Printer Friendly VersionText: “[Jesus] was declared with power to be the Son of
God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans
1:4).
It was not in the Christian home in which I was raised, not
an evangelical Christian college, not even at the Nazarene Theological Seminary
that I made the greatest theological discovery of my life, but in the home
of one of the most intelligent atheistic secularists to whom I have ever talked.
He was the CEO of Martin Marietta Company’s Vandenberg Air Force Division,
prime contractors for the Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile System.
He informed me, he had never attended a worship service of anybody’s
church. He was the consummate American secularist.
Having asked why someone like me would want to waste his life
in religious work, I shared my testimony. I did more than that: I gave him
an overview of the life of Christ. When I got to the Resurrection, he stopped
me and said, “Wait a minute: run that by me again.” “Run what
by you again?” I asked incredulously. I’d been talking non-stop
for about 20 minutes.
“Did you say something about this Jesus coming back to
life again? Run that part by me again.” So I did. I told him that on
the third day after Christ’s crucifixion, He rose bodily from the grave,
appeared to over 500 believers on at least a dozen different occasions, talked
with them, showed them His pierced hands and side, ate with them, and then
in full view of many of them ascended into heaven.
“Now, pastor, I don’t doubt your sincerity, but are
you sure you’ve got your facts straight?”
“It just so happens,” I replied as I pulled out my
pocket New Testament, “that I have with me the original authentic account.”
He fixed his eyes on me intently as I read Matthew 28 in its entirety, Matthew’s
narrative of the resurrection.
“That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard in my life,”
he said, leaning back in his chair. “Although I’ve never been to
church, I’ve been surrounded by believers all of my life. I’ve watched
that Billy Graham guy many times on television.
Then leaning forward he asked, “Given the fact that I’ve
been surrounded by all these Christians all my life, many who have tried to
convert me, and have heard your super-star evangelist preach many times, how
is it that tonight is the first time I’ve ever heard that you people
believe your Jesus not only died but came back to life again? Why aren’t
you talking about that? Why aren’t you shouting it from the housetops?”
He got me! For I was a typical evangelical pastor, preaching
long and intently on the cross and—except for Easter—rarely if ever
speaking of the resurrection. That opened the door to a long and intense discussion
of the resurrection, and how Jesus not only came back to life 2,000 years
ago but continues to reveal himself as alive to those who place their faith
in Him.
As I was leaving, he took my hand in his and confessed, “Pastor,
if what you’ve told me tonight is true, that at a point in time a human
being died and came back to life again, and had a way of making himself known
as alive to people like yourself, I believe I would become the best missionary
Santa Maria has ever seen!”
“I would to God,” I replied, “that you not only
believed but you came to know Christ alive as I have and as millions across
the centuries have. I do believe you would become the greatest missionary
this town has ever seen, or whatever city you happened to be living in.”
I don’t know what happened to Chuck, for within a month
or so, he was promoted to the head office in Denver and I never saw him again.
But I know what happened to me. Sleep did not come easily that night, as I
tossed and turned in my bed asking myself, “How is it that I could have
been born into the bosom of a wonderful Christian home, received the finest
Bible and theology education one could ever get, have read the NT through
and through again many times, much of it in the original Greek, and had not
seen that the sharp cutting edge of the gospel is not that somebody died,
but that somebody was mightily raised from the dead by God?”
The expressionist artist Matisse tells how he discovered his
vocation. As a twelve-year-old boy, he noticed an artist setting up his easel
and canvas beside the seashore getting ready to paint. He watched transfixed,
as a wondrous seascape slowly but miraculously filled the blank canvas under
the artist’s brush strokes. Speaking of that moment later, he said, “My
eyes were skinned. For the first time I saw the wide wonderful world of color.
And I could never look at the world again the same.”
It took an atheistic secularist to ‘skin my eyes’
to see what is so good about the Good News. It is not that someone has died
but that someone has been mightily raised by God from the dead. New Testament
scholar C. Milo Connick says, “If God had not raised Jesus, we would
never have heard about the cross, least of all from the disciples.” Given
their Jewish way of thinking, the cross represented the end. All their Messianic
hopes and dreams shattered in a thousand pieces on Golgotha’s rocky brow.
It was only when God raised up Jesus bodily from the grave that
the scales fell off their eyes, and like doubting Thomas they all with one
accord confessed, “My Lord and my God.” Or as Paul put it in our
text, “God has declared Jesus as Lord by the resurrection from the dead.”
With newly ‘skinned eyes,’ I went back to the New
Testament and what did I see?
I. Resurrection Celebration in the Gospels.
A. Resurrection language. I noticed how often the Gospel writers
used language such as “Rise up and walk,” or “And he arose,”
or “Jesus took him by the hand and raised him up.”
B. Resurrection Predictions. Every time Jesus predicted His
suffering and death, He also said He would rise again.
C. Resurrection Proclamation. What makes the Gospels ‘good
news’ is that they do not end with death, but with the unprecedented
story of a resurrection from the dead; a resurrection in which, unlike that
of Lazarus, He would never be subject to death again, but would remain alive
forever more.
