We're reading today from John's Gospel, John chapter 19, verses 41 through chapter 20, verse 18.
This is God's holy word.
Now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been laid.
So because of the Jewish day of preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.
Now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early.
While it was still dark and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb.
So she ran and she went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them,
They've taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him.
So Peter went out with the other disciple and they were going towards the tomb.
Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and he reached the tomb first.
And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in.
Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb.
He saw the linen cloths lying there.
And the face cloth, which had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded up in a place by itself.
Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in and he saw and believed.
For as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.
Then the disciples went back to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.
And as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb.
And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet.
They said to her, Woman, why are you weeping?
She said to them, They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.
Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing.
But she did not know that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, Woman, why are you weeping?
Whom are you seeking?
Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.
Jesus said to her, Mary.
She turned and said to him in Aramaic, Rabbani, which means teacher.
Jesus said to her, Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.
But go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, I have seen the Lord, and that he had said these things to her.
This is God's holy word.
All right, here we are, week two in the upper pulpit.
So I hope that's okay today.
We just read the story of the resurrection from John's gospel, and I have just two points to make for you this morning from it.
First, the place of the resurrection, and then secondly, the gardener of the resurrection.
So let's think first about the place of the resurrection.
So Mary, at the beginning of the story, runs to the tomb while it's still dark, before the sun is risen.
And she sees there that the tomb is empty, and so she, we read, she goes and she runs back to where the disciples are,
and she tells Peter and then John.
John's the one that it says, the one whom Jesus loved, the disciple that he loved.
That's John.
He's the author here.
And then you've got to love that they all run back to the tomb, Mary, Peter, John.
But in verse four, I think this is great.
John says, we left at the same time, but I outran Peter.
So John, a little healthy competition there.
He's just faster than Peter, and he wanted that to be recorded.
So it was.
And John sees the face cloth.
He stoops down into the tomb, and he sees the face cloth of Jesus that had been over Christ's face,
and it's folded neatly in the corner, and it says, he believed.
But then it says, he didn't understand all it meant.
He didn't understand yet all that the Scriptures had said, but he believed that Jesus was alive.
What does it mean?
He believed Jesus was physically alive, not dead.
So he and Peter, they believe, and they leave.
And then in verse seven, we're left with Mary, Mary Magdalene.
She is alone there at the tomb by herself.
And the text tells us in verse seven that she was there weeping.
The Greek word for weeping there is not quiet grief, not just tears.
It is, the dictionaries say it means to bewail, to howl, to cry like a child is what one of the Greek lexicons said,
to cry like a child.
So this is the kind of crying that she's doing here where you can't catch your breath,
like when little children are crying and you have to calm them down because they're losing their ability to breathe.
That's the type of tear she has here.
Jesus had removed seven demons from her in Luke chapter 8.
She had had a life that was in ruins before that.
And she had found a home in him, and he was everything to her.
She followed him.
She worshiped him.
He was her Savior.
She watched him die.
She was one of the last couple of people at the cross after he had died.
So she always was there.
She lingered.
She stayed back.
She came first to see the tomb.
And she's already faced the grief of his death.
And now she believes that his body has been disrespected.
So what does she say?
She says twice in the passage, verse 2 and 13,
they have taken away the Lord, my Lord, and we don't know where they put him.
What does she think?
She thinks that grave robbers have taken his body.
And grave robbery was a big issue in the first century and very much at this time.
Now what is Mary's, in such grief, she's lost everything.
And now they disrespected his body.
What is she assuming?
Mary is assuming that the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ did not happen.
She thinks that his body was taken, stolen.
He's still dead.
It's just that he's somewhere else.
Now she gives us one of two most common responses to denials of the physical resurrection of Jesus.
And the two most common ways that people approach it in the modern world are to say, number one, his body was stolen.
The scholars, you can read a wonderful book by Gary Habermas that is thousands of pages just working through details of historical facts around the resurrection event.
And one of the things Habermas argues very carefully is that it is a majority scholarly consensus, not exclusively, but in the New Testament scholarship and in historical scholarship, that Jesus Christ was a real man, that he really did die on a cross.
He was crucified under Pontius Pilate and that the tomb was empty.
So that's a majority view of believing and non-believing historians that look carefully at the resurrection event.
But for many, they say what Mary says here, and that's, well, his body was stolen.
That's one answer.
The other answer people give is the resurrection.
