Jesus' Resurrection

I would like us to, this morning, read from John chapter 20, another explanation or another angle on the resurrection, but specifically a wonderful moment between a disciple named Thomas and Jesus who comes to meet him. John 20 verse 24. Now Thomas, one of the 12, called the twin, was not with them when Jesus came after the resurrection. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger in the mark of the nails and place my hand into his side, I will never believe."

Eight days later, his disciples were inside again and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God."

Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in His name. So far, our reading.

Reading. So this morning, on Easter Sunday, we come to celebrate and to commemorate the most important parts of the Christian message. If you've been at our church for a while, you know that at Open House, we talk a lot about the gospel. We use that word a lot. The gospel is the story of Jesus and how He has saved humanity.

And that saving, that salvation has happened around this Easter event that we celebrate this weekend. Now I know that often there can be a lot of focus on talking about the sacrificial death of Jesus, what we celebrated on Friday. That we celebrate He was a perfect sacrifice, the atonement, the word we use. The atonement, or the substitute for us, taking on God's punishment for our sin on Himself. But I would go as far as saying that the whole Christian faith stands or falls on today, on what we celebrate today. There is nothing bigger in Christianity than Jesus Christ rising from the dead.

This is a very good summary that is up on the screen here of a man called Jim Elliff who puts it very simply, very concisely. He sums up the implications of Jesus' resurrection in this way. If Christ were not raised from the dead, then He is also morally unable to save us. Jesus told of His future death and His bodily resurrection on numerous occasions prior to it happening. And those predictions were lies if not fulfilled.

Deception negates His larger message. A deceiver could not be God nor a sinless Saviour. As sinful, He would not be able to satisfy the just requirements of the Father for a substitute on behalf of sinful people. If He were not raised, you should not only refuse to listen to Him, He could not save you even if you did. Here's a point.

The resurrection of Christ is not something we preach about. It's not something we believe in as some kind of wishful thinking, that what happened to Him on the cross was so horrible I hope that this is true so that He may be vindicated of that, or some sentimental desire that the horrible death He died was not a disappointing end to a promising leader.

The resurrection today is preached in the same way that it was preached two thousand years ago when it first happened. And what was said there is that the resurrection was a hard, bare, terribly inconvenient, horribly confronting fact. The passage we read this morning in John 20 talks about this eyewitness account of a man with some of us may really relate to: doubting, sceptical Thomas. And we see Jesus coming to Thomas and allowing him his desire to touch the marks, to see the flesh and the bone of Jesus. And having seen all of this, Thomas, what does he do?

He falls to his knees. He hardly can stand up under the weight of this fact, and he declares like no good Jew believing in Yahweh God would do. He says of Jesus, ostensibly a man, "My Lord and my God." My Lord and my God, he says to Jesus. The Gospel of John records then we see three more events after this of the resurrected Jesus coming to His disciples, even at one point eating with them, eating breakfast with them.

Why does He do this? To prove that He's the real deal. He is no hallucination. He is no psychological mass hallucination of the disciples desiring so badly that their saviour or that their master isn't gone. He eats bread and fish with them.

He is alive in flesh and blood. Three times Jesus visits His disciples to prove this. Why? Why? Because it was as hard to believe back then as it is now.

And people saw this and they experienced this. And therefore they were changed forever. The physical resurrection of Jesus back from the dead became the springboard, the launching pad for the Christian church. It was the single reason that these scared disciples huddling in the upper room could take on this message of losing your life for the sake of this Jesus, God-man, and losing your life but gaining eternal life. Each one, we know, dying for this message.

Each one martyred for this message. It changed them forever. And as Paul said and as they also proclaimed, "Because He lives, we too also will live." Because this Jesus is alive today, we know that we will also live even if we die. For them, Christ's resurrection proved everything that Jesus had preached was true, should be and could be and must be believed.

