notion in your mind, that there might be a possibility, but you don’t know or where you will see them again. When you think of those you have loved who have passed on, is there an emptiness and a still unrequited, unsettled grief about your loss of them, because in your heart of hearts, you believe the loss is probably permanent.