We don't know what happened to his body, but the resurrection is just a symbol.
It's just a symbol.
And it's a symbol of hope and new beginnings in your life.
You know, when you look at the resurrection, of course, he didn't rise from the dead because that is against the bounds of science.
But, you know, you really can get out of debt.
You really can walk into your boss's office and say, I deserve that promotion because the resurrection is the symbol of new beginnings.
And it gives you hope and it inspires you and it brings you to a place where you can do things you could have never imagined because you simply believe that it's a spiritual truth only.
So there's a man named Rudolf Bultmann, who was a famous in his time, New Testament scholar in the middle 20th century.
And in 1941, this is what he writes about the resurrection.
The resurrection was not physical, but, quote, something here and now, it's entering into a new dimension of existence.
It's being set free from your past and from guilt and from care and from it's being freed to be open to loving one's fellow man.
So it's just this mere symbol of new beginnings.
And so that's the product of what we call the enlightenment program, a program of thoughts that began here on the Royal Mile some two and a half centuries ago.
And that's that we have to keep Christianity, but we're going to de-supernaturalize it.
And so we can say the resurrection is a symbol, but we could never say Jesus Christ actually rose from the dead physically.
Now, I just want to ask you this morning in the first point, is that what John wanted you to think?
Is that what the people who were closest to the event that wrote down the four histories we have of this story, the four gospels,
was that the point they were making? Because the best historians are the people that are closest to the action,
the people that were actually there that saw it.
And is that what John wants you to get out of this, that the resurrection is not physical,
but it is something that can, you know, really help you in your life to do better and be better
and give you new beginnings and things like that?
Here, John and Peter walk into the tomb in verse 8 and 9, and it says,
They believe, but they did not yet understand what the Scripture had taught,
that Christ, and here's the word, must rise from the dead.
So they immediately believe by faith that he's alive, but they had it over time,
just the next few days, they began to realize the Scripture said, taught, he must be physically alive.
And what Scripture is being talked about there is the Old Testament.
There's no New Testament yet.
He's talking about the Old Testament, and so we sang earlier from Psalm 1610,
that says,
You will not abandon my soul to Sheol.
You will not let the Holy One see corruption.
That's a prophecy in the Old Testament.
And over the next few days, John starts to realize the whole Old Testament
had to be fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Christ,
or the Old Testament doesn't make sense.
It was meaningless.
And so he begins to realize this is a historical reality that's been prophesied from centuries ago,
and this is the moment that it all begins to make sense, this physical resurrection.
And so John's point is not, is he saying, you know,
you should really look to the resurrection and be inspired today.
No.
He's saying that if, how did Paul put it?
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15, 14,
If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain,
and your faith is in vain.
And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile,
and you are still dead in your sins.
And so Bultman's Christ, Bultman's view of the resurrection,
and so many others that do exist in our time and in our moment,
what are they saying to us?
Look, the Bible says either Jesus Christ is physically resurrected,
or Christianity is pointless.
The symbol of Christ's resurrection doesn't give you anything.
All it tells you is that death still wins.
Yeah, you can get out of debt, or you can go get that promotion,
or you can better yourself in this life,
but you're still going to die, and there is no victory over death.
If Jesus Christ is dead, you are still in your sins,
and there is no hope at the end of this life to face anything other than death.
And that means that the symbol, the mere symbol,
doesn't give you what's been offered by folks that have said that.
You know, think about Mary.
Mary is so right.
Mary, what does Mary do?
When Mary, who is confused, thinks Jesus is still dead,
what does she say?
Well, you read it.
She says, wow, well, at least I've got this great symbol.
Man, I know that his body's not here, but I do feel uplifted today.
No, she's weeping uncontrollably.
She can't breathe, because she said, this has been in vain.
This has been pointless.
This has not produced the forgiveness of my sins
and hope in the face of death.
She knows that without the physical resurrection,
what she thinks has not happened,
she tells us the right thing about that,
that all we can do is weep.
Friends, the resurrection is not a symbol.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead in real time,
real life history, physically.
And we've got to think about a couple things.
One, the people who preached the resurrection in just those first few days
did it in the very place where Christ was crucified
and the tomb was publicly celebrated as empty.
The proximity is too close.
If you go out and preach, as we read about in Acts chapter 1 and 2,
to thousands of people within just 40 days,
and there's thousands of people coming to faith in Jesus,
the resurrected Jesus in the city,
what can they do?
