Easter Sunday - He Is Risen!
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
Amen and Happy Easter! Okay, we gotta do it one more time. I know Pastor Andre did it again, but we gotta do it one more time. He is risen! He is risen! Amen and Amen. That is why we are here, right? We are here to celebrate, to acknowledge, to show our gratitude that not only did Jesus die for us, but He didn't stay dead. He rose from the grave and gave us power over sin and death, so we can have eternal life with Him. Again, I am so glad you are here today. I am Pastor Lauren, if I haven't had a chance to meet you. We have a packed service today, so we are just going to dive right into the Word. If you would turn with me to John 20, you can pull it up on your phones or Bible. We got Bibles in the seats in front of you. It will also be up on the screens if you need it as well. We are just going to read through. It is a good-sized chunk of Scripture, but we are going to read through when the disciples discover that the tomb is empty.
Read along with me. John 20, verses 1-18. Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, "They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have put Him." So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there, but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally, the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to where they were staying. Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?" "They have taken my Lord away," she said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her, "Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him and I will get him." Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni," which means "Teacher." Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news, "I have seen the Lord," and she told them that he had said these things to her. Amen? Amen.
The disciples have just been through a really tough weekend. They saw their Lord crucified and buried, and then they discover that his body has been taken. Jesus had told them that he would rise again, but they did not fully understand it. They go off and tell the other disciples what is going on. Mary is here, still at the tomb. She is weeping. She is distraught. She is in such deep grief. She is so involved and consumed with finding Jesus' body that she does not even recognize Jesus. I do not know, maybe she had tears in her eyes, or she was not even looking at him. She was just frantic. Or maybe his physical appearance had changed after the resurrection. But for whatever reason, she does not recognize him. Until he says her name. She was distracted and disoriented and grieving, but then Jesus said, "Mary." In only the way and tone and inflection that Jesus could, I imagine that she was not even looking at him, and he said her name, and she turned and she knew. Just because he was the only one who could say her name, just like that. Jesus called Mary's name, and she recognized him. One commentator about this passage that I was reading this week said, "Jesus revealed himself, not by who he was, but by who she was." You see, our identity is wrapped up in the resurrected Jesus. Our identity is who he says that we are. That because he rose from the grave, because he is resurrected, he has changed us. We become a resurrection people.
Because of his death and resurrection, we experience true freedom and a new identity in him. We are changed. We're a resurrection people. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone. The new is here." That is good news. It is good news. That because he died, because he paid the price for our sins, and then because he rose from the grave, we experience true freedom that can only come from him. And we have a new identity in who he says we are. On Good Friday a couple nights ago, we gathered together for a service to honor and reflect on his death. We read scripture, and we talked about the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. Because the reality is the resurrection is amazing, but there is no resurrection if there is no death first. In our modern day, I think sometimes we forget how gruesome the crucifixion was, or we try to maybe separate ourselves. We read over the passages, and it's like, "Okay, he was crucified. The end. Move on." We don't necessarily let it sink in, the level of pain and anguish that he endured. But the reality is that it was awful. Jesus endured the cross for us. And only love would go to the cross for someone else. Only love would endure such excruciating pain for people that hated him, and despised him, and mocked him. Only love, only divine love, would stay on a cross when he could have gotten himself off. He chose to stay on that cross for us. Romans 5:8 says, "But God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." He did it when we were still sinning, when we were still outside of relationship with him.
