Resurrection

You may have heard of this phrase that Benjamin Franklin, the great statesman of America, wrote one time. He said that there is nothing in this world that is certain except death and taxes. Now today, we celebrate that even the death part isn't as certain. But the tax man, well, you can't outrun them, can you? Just ask good old Paul Crocodile Dundee Hogan, who had to come back to Australia, was detained when he came back for I think it was the funeral of his mom.

And the ATO caught him and had him try to pay back all his back taxes that he was still owing to them. Fat chance, Mister Dundee, they said. In fact, Mister Dundee probably had more chance of hiding out in the outback than in America where he was living. But today, we celebrate the moment where God overcame at least one of these two. We see in the story of the resurrection a crack in the armour, the impenetrable armour, which is death.

We see a little ray of light breaking through the shadow that lays across all of our lives because really, we won't escape it. The truth is you may actually evade the taxman. People probably have. But no one escapes the finality of death. Without the resurrection, without the resurrection, our faith, Christianity, falls flat on its face.

It loses all of its power. Our faith, the apostle Paul says, is useless without the resurrection. Because you see, if the resurrection didn't happen, not only would we look very silly for believing what we believe, but more importantly, the whole hope that we hold onto disappears. One Corinthians 15:17, Paul writes and he sums this up. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sin.

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sin. There are three things for us on this Easter Sunday to remember and to reflect on about the importance, the centrality of the resurrection. The first thing that I want to point out is that the resurrection changes lives. Jesus' resurrection changed the lives of His disciples. We have that witness.

We have that testimony. It changed the lives of His disciples. After Jesus was crucified, or at least in the run up to it, the disciples all ran and hid. You know this story very well. The disciples who had seen Jesus perform these amazing miracles, power over physical ailments, power over dark forces and demons.

When Jesus died, they thought it was all over and they hid. But when they saw the risen Lord, they knew that it was Jesus who was the real Messiah, and everything that He had said up until that point was true. They knew that He was Lord, that He was King. Last night, I don't know if you caught it on SBS, they were playing the Passion of the Christ again. And I don't know if you've seen it.

I don't know if that's sort of your cup of tea. I know it's very violent. But I was moved again last night by the image of Peter in this story denying Jesus three times. As soon as he finishes denying Jesus for the third time, it's like a light comes on and he remembers that Jesus had foretold that he would be denying Him three times, just the night before. And he is beside himself, and the actor brings it out so powerfully.

He's beside himself with remorse, with heartbreak at having done this to His friend. The resurrection of Jesus, however, changes the man's life. It changes his life. The power and the meaning of the resurrection meant that Peter would have no more fear. We know the story of how Peter ended his life, don't we?

That he was crucified upside down. That he went and died a horrible, horrible death. The man who denied Jesus went through the most excruciating pain for Him. Why would this man do it? A man whose character had a serious question mark put over it.

Because of the resurrection. Never ever would he deny Christ again because Jesus was not a victim. He was a victor. Jesus did not lose on the cross. He won.

And that is what the resurrection points to. The resurrection is the gold medal of the victory. The resurrection changes lives. That's the first point. The second thing of the resurrection is that it gives authority.

It proves authority. You see, no other religious leader has ever risen from the dead again. No religious leader with a witness of hundreds of people at the hands of trained executioners was put to death, had a tomb that was sealed especially, guarded by official guards. No other religious leader was seen alive by up to 500 eyewitnesses. Buddha did not rise from the dead.

Mohammed did not rise from the dead. Confucius and even the late Christopher Hitchens, the promoter and forerunner of the new atheism movement, who died recently of cancer. He has not risen from the dead. Only Jesus Christ has physically, physically raised from the dead. Only Jesus has conquered death.

Why trust anyone else? Why trust anyone else when there is a Messiah who is greater than even death itself? The resurrection proves authority. And the third thing is that the resurrection changes our perspective. It rocks our perspective completely.

There might be people here that wrestle with the idea that someone could come back from the dead and say, it's just too hard to believe. It's just too hard to believe. It just can't be true. Well, I say to them, even if you cannot believe it, you should want it to be true. You should want it to be true.

You see, we all care about injustice in this world. We all feel deeply when things go wrong. We care about the floods in the Solomons. We care about someone dying unexpectedly, too young, a life cut off too short. We care deeply about the needy.

We care about looking after our mates. We care about the environment. If you hold to these views, if you care this deeply, then you would also want to believe the resurrection of Jesus as being real. Why? Because if it was real for Him, if flesh and bone could be brought back to life, if a flat lined heart, a partially decaying body could be brought back from the dead.

If the promise is true, and the fact that we can live forever is also true. Isn't it? If the promise is true, that it means that the here and now, what we do today actually matters. What we do here and now with our bodies, with our lives actually matter. If the resurrection of Jesus never happened, then we don't have a resurrection for us.

If we don't have a resurrection for us, then there is no hope for humanity and nothing we do will actually make any difference. Nothing we do will actually last. Do we realise that? The apostle Paul later writes in one Corinthians 15:20 that Jesus Christ is the first fruit of the resurrection. The first fruit of the resurrection.

In other words, like a fruit tree that bears its first apple of the season. The apple that shows that this season's fruit is going to be good or it's not so good. Jesus, in His human body, is the first one to be restored with a new indestructible glorified body. Paul is saying that in Jesus' resurrection, we see God conquering death. We see God conquering death.