All they've got to do is go and look.
They saw him crucified,
and they can go and see the proximity is too near.
And we've already said the best historians,
we need to do what the historical scholars tell us to do,
and that's understand that the best historians
are the ones that were eyewitnesses,
that were the ones closest to the action.
And every eyewitness account we have of Jesus' life,
his death, his resurrection,
says that he rose from the dead.
Every single one that we have says that,
of people who were actually there and around in the time.
Paul says Jesus Christ,
if you're a visitor today,
we've been working through the book of James,
the letter of James.
We'll be back to that next week.
Paul says that Jesus appeared very specifically
to six individuals and then more than 500 people,
and he says that James,
the biological brother of Jesus,
was one of those.
James did not believe in Jesus
during Jesus' life and death.
He did not follow his brother.
What happened?
Paul says Jesus Christ,
the resurrected Christ,
appeared to his brother James,
and all of a sudden,
James becomes the pillar of the church,
one of the pillars of the church in Jerusalem,
the writer of this great letter
that we've been working through.
Jesus Christ's resurrection is not a symbol,
it's real life history,
and today I'll move on from this point with these words.
Christianity does indeed provide good feelings.
Yes, Christianity can,
Jesus can indeed give a therapeutic quality
quality to your heart and life
where he does lift you up,
and he does make your emotions healthier,
but Christianity is not feelings.
Christianity is the fact
that God in the middle of history
died for your sins
and rose from the dead physically
and has announced the end of death.
Christianity is not first a feeling,
it's first a fact.
Christianity provides a great source
for introspective meditation,
yes,
but it is not self-help.
Christianity is a historical pronouncement.
It is good news,
it is not good advice,
and it is the good news
that his body cannot be found
in Jerusalem today.
His bones,
his ash are not there.
That is the news of Christianity.
As I move on,
you've got to do what Paul did.
In 1 Corinthians 15,
Paul whittled down,
if you were to ask,
what is Christianity?
You can whittle it down
to just a few lines,
and what Paul gives you
in 1 Corinthians 15,
three to four,
the scholars tell us
that this is one of the earliest creeds
of Christianity.
So, you know,
we write creeds
like the Apostles' Creed,
but there were little creeds
already traveling about
from Jerusalem,
and Richard Baucom
in his great book,
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,
says that within months
of Christ's resurrection,
this creed was already
being stated in churches
near Jerusalem.
And the creed is in
1 Corinthians 15,
three and four,
and listen to Paul.
He's footnoting it.
He's saying,
look, this didn't come from me.
Listen to how he says it.
I delivered to you
as of first importance
what I received.
That's like a modern day
footnote in our books.
I'm sourcing it.
I'm telling you,
this did not come from me.
I did not originally write it.
That Christ died for our sins
in accordance with the scriptures.
That he was buried.
That he was raised
on the third day
in accordance with the scriptures.
That's what John realized.
He had to rise from the dead
according to the scriptures
of the Old Testament.
And that he appeared
to more than 500 people.
Everybody around
was saying it.
They were all there.
They were all eyewitnesses.
They could check.
The gospel is good news.
It's not just good feelings.
And so today,
if this is a fact,
then it is.
It has to reorder,
reorient,
disrupt your life.
If Jesus Christ
came into the middle of history
as man claiming to be God
and he died
and he rose from the dead
on the third day physically,
that fact has to disrupt your life.
It has to.
It has to reorder it.
Whether we want it to or not,
whether we like it or not,
and we don't.
But it's a fact of history.
It has to reorder us
from top to bottom.
It has to change us.
Secondly, lastly,
what is then,
if it's a fact,
what then does the resurrection mean?
And here John teaches us
about the gardener
of the resurrection.
So in John's gospel,
throughout John's gospel,
it's full of irony.
That's one of the big things.
Misunderstanding all the time
up to this point.
And here we've got,
of course,
a great misunderstanding
where Mary Magdalene
doesn't see him.
She doesn't know who he is.
And so these two angels
appear in the tomb,
one at the head of where Jesus laid,
one at the feet.
And they say to her,
woman,
why are you weeping?
Now,
if you were around on Good Friday,
you'll know,
we talked about how woman
is not an insult.
It's a term of honor
in the first century.
So they're honoring her,
coming to see him.
Woman,
why are you weeping?