So friends, let me ask you this question then. For you, why is Easter Sunday good news? Why is the resurrection good news for you? Why would it make such a lasting change and effect on these disciples of Jesus? Why will you change your entire life, the trajectory of your life, the way you live this life, why would you change it in honour of Jesus?

Well, three reasons. The first one is that because of the resurrection of Jesus, there is a personal hope. Things haven't changed too much in two thousand years. In the time of Jesus, there were philosophies much like ours today who said similar things. At exactly the same time when Jesus' message of the resurrection is being excitedly shared among the first Christians, there were major philosophical movements of that day that were sceptical about this news.

That they would have heard this, and it would have not sat well with their understandings. Listen to the similarities between then and now. They were the Greek Epicureans, a popular philosophical movement that believed that life could only be lived in the here and the now. There was, in other words, nothing after death. We live and we die and that's it.

Very similar to our modern day atheists today. Life can only be what you see and what you touch. Their famous catch cry, we still repeat today: "Eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we die." This is of course why the term when you say to someone who enjoys their food and enjoys their wine, say they're a real Epicurean because they indulge in everything.

Whether it was sex, whether it was food, whether it was alcohol, it was gorged on because it's all pointless. Moderation isn't necessary. We'll die tomorrow and that's the end of it. Then on the other side, almost the opposite, there were the Stoics who are similar to today's Eastern philosophies. They believe that when you die, you continue to exist, but not in some personal sense, not in a personal self.

You become part of a greater existence. You become a part of the substance that makes up the world. You get to this higher level of existence through living in harmony with what they call divine reason. Enlightened understanding. Sounds familiar.

The magical force that governs all of nature. Stoics were often very disciplined. They limited the indulgences of the Epicureans. They would work hard to be indifferent to the pursuits of life or the things that they considered less desirable like pleasure. Why?

Because that was lesser than attaining perfect knowledge of the universe. And so they would discipline themselves not to care about any pain or pleasure because these things are immaterial and hinder the progress to this divine knowledge. So when you say someone's very stoic, it means that they are, you know, very reserved, that you don't see anything in their facial expressions or that's how we use the word. But it comes from this idea that they are without emotion.

Now these views, I promise you, existed in the time of Jesus. They were well and truly developed philosophies, and you can still see that some of these philosophies flow over into our world today. Buddhism, Hinduism, very much in this sort of Stoicism idea, and then, like I said, our modern classical atheism very much in this Epicurean understanding. There is nothing new under the sun as the bible says. But here comes Christianity. In the midst of these views, and it provides this deal breaker, it proclaims something that flips the table and cannot sit well with any of these views.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is what they proclaim. Now how does this flip the table? Well, this first point says that it points towards a future that is personal. A time after death where there is a person that remains. Unlike a Stoic understanding of how we all somehow get absorbed into the universe or the Epicurean view that we must all die and just become worm food, the resurrection says your self, you as a person continues in flesh and bone even after you've died.

This is what the resurrection of Jesus shows us. Now why does this matter? Why will even a non-Christian like the idea of an afterlife called the resurrection? Because we are creatures who love. Because we are creatures who love.

Bear with me. All of us, whether we believe or we don't believe, whether we have different views or different philosophies, we all want to love and we all want to be loved. It's in our nature. It is hardwired into us. The single hardest thing about our existence, therefore, is becoming separated from our loved ones.

The hardest thing is to lose them, especially through death. When we lose loved ones, there is something in us that screams, "This is horrible. This is unfair. This is not how it should be." Now we ask ourselves if we were Epicureans, and death was a normal part of life.

If death is as neutral as life, it is not better or worse, there is no point in either, then why do we hate losing the ones we love in death? Why do we mourn them? It is because the one thing we do not want is to lose those we love. And so death is the ultimate enemy of love. Not hatred.

Not anger. Death. When Jesus Christ shows Himself physically resurrected to His disciples in John 20 and says, "Hey, guys. It's me. It's me myself."

You know what happens? You see it, don't you? They recognize Him. They know who it is. Jesus somehow has a body that can stand in the midst of a locked room.

