The King Lives - Easter 2005

The King Lives

Pastor Glenn Newton

March 27, 2005

JN 11:25 Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; 26 and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

Phil. 3:10 “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.”

Text : Luke 24:1-8

LK 24:1 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 `The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ " 8 Then they remembered his words.

This morning we celebrate the single most important fact of the Christian Faith. Without the fact of the Resurrection our Faith, my preaching would be of no value…. You see… without the resurrection, without the empty tomb, without the knowledge that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples and met with them, ate with them, gave them many convincing proofs of his resurrection… without all those things.. Are faith would be without hope.. And of no value.

But today, Praise God… He Is Risen! (He is Risen Indeed) Do you realize that this creed, this tradition is one of the oldest traditions in the Church… do you know why? Because it’s true! And His people, there was no doubt in there mind… they knew the truth and that truth made them free and fearless to share the news…. He Is Risen! (He is Risen Indeed)

The King Lives…. Don’t you just want to shout that this morning? Repeat it after me… The King Lives…

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading various books that provide compelling evidence that backs up our Christian beliefs to the point that there is no question that what our Bible teaches… it’s true.

Lee Strobel writes in his book, “The Case for Christ” “Without question, the amount of testimony and corroboration of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances is staggering. To put it into perspective, if you were to call each one of the witnesses to a court of law to be cross-examined for just 15 minutes each, and you went around the clock without a break, it would take you from breakfast on Monday until dinner on Friday to hear them all. After listening to 129 strait hours of eyewitness testimony, who could possibly walk away unconvinced?”

In 1963 the body of 14 year old Addie Mae Collins, one of four African-American girls tragically murdered in an infamous church bombing by white racists, was buried in Birmingham, Alabama. For years family members kept returning to the grave to pray and leave flowers. In 1998 they made the decision to move the deceased for reburial at another cemetery.

When the workers were sent to dig up the body, however, they returned with a shocking discovery: The grave was empty. Of coarse, family members were terribly distraught. Hampered by poorly kept records, cemetery officials scrambled to figure out what had happened. Several possibilities were raised, the primary one being that her tombstone had been erected in the wrong place.

In the midst of determining what happened, one explanation was never proposed: Nobody suggested that young Addie May had been resurrected to walk the earth again. Why? Because by itself an empty grave does not a resurrection make. (The Case for Christ, pg. 225)

Friends, the facts are, we don’t just have a empty tomb… We don’t just have a nice little story that we all are hoping is true.. We don’t just have some tradition that is based on heresay and myths…. What we do have is Truth, based on Facts.

Your Christian Faith is not Flimsy… You do not have to put away common sense to believe in what the Bible teaches, because it’s basis is the Truth, and that Truth is backed up with just as much, if not more evidence than any other single act in all of history… you don’t believe me… you do the research… discover for yourself what so many scholars have discovered…. The King Lives. You can believe it… He’s alive today because He rose from the Dead and He is with the Father this morning… Do you believe?