And so you can hear in that
a softness,
but also a gentle rebuke of sorts.
Why are you crying?
What did you come look,
who did you come looking for?
And she had traveled around with him
and heard him say,
the son of man must die
and must rise from the dead
three days later.
She had heard it preached.
And yet,
she still just couldn't get there.
She couldn't quite believe it.
But then,
of course,
the culmination point
of all John's gospel
of misunderstanding
comes here
when all of a sudden
she turns around
and there is Jesus.
And it says,
she's supposed him
to be the gardener,
the mere gardener,
the one who would,
you know,
tend the flowers
around the tombs
and things like that.
And he elevates the question.
He says,
woman,
again,
why are you weeping?
Whom do you seek?
And what is he asking?
He's asking something like,
what kind of a God,
what kind of Messiah,
what kind of a Savior
did you think you were following?
Who are you looking for
in this moment?
Now,
I think this is the culmination point
of all the misunderstanding stories
in John's gospel.
Remember Nicodemus,
Jesus said,
if you want to be saved,
you've got to be born again.
And Nicodemus said,
how can a man
be born of his mother's womb twice?
That doesn't make any sense.
It's impossible, right?
Misunderstanding,
it's constant throughout John's gospel.
And here is that
culmination point
of this moment
of complete misunderstanding.
What do we learn?
When you go through
John's gospel
and you realize
that this woman
had seven demons
removed from her,
she followed Jesus
so closely.
You can read
the other gospels
and see how the apostles
can never get it right.
Nicodemus couldn't get it.
Nobody could understand
and see.
What are we being told?
We're being told,
it is impossible
to believe the resurrection.
It's impossible
to believe in him.
That's what John's gospel
ultimately teaches.
Why?
Because the Old Testament
and the New Testament
says this to us
in so many ways.
Isaiah,
you keep on hearing
but you don't understand.
You keep on seeing
but you do not perceive.
No one is righteous.
No, not one.
No one understands.
Nobody seeks for God.
It is impossible
as we are
as human beings
born into the veil of tears
in the light of our sin
to actually believe
in the resurrection.
We refuse.
He has so clearly
revealed himself
yet in our struggle
in our upside down hearts
we say no.
We can't do it.
We can't believe.
We don't want to believe.
John Calvin gave a really famous quote
that I've said here too many times.
In fact,
there's a couple people
in the church
who sort of make fun of me
for reusing the quote
over and over again.
And so I know that will happen
after the service today
but it gets reused
over and over again
because it's so right
and true and good.
But I don't want to highlight
you'll hear the most common point
but listen to the very end.
Calvin writes,
human nature,
so to speak,
is perpetually
a factory of idols.
We know that one.
Man's mind,
full as it is
of pride and boldness,
dares to imagine a God
according to his own capacity.
As it sluggishly plods,
indeed is overwhelmed
by the crassest ignorance.
It conceives,
and here's the word,
an unreality
and an empty appearance
as God.
Calvin says,
we all live in unreality
which is
the world of self-deception,
self-sufficiency
where we take
what is God revealed to us
and we flip it upside down
because we refuse to believe it.
Francis Spufford,
the great novelist
who was an atheist
turned Christian,
this is what he writes about it.
What Calvin's talking about here,
what we're talking about here,
is not just our tendency
to lurch
and to stumble
and to mess things up
by accident,
but this is our active inclination
to break stuff.
And stuff here
refers
to promises,
relationships,
people we care about,
our own well-being
and other people's well-being,
we break stuff.
We mess it up.
You are a being,
he writes,
whose wants make no sense,
who don't,
you don't harmonize,
your desires deep down
are completely discordantly arranged.
You truly want to possess
and you truly do not want to possess
at the very same time.
You are equipped far more
for farce and tragedy
than for happy endings.
You see,
what is unreality?
What is being talked about here?
It's this,
that every one of us
are not passive victims
of confusion
around the resurrection.
We're not passive victims
of confusion
about who God is
and whether or not
he showed up
and whether or not
he's revealed himself.
We are active manufacturers
of smaller gods
and we choose them
more than the true,
real,
resurrected Christ,
the God who actually
has revealed himself
to us in world history.
We work hard
to believe
the tomb is empty
yet he's still dead,
that somebody stole his body.
That's what the Bible teaches
and so today if you come
and you don't know
what to make of the resurrection,
I just want to gently say
that the Bible teaches
that we don't believe
in the God
who really exists
and really has revealed himself
not because there's not enough evidence,
far from it,
but because we don't want to.
