Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Worshiping with you has been so good that I feel like anything I do can only make it worse, but I'm gonna try.
[00:00:10] No, it's been just amazing to be here this morning. Amen. Right? I mean, this has been great. You just to worship.
[00:00:18] When we have someone as thoughtful as Sarah and so many more of you get up and lead us through communion together, I just sometimes want to get up and say, well, just whatever they said, and let's stand and sing. But I've worked on this, so I've got to say it, I guess.
[00:00:35] We put out an invitation for Easter.
[00:00:40] We sent invitations to apartments around here. We put an ad online. We said, hey, we're a church. Easter is a thing show up. It was more complicated than that, but that was essentially the message.
[00:00:55] It had clips of what was going on in worship. I don't know if you saw it happen across your Facebook feed.
[00:01:03] Maybe some of you gave up Facebook for Lent and praised God for you.
[00:01:07] You ever decide to drink your coffee in the morning and see if you can scroll Facebook without spitting it out? That's a fun game.
[00:01:16] But we put it on Facebook and we said, here's a clip of us worshiping, and here's a clip of Benjamin saying things the way he does.
[00:01:24] And then we said, you're invited to Easter. And for the most part, about 95% of the people said, thumbs up. I like that. The others said, this is great. I love. We had a lot of. I love listening to DJ sing, which I think he paid off. I think that was a propaganda.
[00:01:48] But we do like people. I love Glenwood Church. People who have moved away, said, I wish I was back there with Glenwood. And we were so thankful to hear all that.
[00:01:59] But the other 5%, the first one I got, we posted it, I guess, on Thursday. The first one was, and this is verbatim, what are them women doing up there? That was it. No, it's okay. It's okay. People have different beliefs. We're not going to now. Them's a problem there in that sense. That's my problem is what are them women?
[00:02:23] That's my main problem with the post.
[00:02:27] And the last one I almost responded to. Now, you know, most of you know that I also sometimes am a comedian in actual comedy clubs and in. But. And so I know how to deal with hecklers and face.
[00:02:49] So what I have to do to not post responses is I have to type them into Facebook, screenshot it, and send it to DJ just to make him laugh.
[00:03:04] But the last comment was something to the effect of, we shouldn't change. There shouldn't be women on the stage.
[00:03:13] We shouldn't change the way the Bible told us to do it.
[00:03:18] And I typed out a response that said, you know, we all have different opinions and different understandings of Scripture, but it's very hard to figure out who was on stage in the first century.
[00:03:37] Explain the joke.
[00:03:40] We didn't have stages. It was just tables. It was a group of 12 to 15 people in a living room, sitting around a table, sitting all together around this place. And they experienced God together there. They took communion together there. Christianity has grown to become a religion where it would be difficult to do that all the time, although we try to do it some, but the way they worshiped wasn't this.
[00:04:14] So if your mind is like, we got to get back to first century Christianity. All right, good. Get back to Jesus.
[00:04:21] Don't get back to the way the church did something. Get back to the way Jesus saw the world, the way Jesus viewed the world. And I've got to ask myself this question, and I think this is a very important question.
[00:04:35] What did we expect would happen when we posted something on Facebook in East Texas?
[00:04:41] We should have known.
[00:04:43] I don't know why I was so flummoxed whenever the first message. I think it was the. Them. The thing that bothered me. What are them women doing up there? And listen, I know I made a voice for that person just now. I understand that.
[00:04:58] But when you say, what are them women doing?
[00:05:01] You get a voice that just is.
[00:05:04] That's a rule.
[00:05:06] Now, listen, there are. And this is important, there are good, godly men and women followers of Christ who disagree with me about this.
[00:05:23] God loves them deeply and they are doing good work for the Lord. And I do not want to dismiss the disagreement that happens. There are people smarter than me that disagree with me about this.
[00:05:37] But what I.
[00:05:40] It used to be that if you wanted to say something to a stranger, something offensive or crazy or argumentative, even if you wanted to say something to a stranger, you had to have the gall and the foresight to take a Sharpie into a bathroom stall.
[00:06:03] And now it's just Facebook and we just do that instead.
[00:06:09] It used to be more difficult, is all I'm saying. And now it's really easy to just type on your phone and do the things. But what did we expect? See, like, if we would have gone into the situation with different expectations, we would have easily gone, oh, okay, yeah, we knew this was coming. Of course, that's fine.
[00:06:30] Delete. But we know we're ready. I think DJ was more prepared than I was.
[00:06:38] But expectations about what will happen help you be the kind of person you want to be right now. Now we're not worrying about the future. We just have an expectation about, oh, this is. I expect this to be so. So I'm going to plan for this. And sometimes you're off and you Correct. But planning expectations about the future impact the present.