He's somehow moved through the door, but it's still Him. What incredible, incredible joy that would have been. The one they love has not been lost for eternity. The resurrection of Easter Sunday says that, therefore, that for all those who place their trust in the Christ of the cross, they will enter into a resurrection from the dead that leads to an eternal life instead of eternal death and that this wonderful future is personal. We will know who our brothers and our sisters are when we get there.

We will know who Jesus is just like He knows who we are. And that is something that will remain with you. Something of who you are here will remain with you there. So there is a personal hope because of the resurrection of Jesus, but then there's also a certain hope. And here's what I mean by certain.

What good is it to be told that there is a personal future, a personal hope for us, love without parting, love without death if you can't be certain that it's for you? Martin Luther was really good at it when he said, "Suffering is intolerable, intolerable if you're not sure of your salvation." When Jesus comes to the disciples at His resurrection, every time He greets them, He greets them with this phrase, "Peace be with you." John writes this down very specifically because the resurrection of Jesus gives unconquerable peace. Unless you are sure that in spite of all your flaws, in spite of all your troubles in life, and there may be many, if you're not sure that God has worked out all of this in the end, then suffering in this life is intolerable.

It is unbearable. But if the resurrection of Jesus Christ is true, then the resurrection says you can be certain of this hope. Why? Because the resurrection of Jesus, His individual resurrection is a down payment, is a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for His followers, for His disciples. One Corinthians 15:22, Paul puts it this way.

"For as in Adam all die, because of Adam's sin, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order, each in this order, first, Christ, the first fruit, then at His coming, those who belong to Christ." The resurrection of Jesus makes our hope certain, and this truth actually starts changing our life here and now. Knowing that we will be with Him, knowing that because Jesus lives, I will live, it changes how we live now. It gives us hope.

I've used this example before, but Tim Keller uses this illustration. He says that there are two imaginary men. Two identical men who are hired to do the same job. They have to build gadgets, iPhones, let's say. It's a very boring, monotonous job.

They work in identical conditions, ten hours a day, they work. Thirty minutes off for lunch, that's all they get. Six days a week, they work. There is only one difference between these two men. The one man, when he begins working at his company, is offered ten thousand dollars per year to do this.

The second man is offered ten million dollars a year. What happens? One man will hate his work. He will hate his life even. The other man will enjoy his life and he may even enjoy his work.

Why is that? Because what they are told about their future completely transforms the way they see their present. The resurrection of Jesus is a down payment of what is awaiting every believer. It is a first deposit by God stamped across the history of mankind that this is awaiting all of us who believe. And so seeing Jesus resurrected gives us certainty of the hope we hold on to.

And then finally, because of the resurrection of Jesus, there is an unimaginably joyful hope. Study any kind of world religion today and they will teach you of some kind of spiritual future. They will tell you in Buddhism or in Islam of a Nirvana or a Valhalla or a Shangri La, but there is a significant difference when it comes to the Christian faith. Those other religions promise a consolation for what you've lost. You've had a tough life.

You've lost a lot, but here you go, 72 virgins for you. You gain what you have lost back. Or Buddhism's Nirvana is a little bit different. They will say you've experienced great pain. You've worked really hard in this life to stay disciplined and stay the course, to not indulge in these pleasures because emotion is suffering, but now Nirvana, which is full enlightenment, also an absorption into the universe, Nirvana offers you no more emotion.

No more emotion. No desires. You may have experienced great pain, but now you won't feel sad anymore. But of course, you won't feel happy at all either. An eternity of neutrality for what you've lost.

So most of the world's religions actually work on a similar system, holding out some reward even in the afterlife. But the resurrection of Christ doesn't simply promise a consolation. It promises a restoration. Resurrection is a restoration of something, something you have always known you wanted but never had. You will have a physical body that the disabled person never had.