Because if we did,
if Jesus Christ really did rise
from the dead
in the middle of history,
that means you have to give away
your independence fully.
You have to,
you have to be completely
dependent on him.
You know,
no matter how we feel,
if he really did rise
from the dead,
it changes everything.
And that is so hard.
And so we don't want it
to be true.
I was reading,
or listening maybe,
I can't remember,
a story recently
of Tim Keller
talking about,
in the past,
talking about years
of interviewing
ministry candidates
to plant churches.
You know,
a redeemer,
when he was there,
planted something like
80 or more churches
in New York.
And so they had
a constant pipeline
of interviewing
ministry candidates
to plant churches.
And he said,
one of the questions
they would always ask is,
first,
we do this here
in our presbytery,
tell us your testimony.
How did you come
to faith in Jesus?
That's sort of
question number one.
And he said that
he noticed over the years
everybody would almost,
almost inevitably
say the same thing.
They would all say,
I grew up in the church,
but I never heard
the gospel.
And he said,
boy,
we got a lot
of bad churches.
Nobody's preaching
the gospel.
All these guys come through
and they never hear
the gospel.
And of course,
later on he heard
one older man
who came into ministry
later in life say,
I came to faith
reading Martin Luther's
commentary on Galatians.
Talks a lot about
justification
and being forgiven.
And Tim asked him,
you know,
well,
was that the first time?
He said,
no, no, no,
I'd read it many times.
And he said,
well,
did you see something
new in it?
Did you hear something new?
No, no,
it was so plain.
I'd studied it.
I knew it like the back
of my hand.
And he said,
what happened?
And he said,
I didn't have eyes to see.
And so many of these guys,
what do they mean?
I grew up in a church
and I never heard the gospel.
They didn't have eyes to see.
And you can probably
tell that story as well.
I grew up in a church
or I've been in churches,
but all of a sudden,
one day,
some of you can tell this story
that all of a sudden,
it was as if the light switch
turned on.
You see,
left to ourselves,
we cannot believe
the resurrection.
So what does Jesus do?
And in the middle of the story,
Mary accuses,
in verse 16,
accuses Jesus,
in 15 and 16,
of being the one
who stole the body.
Huh.
And then what does he do?
He just says her name,
Mary.
And the scales fall off.
What she could not see
one moment before,
now she can see.
The gardener.
The gardener himself.
And in this moment,
we are seeing
the first moment
in human history
of the application
of the resurrection
of the Son of God
to someone's personal life.
And how does it happen?
It happens when Jesus,
you know,
you could study theology
for 2,000 years.
What you really need
is for Jesus Christ
to say your name.
Mary,
your name.
and the scales
will fall off.
And what happens,
he had already prepared
her for this moment
because a couple chapters ago
when she was there,
he had said,
my sheep hear my voice
and when I say their name,
they come to me.
And that's what he did for her.
And the Bible
comes today
and tells you
the exact same thing.
What does it say?
It says,
today,
if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts.
It says both that
you cannot survive,
you cannot believe
without hearing your name
spoken by him
and today,
don't harden your hearts.
Hear his voice
and you will come to him.
Come to him.
Wake up if you're sleepy
in your faith.
Come to him
if you've never been
in the faith.
Hear it.
He seeks you.
He knocks at the door
and just simply asks
that you open it
and you hear him
calling to you.
The resurrection,
this is the word of God
being preached.
He is calling to you.
He is saying,
come and believe
and the resurrection
will be personally
applied to you
and you can face death
without fear.
Let me give you
two applications
as I close.
Number one,
when Mary wakes up
and she sees him
for the first time,
her words,
her actions show us
the power of the resurrection
because what she does here,
as soon as she awakens,
she obviously gives him
a big bear hug.
He has to say,
do not cling to me.
He's probably pulling
her arms off
because she's got her arms
wrapped around him
and she realizes
in that moment
that the power
of the resurrection,
that it is truly physical,
that he's there.
What is happening?
The gardener
of the resurrection
is there
and he is proclaiming
in his resurrection,
what is God saying to you?
He's saying,
look,
I made this world
and I'm not going
to let it go away.
I'm here to reorder it,
to reshape it,
to remake it
and it begins with Jesus.