[00:07:07] And sometimes the present feels dark. The present, like right now, feels like I just can't.
[00:07:18] I can't get to a place where I feel good about the world around me.
[00:07:23] Have you been there?
[00:07:25] Where you're looking around and there is poverty, there is arguments, there is disagreements, the people are rude to each other in public.
[00:07:36] And not just that, but hunger and death and devastation and war.
[00:07:43] That now, if we just take it at face value, we.
[00:07:50] We could get really discouraged about what's happening right now.
[00:07:56] But a good question then is, what do you expect?
[00:08:04] Both in a world without Jesus, the world won't look like Jesus.
[00:08:10] But I ask that question more importantly on Easter.
[00:08:18] What do you expect?
[00:08:24] What do you think will happen?
[00:08:29] If the resurrection is true, And I believe it is surprise. I don't want to spoil the end of the sermon, but I do.
[00:08:37] If it is true that Jesus, this Jewish carpenter's son from Nazareth, who, three years or after he turned 30, started walking around with fishermen for disciples, that this Jesus was eventually crucified, and then when they buried him, he didn't stay dead.
[00:09:06] If we believe that that pinnacle of human history, like, the most important thing that happened is also. And we just got to say it out loud, is the craziest that happened.
[00:09:19] It's pretty absurd that we believe this.
[00:09:23] That's fine. Like, the world may look at us and say, you believe in a resurrection. That's crazy. Of course. Yeah. Our response shouldn't be defensive. Our response should not say, oh, well, there's evidence.
[00:09:39] Yeah, we could go that route.
[00:09:44] Our response should not be to get our feelings hurt that they don't believe what we believe. We believe a man who was God in the flesh, was crucified, was buried, and then walked out, stopped being dead. We believe that. And it is crazy.
[00:10:18] And it's true.
[00:10:22] What we.
[00:10:25] What do we expect?
[00:10:30] I just.
[00:10:32] I have. In ministry. I've been in ministry 20 years now. I've been a preacher for 20 years.
[00:10:40] I've been through it. Like, there's some of the craziest stuff that you could ever imagine happens to preachers.
[00:10:53] You know, Steve, a lot of you just stuff you Would try to tell people and say, you'll never believe what happened to me. It's gotten to the point I don't even tell people I'm a preacher anymore.
[00:11:06] It's just I have to be in the right mindset.
[00:11:09] You know, you go into your doctor's office and you say, I'm a preacher. And he goes, oh, okay, well, then, you know, we'll heal this with prayer. You're like, I don't think that's. You wouldn't do that with anyone else.
[00:11:25] I need. And don't let Slot clip this for the Internet. I need drugs.
[00:11:34] Like, that's why I'm he. Like, not.
[00:11:40] But, like, sometimes they just have a different view of you and people can. People can say horrific things.
[00:11:49] When did you start gaining weight? Ugh, Thursday.
[00:11:55] I don't know what to tell you.
[00:11:59] My favorite was a preacher had gotten.
[00:12:03] He had gotten to the place where they could get a new car. He had driven the same old beater forever, and it was just the wheels were falling off. They got a new car. They knew they would have it for a long time. He got a new car, pulled into the first. Pulled into church for the very first time. The parking lot gets out, closes the door, and someone goes, nice car. Passed her, as if to say, we're paying you too much if you can buy a car like that. And he said, I'm so sorry my donkey broke.
[00:12:38] But there can be, like, difficult situations, difficult times. You can have. You can have disagreements with your kids and with your parents and your co workers, and life can seem like it's just not going to get better.
[00:12:58] Like right now can feel like, well, we've prayed and prayed and the illness just keeps going. Yeah, God didn't come to cure heart disease.
[00:13:09] God didn't show up to heal diabetes.
[00:13:14] God is not an oncologist. He's a resurrected king.
[00:13:19] So all that goes into the grave comes out because Jesus came out.
[00:13:25] All that goes into the grave, no matter what road we took that we walk back out because Jesus came out of the grave. And we have to. What we expect to happen should impact how we exist in this world.
[00:13:42] It's one of the. Not one of. It's the most important thing that ever happened, if it happened. So if you believe it happened, it's gotta impact you.
[00:13:56] It's gotta straighten you out. It's gotta have some sort of application on your life.
[00:14:05] And so Easter is a time to celebrate the resurrection, But a lot of times we need to take the resurrection and just stare at it for a Second, and ask ourselves, if I believe this, what then?
[00:14:20] What do I expect? How do I treat people if Jesus is out of the grave?
[00:14:25] How do I treat difficulty or worry or death? Or how do I interact with the brokenness of the world? If Jesus is out of the grave, it matters.
[00:14:38] And if it happened, it matters more than anything in human history.
[00:14:45] I believe it matters more than anything in human history.