Death is not how the story ends. Not if God has His way. Eternal life is what God wants for humanity. And you see what that means is it changes our perspective on ethics because it lengthens the scope of our decisions. It lengthens the scope of our decisions.

If I make a decision today, it does not end with me at death. It carries on into eternity. It means that our decisions and our actions will carry on. If we do something that is God honouring now, it honours God forever. If we do something hurtful now to Him or to our fellow human beings, it means it carries on into eternity.

And that changes us, doesn't it? The bad things we do, if we believe that death is final simply ends. The good things we do also ends. But imagine, but imagine if life continues. The beautiful art of Leonardo da Vinci, of the Michelangelos, will be celebrated for eternity.

If their lives are restored, we'll be celebrating beautiful sculptures and paintings for all of eternity. If the resurrection is true, we will be blessed by the music of Mozart and Beethoven, glorifying God forever. Beauty and love doesn't have to end in the grave. The resurrection gives us an eternal perspective and that changes what we do. That changes how we act.

That's an amazingly powerful realisation, isn't it? What we do, what our lives become has a purpose and carries on forever. The resurrection changes our perspectives. I have a family friend who is dying of cancer. God united his family and our family in an amazing way when they came to Australia for the first time.

He's a South African who met my dad, and my dad invited him to come to our church. And stuff had happened in his life and in the life of his family that meant that they were really hurt by the church and were in a wilderness away from God. But I guess the offer, the invitation, it was just so powerful now in hindsight, but that invitation just gave them the opportunity to have a fresh start. This man radically came to a point where he just committed his whole life to the Lord again. And he went on to become the chairman of our board of management at the church.

He played the cello in church and donated hundreds and hundreds of hours serving the church. He was a lawyer and just served the church with those gifts so amazingly. But two or three years ago, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Stage four. And a few weeks ago, he flew to South Africa very weak and very sick.

Now, humanly speaking, there's not much hope for him to return. A friend of his said that and Africans here will understand, it's like an elephant, a bull elephant, an old bull elephant returning to its herd when it knows that it's about to die. What is his hope? The Bible says, when you sow a seed, it does not come to life until it has died first. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed.

The apostle Paul writes, and so will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, but it is raised imperishable. The body that is sown is sown in dishonour, but it is raised in glory. And for my friend, it is sown in weakness, but it is raised in power. On Easter Sunday, today, we remember Jesus' resurrection from the dead in that moment where God showed everyone that He is more powerful than death.

Death, He proclaims, is not a part of the master plan. We may accept it as a given, as a certainty, but it is not the final part in this story. At the moment of the resurrection, God was saying, Jesus, My son matters to Me, and I am very pleased with what He has done. But it also says, this world matters to Me. Easter Sunday means that in a world today where injustice, where violence, where unfairness exists, where diseases like cancer is everywhere.

God is not prepared to tolerate such things forever. If Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead, Christianity becomes truly good news to the world because it says that death cannot conquer. It shows that our life and what we do and the decisions that we make matters. Two days ago, we celebrated Good Friday and we heard the message of Jesus dying on the cross, which says that I am so flawed and so broken that Jesus had to die for me, but also that I am so loved and so valued that Jesus was happy to do it. And today, when we come to Easter Sunday, we come to the message that says, God the Father so valued and loved His Son that He raised Him from the dead, showing that the mission of saving mankind that He took on was a success.

This morning, we are once again invited into the kingdom of God. God is in the process, friends, of making all things new. God is in the process of restoring and redeeming and renewing. And it started first of all with Jesus being raised from the dead, the first fruit. And with those angels, can say He is alive.

He's not here. You're not gonna find His bones. He's risen. And it means that life matters because it's not going to end in a disappointing death. Your life, friends, matters.

Our decisions and our actions matter. The resurrection of Jesus means that our sin and our brokenness is truly fixed. This morning, Jesus offers us again the chance to make Him Lord, to make Him our King, the King who conquers even death and sin. And He invites again all of us, all of those who are willing, all of those who are ready to enter into this kingdom. The kingdom where death will not have its say.

Come and learn what the power of the resurrection feels like, friends. Change your lives by a realisation that life matters. And may our thinking, may our doing, may our understanding that life might be hard now, might be painful now, may we know that the time is coming where we will say, death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory? Victory?

Because friends, Jesus is risen. Amen and Hallelujah. Let's pray. God, we're emotional wrecks in Easter. So profound, so powerful.

But thank You, Lord, that being emotional wrecks is not a bad thing because we are happy. And these tears, these emotions are tears and emotions of happiness and of joy. Lord, we want to know the power of the resurrection and what that means for our lives. Yes, Lord. Let us remember, let us be humbled by our brokenness and the sinful state that we were born into, and that we struggle with, that we wrestle against.

But Lord, let us be even more grateful and more thankful for the reality of the resurrection. That we will see You face to face, just like we see the person next to us. That we will touch You, that we will hug You, that we will bow down before You. And Father, that because of this great love, this great action You have done in Jesus, as the first fruit You will do for us, thank You, Lord, that with You there is no death. Thank You, that with You there will be no more mourning, there will be no more longing, no more disappointment.

But we accept and we take this and we apply it to our lives and we say again, Lord, that we want to be changed because of it. And we refuse, we refuse to be complacent about this. We refuse to forget this. Lord, here are our lives again. Do with it what You see fit.

We give it to You in Jesus' name. Amen.