He's physical,
meaning that if you have
things about this life
that you love
and I bet you do,
gifts and your physicality
and the people around you,
the resurrection promises
God is not letting
creation order go.
This is not some Gnostic text
where it's only about
the spiritual,
no, not at all.
In his physicality,
in the fact that he hugs her,
she hugs him.
We're being told
he has come to remake
this world
and renew it physically,
finally,
and ultimately forever
and you see,
when she says,
when she supposes
he's the gardener,
she's not wrong.
She's not wrong
because what John does
over and over again
in John's gospel
is he brings us back
to the creation story
and in the very beginning
of world history,
God,
God the son here,
made the world
and the very first thing
he did
was he organized
a beautiful garden
called Eden
and he,
this son,
is the gardener
of creation.
He made the garden
in the beginning.
He upheld it
and it just so happens,
it just so happens
that in John 18,
41,
John points out for us
that the very place
where Jesus was being crucified
was next to a garden.
Why?
Because Jesus Christ
who is God,
the gardener of creation,
but also the son of Adam,
the second human,
the second Adam,
the one who came
to fix what Adam
broke in that garden,
he hung upon the cursed tree
just next to the garden
so that his dead body
would enter
and blast open
the gates of Eden
and you could enter in.
You see,
when he comes out
of the grave
on the third day,
he is not only
the gardener of creation,
he is now the gardener
of new creation.
He is the tree
of life himself.
The tree of life
now stands there
in the middle
of the garden
of Eden,
the new Eden
and that's what
Revelation 22 says
that the story
of the world
is us running away
from that beautiful garden
and Jesus bringing us
back to it.
He is the gardener.
The gardener of creation
here becomes the gardener
of the new creation
and so finally,
second application,
that means,
look at what he says
to her.
He says,
don't cling to me.
I have not yet ascended.
I go to my God
and your God,
my father,
your father.
What is that language?
That is covenant language.
That is the language
that comes from
the Abrahamic covenant
where God promised
to Abraham,
they will be,
you will be my people,
I will be your God
and now he is saying
it to her
for the first time.
The resurrection
fulfills
all the covenant promises
of the Old Testament
and what is he saying?
Don't hold on to me
because I have got to go
prepare a place for you
and you see what he is saying?
He said,
because the covenant
is fulfilled,
everything that is true
of me right now
physically,
resurrected from the dead
is going to be yours as well
so don't hold on to me.
I go and prepare a place
for you.
Now that means,
and this is the last word,
the resurrection
that has already taken place
in the past
in Jesus' life
means that your sins
are forgiven today,
that you,
he defeated death and sin
and therefore you today
can be forgiven
but it also has to point you forward
to what is not yet
about the resurrection
and that is that
you still live
in the veil of tears
and so if you come today
and you say,
yeah and my body
is hurting today
and my job is miserable
and I've just lost somebody
and there's the,
we've got the diagnosis
that it's not going to go away
and that's true
of all of us
at different times in life.
It's coming, right?
We're all in different places
of suffering today.
You've got to know
that the resurrection
is now
and not yet
and that everything
that is true of him
physically
is going to be true of you
and so I just want to leave you
with these words.
Paul says,
therefore,
you say,
but the pain in my life,
yes and the suffering
of this present age
is not worth comparing
to the glory
that is to be revealed
in the sons and daughters of God.
We will look back one day
and say,
that was a faint,
it's just a faint memory,
the veil of tears,
the life that I used to have
that was so hard.
It was just a faint memory
and today you can look
at every problem
you have in your life
and say,
the life that is to come for you
in Christ
is unimaginably wonderful.
And everything
that is truly good
you will experience in him.
Mary came to the garden
to find a corpse
and she left
with the gardener king
and that's the resurrection,
that's what it does.
The resurrection today
can find you weeping
at the tomb.
It can find you weeping
in whatever it is
that's brought you to that point
and it can change
the direction of your life forever
and give you true hope,
hope in the time of fear
that we live in.
The good news,
this is good news,
it's his history,
it has to reconfigure your life.
So let it as we sing.
Let's pray.
Father,
we thank you
for the resurrection promise,
the hope,
and we come today
to experience hope.
So we ask that now
as we come to you
in singing
that you would help us
to see what a morning
gloriously bright
as the king
enters into Jerusalem.
And we ask
for that vision,
take away unreality
for us
and show us reality today.
We pray that in Christ's name.
Amen.