[00:14:53] There was a time early in ministry where I decided, you know, I'm just going to quit and teach math.
[00:15:06] Why?
[00:15:08] Yeah, good point.
[00:15:13] Matt has rules.
[00:15:17] And I've tried to find the principal's office around here to send some of you to, and I just can't. I don't know where it is.
[00:15:25] I wanted to coach basketball and teach math.
[00:15:34] The math didn't walk out of the grave. I just. I gotta. I gotta keep talking about Jesus.
[00:15:42] The tomb is empty. The king has occupied the throne. I've gotta quit talk. I've gotta keep talking about Jesus, because that's the only thing. That's the only expectation I have that matters.
[00:16:00] Paul wrote a letter to a church in Corinth.
[00:16:04] And Paul does this thing when he writes letters where he has something, he has a reason for writing the letter. He really does. He doesn't. He didn't just say, well, today I've really got to. I gotta promote my stuff. So I've gotta. You know, Paul, he wasn't like an influencer for Jesus in the first century. He didn't write blogs. Paul had a. He heard a thing about a place and he wrote a letter to them.
[00:16:32] And a lot of times you can find that thing. And it's oftentimes toward the end in Romans, it's. I mean, way toward the end. Even. It gets into chapter 16, where he's listing names, the letter to the Philippians. At the very end, he says, because the whole time he's talking about joy, unity, all throughout Philippians. And he gets to the end and he goes, all right, Euodia and Syntyche, could y'all get along?
[00:16:59] Now, we don't know what their issue was.
[00:17:03] We know it would have been worse if Facebook had happened, but we don't know what their issue was. Paul did, and he wrote him a letter. And we have the letter to the Philippians because Euodia and Syntyche were fussing, and it probably had something to do with. And I'm sorry, this won't be on the test later. Epaphroditus, which is a name I promise you I didn't make up first. Corinthians the letter. He writes the letter to the Corinthian Church for the same reason. There's something he's hearing going on there.
[00:17:41] The place of Corinth, it was like, you know how everyone in Athens was just very, very proud of how smart they were. The Corinthians thought the Athenians were just lacking.
[00:17:52] The Corinthians loved how logical and thoughtful they were there in Corinth, which is just south of Athens a ways. So he.
[00:18:08] They had started. They believed in Jesus.
[00:18:11] They believe that Jesus was resurrected. But they're just got. They got to a place where, you know, Jesus is just. Jesus is a good philosopher. And there's a chance that he wasn't quite ever really resurrected. Like, it's a metaphor.
[00:18:32] Christianity does not work as a metaphor.
[00:18:38] CS Lewis says that Jesus walked around and claimed that he was the Son of God. He claimed he would die and be resurrected.
[00:18:52] He claimed. And when he. When he died, he was resurrected. And then his followers said, we saw him. So either Christianity is the. The vocalizations of crazy people or Jesus is the son of God. There's no option if Jesus was a good moral teacher. He also said some pretty crazy things about himself in the process.
[00:19:19] But if Jesus truly is the Son of God, and I believe he is, and he truly died on the cross for remission of our sins, and I believe he did.
[00:19:27] If he truly walked out of the grave, and he truly did, and he truly sits on the throne and conquers division and brings us together, all nations, all tribes, all people, all languages, and that is the good news we follow, then it matters that he was resurrected.
[00:19:46] I have a lot of opinions that people disagree with. And I say to myself, oh, okay, well, we're fine. We can argue about that in heaven, I like to say, which is frustrating if someone wants to argue about it now, but we'll argue about that when the kingdom comes, it's no big deal.
[00:20:09] We can hold on to our brotherhood here.
[00:20:15] We can be brothers and sisters in Christ here and disagree here.
[00:20:22] But the tomb is empty.
[00:20:27] And I just, I don't waver on that. And neither did Paul at the first of the letter to the Corinthians. He says things like, who? Why are you teaching? Why are you following these teachers and claiming, well, I'm with Apollos, and I'm with Cephas, and I'm with Simon or Simon, I'm with Paul.
[00:20:48] There's none of us died for you. None of us was resurrected. But what unites us is this resurrected king. And there's some hints that the people in Corinth are struggling a little bit with the resurrection.
[00:21:04] And Paul says in Corinthians 1 Corinthians 15, now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the gospel, the good news that I proclaimed to you. Here it is. You want to hear one of Paul's Gospel sermons? Here we go. The good news that I proclaim to you, which you in turn received, and you also stand on this gospel. Here it is.
[00:21:36] Through which you are being saved if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you. Unless you have come to believe in vain, by the way, you shouldn't believe in vain, he says, for I hand it on to you as a first importance. What in turn had received.
[00:21:54] That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and he was buried.