You will have health that the terminally ill person, that the long term sufferer never had. For those with mental illness, for those with a terminal illness, there is hope, but it goes further than this because the resurrection is not only a consolation, it is a restoration. It is receiving a body that is perfect, that you never had. But it goes beyond it because it says our nature, our character is restored as well. If you have become aware that there is the stain of sin on your heart, if you grieve ever in your life over the lack of discipline you have to live the life that you should, if you are painfully aware of how weak your character is. The resurrection doesn't just give a consolation of "Here you go, reincarnation to try again.

Give it another go." The resurrection says, "You will become virtuous in every sense. You will become perfect even in your character, which is so hard to change." The bible in Colossians 1:22 puts it this way: "But now God has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy, to present you holy in His sight without blemish and free from any accusation." That is just all encompassing, isn't it?

A personality, a goodness that you never had but somehow you missed and you longed for. If you are aware of your own moral weaknesses, whether that be sexual, whether that is your anger, whether that is your insecurity, whether that is your greed. The resurrection holds out that a hope for a kind and compassionate you is available. You don't just get your life back. You get the life that you've always wanted but never had.

Now the resurrection of Jesus is therefore walking proof of an unimaginably joyful future. There is no religion, therefore, no philosophy. There is certainly no human being who can offer this hope, this happiness, this joy with certainty. The eyewitness account of the resurrection, what we've read and what Nikki read before, the thing we stopped to reflect on today gives us a hope of this. And friend, I hope you take this hope with you.

If you believe it, this hope gives you power to endure even the most anguishing parts of life. And so if you're not a Christian, let me ask you this. If you're not a believer in Jesus Christ, let me ask you this. Wouldn't you want this? Wouldn't you want this?

If you want this, even if some parts of the Christian message are confusing to you and you don't understand why, if you want this, then it is available to you to receive today. Everything else will fall into place, I promise you, but receive this today. Put your trust in Jesus Christ. Put your trust and your hope in His death, His sacrifice on the cross, but also this life, this reality of His resurrection because it means the world. Friend, there is a Saviour who has died for your sin.

He has paid for it all through His perfect sacrifice, a perfect life offered up for an imperfect life of yours. Blood must atone for blood as the law says. Life for life. But today we hear this Saviour, really. He is a Saviour because His sacrifice was shown to be acceptable to God.

If it wasn't, like we read in that quote, if He was sinful and He was a blemished sacrifice, He would be dead today still. But because He was perfect, because He is incomparable in His perfection and His holiness, He was raised to life because God is just and cannot unjustly punish those who are holy. Only a perfect sacrifice could pay your debts and also be returned to life. And so now Jesus' eternal life shows us what lies ahead. And so again, I wanna urge you, if you sense His majesty, if you sense His glory, if you sense His prompting working in you today, don't leave here unchanged.

Please don't. Speak to someone. Pray with someone. Receive this because it can be yours. Jesus lives, and therefore, you will also live.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you. Lord Jesus, we thank you. Jesus, our Lord, You said, "I have the authority to lay down my life for these people of mine, but I have authority to take it back up again." Lord Jesus, You said, "No one takes my life.

I give it. I offer it." No one really murdered You on that day. No one really won over You on that day. You have the authority to lay it down and You have the authority to take it up again.

We thank you, Lord, that those first witnesses were faithful enough to investigate this. We see our own weakness in them and we thank you, Lord, that even that has been recorded for us. That in their scepticism, in their doubts, Lord, You were faithful. You stooped low to show Yourself and to comfort them, to be with them and to say to them, "Peace, peace be with you." We thank you, God, for our peace this morning.

We thank you, God, for our joy, our hope this morning. I hope that is personal, that will affect me for eternity. I hope that will transform my life here and now. And Father, a hope that is wonderfully joyful because it will transform my eternity forever. I will be who You've always wanted me to be.

I will be what I have always longed to be. Thank you for this promise, God. May our lives be changed by it. May our lives be called to a higher calling because of this. And may we give honour and glory through these lives right now to You as well.

In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.