This Is Love

This is Love

Easter Sunday (April 21, 2019) – Brad Bailey

[In the following message given at Easter, the following resurrection narrative was read earlier in the service: John 20:1, 16-22 (NIV).]

Intro: As we come to engage what today is all about, it will be helpful to personally consider:

How big is your world?

What is the ultimate reality in which you exist?

We do well to ask ourselves that question…because what we engage on this day bears the power to transforms our limited perspective.

The current trend for many today… is to believe that “This is all there is.”

• Maybe it represents a type of courage to face a hard truth.

• Maybe it is deemed to be associated with being a person of facts over faith.

> But if we allow ourselves to reflect a little more deeply… it seems to me that such a posture reflects the same lack of limited perspective that has always proven to be wrong in our assumptions.

For a long time… we believed that the world was flat…that of we ventured too far…or sailed too far…we would drop off the edge. We may laugh at that idea now…but it made sense given that everything appears flat. Then we understood that we lived on a spherical planet…but we believed that the sun revolved around the earth…after all…it appears to rise each day… we assumed we were the center… but we would come to realize that we are but a small planet rotating around the sun. Again…the problem… a limited perspective.

At each juncture human beliefs became certain that they understood reality… because it was assumed that we had enough perspective. And so we should wonder why we should presume that we know the whole of reality today. And in fact the most current understanding in physics points to a realm that lies outside time and space as we know it. And that gives reason to assume that we are the finite… who cannot presume to grasp the infinite.

And the event we come to today… declares that indeed the world is bigger…infinitely bigger.

Jesus comes confronting the limited perspective. In fact, when Jesus came, there was already a parallel view… “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”

[1] Listen to what Jesus said…

John 3:11, 13-16 (NIV) ?I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen… 13  No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven--the Son of Man. 14  Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15  that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. 16  "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Jesus confronts our presumption to think we understand the big picture. How can you presume to know what is beyond you? He has come from the heavenly realm.

He is the intersection of two realms.

He declared that the God behind all creation was at hand…and breaking into this world…restoring it… redeeming it. Everything about him revealed something beyond this world. A curtain was opened… and then it seemed to close… he was crucified. He hadn’t simply died… he was crucified by the very powers that rule this world…and that first Sunday morning… we find his followers back to hiding…some willing to go treat the dead…because death had won.

How many of us may have felt a longing stirred… connected with...only to then seem confused… return into a safe mode….and in our own ways… we are just ‘treating death’… wrapping up death.

The event that we celebrate in Easter…Christ defeating the powers of this world… including death… radically transforms our understanding of what defines our lives.

Jesus declares that we exist within a larger reality and a larger story.

The resurrection was not merely a moment.

Rooted in real life…in real time and space living… but it is that which reveals what is timeless.

It is in the story…but redefines the whole story. [2]

Jesus would surmise the story line this way…

“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” - John 3:16

> “For God so LOVED…” – At the root of what we come to today…is love.

Behind the whole of the life, death, and raising of Christ… is the power of divine love.

The resurrection of Christ reveals…

1. There is a Love that rules all of life.

The resurrection declares the power of the personal and eternal Love that lies behind all of life.