D. Resurrection Appearances. Jesus’ resurrection was not
done in a corner but was witnessed by over 500 believers in many different
ways and places over a 40-day period of time. He appeared to His own near
the tomb, on the road, at a dinner table, beside the sea, and most often when
the disciples were gathered together in the upper room. To show that He was
no ghost, He ate bread and fish with them and invited them to touch Him.
With my skinned eyes, I also saw:
I. Resurrection Celebration in the Earliest Church.
A. Peter’s Sermon. I noticed that over half of Peter’s
sermon on the day of Pentecost was devoted to preaching the resurrection and
exaltation of Jesus to the right hand of the Father.
B. Apostolic Preaching. Not only Peter’s sermon, but every
sermon preached by Paul and the other apostles is first and foremost, front
and center, resurrection preaching.
C. New Testament. The resurrection was such a revolutionary
event that it gave us the most powerful and influential book in world history,
our New Testament. If the story of Jesus had ended with a crucifixion—there
were, after all, tens of thousands of people crucified on Roman crosses—there
would have been no New Testament. It was only because the life of Jesus did
not end with His crucifixion, but that He was raised up by God and continues
to live in the world through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit, that
we have a New Testament. The resurrection was such a revolutionary event that
it created
D. A New Day of Worship. Jesus was a Jew. All His disciples
were Jews. All those 3,000 converts on the Day of Pentecost were either Jews
or Jewish proselytes; that was why they were in Jerusalem, to celebrate the
Jewish feast of Pentecost. There’s nothing more central in the Old Testament
and the Jewish religion than Sabbath worship. Not only did Jesus worship on
Saturday, but He never told His disciples to do anything different. Yet, from
the Day of Pentecost on, we find early Christians worshiping on Sunday, a
secular day on which, in that culture, everybody went back to work. Why? For
two reasons: (1) God raised up Jesus on “the first day of the week,”
and (2), the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Day of Pentecost which always
fell on the first day of the week. The resurrection and the dawning of the
Age of the Spirit were events of such cosmic and historic significance that
they called for a new day of worship! Likewise,
E. The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was observed not
on Thursday, the day on which it was instituted, and not on Friday, the day
Jesus died, but on Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Why? Because in the early
Church, holy communion not only recalled the sufferings and death of Jesus
but most of all celebrated His resurrection. Notice the language of the Lord’s
Supper ritual. It is not “This was my body” but “This is my
body which is broken for you.” Present tense. The bread and wine represented
the real presence of the living Christ with His Church. That’s why in
speaking of the Church, Paul most often describes it as “the body of
Christ.” It is that visible place, that gathering of believers, where
the living Christ continues to make His presence felt alive and real even
as we experience it this very hour in this place.
F. Easter Celebration in the earliest Church lasted not one
day but 50 days, during which time Christians were discouraged from fasting
or kneeling when they prayed. Rather, they were to feast and stand tall as
they prayed, in celebration of the fact that Jesus was not dead but everlastingly
alive. We read in early church history that their worship during these days
was punctuated with much joyous singing of Allelujahs.
G. No images of the cross. Professor Greg Athenos of North Park
College outside Philadelphia spent a Sabbatical in Rome combing through some
23,000 copies of ancient Christian art, covering the first three centuries
of the church. Much of it was taken off underground Roman catacomb walls where
persecuted Christians met for worship. He was surprised to discover that not
once did any pictorial representation of Christ show the image of a cross.
Most often, Christian artists drew or painted pictures of Jesus holding a
lamb in His arms or Jesus with outstretched hands following His resurrection.
The cross was, after all, an ugly symbol of execution. It was not until the
fourth century that the first cross appeared in Christian art. It originated
not from Christians but from a pagan artist who wanted to make fun of Christians.
So he sculpted a cross, in which the body that hung on it had the head of
a pig. It was only then that Christians began to embrace the cross as their
preeminent religious symbol. The absence of the cross in early Christian art
is testimony to how resurrection-centered those believers were. Perhaps that
was the secret of the explosive growth of Christianity around the world during
the first three centuries of the Church’s existence.
H. Eschatology. The resurrection was such a powerful force in
early Christianity that it radically changed the content of their hope. No
longer were these Jewish Christians looking for the ushering in of God’s
Messianic kingdom; now they were looking for the bodily return of the risen
Christ. “This Jesus whom you have watched go up into heaven,” the
angels told those original witnesses to Jesus’ ascension, “you will
see return in like manner.”
No wonder the whole world now dates everything to and from the
birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and that Jesus has become the axis upon which
human history turns. Jesus, as the earliest apostles joyously proclaimed,
“Is Lord and Christ by his resurrection from the dead.” Which raises
an important question:
III. What Difference Does the Resurrection Make Here and Now?
It makes all the difference in the world for at least three
reasons.