He died for us. What he did was this deep, beautiful, only God kind of love. And because of his sacrifice, our sins are forgiven. The price has been paid. There is no more price to be paid. Through his death and resurrection, he restored what was broken. He made us new, and he put his righteousness on us. 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." That means that we have now direct access to God. We can approach the throne of grace freely. There is nothing there to block us. Because of his death and resurrection, he put his righteousness on us. But we couldn't do this ourselves. He did it because he was the only one who could do it. He is perfectly God and perfectly man. He was sinless. And the reality was that God is holy, but he wanted a relationship with his people. And because God is holy, he cannot make himself less holy to stoop down to our level. He can't become less holy, so he had to make a way for us to be holy in order to be in relationship with him. He had to make us right. And only Jesus qualified as the perfect sacrifice. But now, because of that sacrifice, we have been set free, and we can have a direct relationship with God. But because Jesus was the only one who could do this, we have to remember that it wasn't by anything that we did. There is nothing that we can do that can save us. There's no amount of good works or living rightly, performing, producing. There's nothing we can do that we can earn our salvation. It's only by his sacrifice. It is only by the death and resurrection of Jesus that we can be saved. Now, for most of us, this is really good news. That we can't do anything to earn our salvation. We can't do anything to save ourselves. That's good news. But I imagine there's some of us in this room that maybe have a slightly different response. Maybe your initial reaction is, "But I don't deserve it. I've sinned too much, or I've been gone away from him for too long. I don't deserve that kind of gift." Or maybe you're thinking, "Okay, yeah, sure, but I have to do something to earn this, right? Surely there's something that I have to do to get this incredible gift. Or if nothing else, I have to do something to keep it. Maybe he'll give it to me, but I have to keep striving in order to keep hold of this thing that he has given me." Well, if you're in the first group of thinking that you don't deserve it, I'm here to tell you today, you're right. But that's the point. You don't deserve it. None of us do. But here's the thing, if you deserved it, you wouldn't need it. You wouldn't need the gift because you'd already saved yourself. And if you're in kind of that second group of thinking, it's just another, the other side of the same coin. You can't do anything to save yourself. There is no catch. There is no, "Okay, yeah, but." No, there is no, no, there's no, "Yeah, but." It just is a gift. Again, if there was a way for you to earn it, you wouldn't need his gift of salvation. I heard a pastor this week on a podcast talking about the things that we do as Christians. Good things, like, you know, praying and going to church and the good things we do out of our love for Jesus. And he said, "When we do those things, we are not earning, we are inheriting." We're not earning, we're inheriting.
Because the reality is when we accept Jesus' gift of salvation, we become adopted into his family. We are the sons and daughters of Christ. We are co-heirs with Christ. So by the power of his death and resurrection, we are adopted into the family of God. I had never caught this before, but in the John 20 passage we read earlier, Jesus tells Mary Magdalene, "Go tell my brothers," meaning the disciples, "Go tell them what you've seen." But before this, he had never called them that. He had called them servants. He had called them friends. But he had never called them brothers. But because of his sacrifice and his resurrection, they are now family. Their identity, again, back to that idea of identity, their identity has changed. We too are family. We have been adopted into the family of God. If we believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, we are part of his family with all the rights and privileges of a son or daughter. When we have a legal adoption in our country, the child becomes part of that family. They have all the same rights and privileges of any other person in that family. Their parents are their parents. They get the same inheritance. They are a sibling. They are part of that family with all the rights and privileges of a natural-born child. They are brought in. They take on that name, their last name. They are part of that family. Galatians 4:7, "So you are no longer a slave, but God's child. And since you are his child, God has made you also an heir." There's nothing we have to do to earn this adoption status. Because we're not earning, friends. We're inheriting. If Jesus declares that you are forgiven and righteous and made new, and he does, then the literal only thing you have to do is to not fight against it, to not resist it. If you believe that he died and rose again and paid the penalty for your sins, then you're a follower of Jesus and you get to spend eternity with him in his glory and in his presence.
Friends, if you've already made the decision to follow Jesus, if you've declared that he is Lord of your life and received his forgiveness, then let this day be a day of celebration, like a birthday. Just a reminder of his goodness and his sacrifice and his love for you. Because it's such a powerful day. We get to celebrate Easter whenever we want as Jesus followers, but today is extra special, right? We get to really just focus in on it and celebrate it. But I have a little bit of a challenge for us as we wrap things up today. I want us to ask ourselves this question. Maybe just kind of take it into your week, think about it. But for those of us who call ourselves Christ followers, the challenge for us is how does my life reflect that his death and resurrection changed my life and my identity? How does my life, my words, my actions, my decisions, my priorities, my responses to things, how does that reflect his death and resurrection changed my life and my identity? Because it should. Your life should look different than the world's. Your life should look different than it did before. And friends, if you've never made the decision to follow Jesus, if you haven't surrendered your life to him, and you're wondering if Jesus maybe is for you, I just encourage you to consider that today. Consider that maybe he's calling you and he wants to change your identity. Jesus wants a personal relationship with you and he went to the cross for it. We are going to head into our time of baptisms today. But as you watch these people get dunked underwater and representing raised to new life, consider what that would maybe mean for you. That maybe today is the day that you surrender your life and enter into a relationship with Jesus.
Pray with me. Jesus, we thank you for who you are. We thank you for raising from the dead. We thank you that not only did you sacrifice for us, but you chose not to stay dead. And we can declare that we serve a living God. We thank you that we get to celebrate your resurrection today through worship and the word and through the testimonies of those being baptized today. We love you, Jesus, in your name. Amen.