The Resurrection, The Reason To Praise Him (Sermon)

The Resurrection, the reason to praise Him..1 Corinthians 15:

3 Buddies were talking about death and one asked the others:

What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?

• One said...."He was a great man, who cared about his community."

• Another said...."He was a great husband and Dad, who was an example for many to follow."

The 3rd one said ....I want someone to say.....

• "Look, he’s moving!!"

We are going to look at one of the most important scriptures in the Bible…this could be an Easter message....this could be the complete gospel message because it deals with everything we clam to believe.

1 Corinthians 15:12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?

13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:

14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.

15 Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.

16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:

17 And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.

Apostle Paul wrote 1 Corinthians chapter 15 to straighten out the hearsays and the perverted gospel that was being spread in the city of Corinth.

Corinth was the sin center of the Roman Empire in Paul’s day.

The spirit of the world seemed to have more influence in the Corinthians than church did the Spirit of God.

Kind of like our Hollywood or Los Angeles but, it was even worse if you could imagine that.

Some in Corinth ....mostly Greeks were teaching there was no resurrection ....but, Paul says ...if there is no resurrection then our faith is in vain and we are still in our sins.

But, to understand their thinking some of the Greek culture...they had the idea that the body was a prison in which the soul was incarcerated and when someone died.........

The soul that is good is freed.

To a person with this kind of thinking or religion the idea of any bodily Resurrection would have been offensive to them.

There may have been a reaction to a popular Jewish idea of that day

Some believe that the resurrection meant that the present physical life would start all over again.

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians some 20 years after the events of Christ.

Think about this ......if we had Apostle Paul, John and maybe Apostle Peter were here today and ask each one to stand and give a personal account of what happen and how they felt during those 3 days of the death, burial and resurrection of our Lord....I believe their stories would be different than what you might think...

..I believe each one would give account of how it felt to lose a close friend and someone they loved

**Seeing them nail Him to a Roman cross....watching as people spit upon Him....laughed at Him....hung a sign around His neck saying The King Of The Jews....watching as He drew His last breath and then a soldier stuck a sword in His side and they watched as blood and water ran out of His lifeless body then ...in 3 days find out He was alive again.

That’s our Saviour.....that’s our King ....our friend...our Shepherd.

ILLU: I read a true story of a mother in Chanute Kansas

It was Feb 1991, in the middle of Desert Storm war, that Ruth Dillow received a message from the Pentagon that all parents can only imagine the horror of getting.

They told her that her son from a previous marriage Clayton Carpenter, Private 1st Class, had stepped on a mine in Kuwait and had been killed.

Ruth Dillow later wrote, "I can’t begin to describe my grief and shock. It was almost more than I could bear. For days I wept. For days I expressed anger and loss. For days relatives and friends tried to comfort me, but, there was no comfort because the loss of my son was too great."

But a few days later she received another phone call the voice on the other end said, "Mom, it’s me. I’m alive." Ruth Dillow said, "I couldn’t believe it at first. But then I recognized my sons voice and he really was alive."

The first message she had received was all a mistake...it was meant for another family across the country....he had been injured but, was fine.

She wrote, "I laughed, I cried, I felt like turning cartwheels, because my son whom I had thought was dead, was really alive.