A. The Resurrection vindicates Jesus as Lord. Thirty years ago,
Sunday by Sunday, I preached that Jesus is Lord from the pulpit of one of
our great southern churches, Atlanta First Church of the Nazarene. Today another
voice is heard in that pulpit. He does not preach Jesus but rather Mohammed
as the true prophet of Allah whom we are to follow. In the major sociological
changes that have occurred in that great city, what was once First Church
of the Nazarene is now one of several Black Muslim temples in the city. So,
who was right? Him or me? How do we settle the issue of which is the true
religion? I know of only one way to resolve that question. When Mohammed died,
he stayed dead and millions make pilgrimages to Medina where his body lies
buried today. But when Christians go to the Church of the Sepulchre, just
outside the walled city of Jerusalem today, what do they find? An empty tomb!
B. The Resurrection gives me a sure hope for the future. I don’t
like to meditate on this fact but if Jesus tarries, I have a sure date with
the funeral home director. When that day comes, when I slide off into the
dark abyss of death, I can tell you that I will care not a whit about the
stock market or who wins the next presidential election. There’s only
one thing I will care about and that is the one who has fallen—no, who
was hurled violently—into the abyss of death, but who did not stay dead.
Rather,
Up from the grave he arose, with a mighty triumph o’er
his foes,
He arose a victor o’er the dark domain,
And he lives forever with his saints to reign;
He arose, He arose, Hallelujah, Christ arose.
In that moment, all I’ll care about is the one who said,
“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, even though
he dies, yet will he live!”
C. The Resurrection gives me solid help for today. Death does
not wait for the undertaker. It comes to us in many ways and forms: in the
death of a child, a spouse, a parent, a loved one, in a divorce, in the loss
of a job, in the failure of a business, a bankruptcy. But here is the good
news: for those who are in Christ, there is never a period placed at the end
of a sentence but that another sentence begins. There is not a chapter that
closes but that a new chapter begins to be written. No wonder the Apostle
Paul exclaimed, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain!”
For beyond every death is a resurrection, a new dimension of life in an even
higher key.
Many years ago, I heard Dr. Tony Campolo tell a story I will
never forget. Dr. Campolo is chairman of the Sociology Department at Eastern
College. He is also a Baptist minister and one of the most dynamic preachers
I’ve ever heard. He was born and raised in Philadelphia. When most of
the white families in his neighborhood were moving out to the suburbs, his
stayed. They stayed on in their Baptist Church as it changed from white to
black.
Tony says that even though he preaches all over the country,
he would rather preach in his home church than anywhere else. The people there
really know how to worship. When you preach, they yell “Preach.”
And when you are really going, they help you out by saying, “Keep going.”
So different from white churches where they say “Stop.” And the
dear older ladies who sit down in front, they wave their white hankies in
the air and say in tremulous voices, “Well.”
A unique custom that had evolved his home church is that every
Good Friday, they have church all day long. They begin around 9:00 a.m., and
have one service right after another until 9:00 or 10:00 at night, broken
only with a covered-dish lunch and then dinner. Tony was scheduled as the
next-to-last preacher at one such Good Friday preaching convention. He says,
“The people yelled, ‘Preach’ and I preached. They shouted out,
‘Keep going,’ and I kept going. The dear ladies said in their tremulous
voices, ‘Well, well,’ and I did so well that I wanted to take notes
on myself .”
Feeling good about how well he had done, he whispered to his
senior pastor, who was to bring the last sermon of the day, “Well, pastor,
do you think you can beat that?” The old African-American pastor stroked
his chin for a moment and then whispered back, “You just watch.”
And then he preached the greatest sermon Tony had ever heard.
Its power was in its simplicity. At first, the old pastor said nothing. Just
looked at his people until all conversation, all talking died down. You could
hear a feather drop in the huge sanctuary. Then he whispered, “It’s
Friday, but Sunday’s coming. It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.”
Over and over again, he simply repeated, low and slow, “It’s Friday,
but Sunday’s coming.”
Then after a while he said,
It's Friday: Mary's crying her eyes out 'cause
her baby Jesus is dead.
…but Sunday's coming.
It's Friday: The disciples are on the run,
like sheep without a shepherd.
…but Sunday's coming.
It's Friday: Pilate's strutting around 'cause
he thinks he's got all the power and the victory.
…but Sunday's coming.
It's Friday: Satan's doing a little jig saying,
"I control the whole world."
…but Sunday's coming.
After forty-five minutes, that old preacher was shouting out,
“It’s Friday!” And all the people were shouting back, “Sunday’s
coming!”
Wow! Wouldn’t you like to have been there? Well, why don’t
we try that? I’ll be the black pastor and you be the black congregation.
Are you ready?
“It’s Friday!”
“Sunday’s coming.” (Three times).
Beloved, I don’t know why Fridays come tearing and ripping
into our lives like a tornado. I don’t know why health suddenly fails,
marriages split up, children break parental hearts, careers are destroyed,
jobs lost. I don’t understand why these things happen even to the best
and most conscientious believers. Jesus understands our Fridays. He’s
been there. He’s been there with us on the cross.
I don’t understand Fridays. But this I do know: because God raised up Jesus from the grave, Fridays do not last forever. Sunday’s coming! It always comes to those who have placed their faith and trust in Jesus, who said, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, even though he die, yet shall he live!” Hallelujah! That’s the good news!