[00:22:01] And that he was. And this word, the Greek word here is the word for resurrected. They have one for like. If you were just to raise like a picture, like you're hanging a picture. And then they say, well, let's raise it a little bit. That's not resurrected. The Greek word here is for like. You came back to life for good.
[00:22:24] He was resurrected on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.
[00:22:29] And that he appeared to Cephas, this is Peter.
[00:22:35] And then to the 12.
[00:22:38] And then he appeared to more than 500 brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive. He goes, go ask them, though some have died.
[00:22:51] Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
[00:22:57] Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. Let's hold it right there.
[00:23:06] Paul knows his role in all of this.
[00:23:11] He knows that he wasn't one.
[00:23:14] He knows his past.
[00:23:16] Now, you might not know Paul's past. Paul used to persecute the Church. He disagreed with the resurrection of Jesus. That anyone who so much that anyone who proclaimed that Jesus was resurrected, he would hunt them down and throw them in prison. He would get court orders.
[00:23:35] He stood and held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen, who killed Stephen.
[00:23:42] His past was standing up against the resurrection.
[00:23:50] He says, like that fourth child you weren't expecting.
[00:23:58] Surprise.
[00:24:02] Jesus shows up to Paul.
[00:24:06] He appeared also to me.
[00:24:11] For I am the least of the apostles, unfit really to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church.
[00:24:27] And then he says most like, this is one of my favorite things Paul's ever said.
[00:24:34] But by the grace of God, I am what I am.
[00:24:40] And his grace toward me has not been in vain.
[00:24:47] His grace toward me. This could be translated, his grace toward me was not without effect.
[00:24:57] Actually, My favorite way to translate this is his grace toward me did not show up empty handed, that when God's grace showed up, it meant something.
[00:25:12] When God's grace arrived, it had something. It was a gift that shaped us.
[00:25:21] Paul says, by the grace of God, I am currently what I am currently, and his grace was not in vain. To me, the resurrection is a celebration of our expectation, the resurrection on Easter. Here we celebrate what we expect, that death does not have the final word, that Jesus paid the final price, that his kingship unites us at all costs, that we are the people he's showing his grace to, we are the people he's offered this good news to.
[00:26:13] We have it.
[00:26:17] But I think that if grace does not show up empty handed, do we take the gift?
[00:26:32] Do we receive it? If God's grace is going to affect us, if the resurrection is going to move us, will we be moved?
[00:26:43] There's a lot of ways that Jesus calls us to be.
[00:26:48] A lot of ways Jesus asks us to interact with the world.
[00:26:53] Some of those ways are we refrain from things sometimes we engage and we welcome and we like. There's just, you know, Jesus when you see it.
[00:27:08] I've never met anybody who knew their Bible really well, but lost their minds at football games.
[00:27:18] I've met those people, but I've never met them and thought, oh, there goes Jesus.
[00:27:28] But I've met people who, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that they loved me when they met me.
[00:27:36] Not because I'm particularly likable, as we've learned, I'm an acquired taste, but they just loved me.
[00:27:55] And in those moments, I never said, man, you look like Jesus, but what's your doctrine?
[00:28:02] Now sometimes that's important, can shape and shift the way we interact with the world, our theology.
[00:28:14] But when it comes down to it, whenever God's grace affects us, people notice. And you don't have to tell them. And when they notice, praise God, you get to tell them we have a message that the tomb is empty, the throne is occupied, the cross, it didn't do its deed.
[00:28:42] Death did not reign over Jesus, but Jesus now reigns over death.
[00:28:50] And so we give God all of the glory.
[00:28:58] So there's just one, one question I want you to ask of yourself today.
[00:29:08] How has his grace affected me?
[00:29:13] How has his grace affected me?
[00:29:17] And if you're just, if you're Christian early on in your walk, like you just haven't really given much thought to it, but you want to start giving more thought to it, a good way to reframe that is, what do I expect now?
[00:29:36] What do I expect at this moment?
[00:29:42] You know, in the end I expect life.
[00:29:48] But as I live in the middle of this death ridden present, the best I can do is love that what we find when we love others is the God who emptied the tomb.
[00:30:13] That God, he is more powerful than any of the hatred and division and any of the judgment and any of the brokenness this world.
[00:30:24] And if love can overcome present darkness, well, we can expect great things in the future.
[00:30:34] Because our God is holy yesterday, our God is holy now and our God is holy forever.
[00:30:46] From now until the end of time, the tomb will stay empty, the resurrection will rule and Jesus is on the throne.
[00:31:00] We are not a church that gets it right 100% of the time. You know, we're really shooting for a B minus to be honest.
[00:31:08] B plus if we're lucky on some days. We're not going to get it right all the time.
[00:31:14] But my goodness, as we try to stand firm on something, it's going to be an empty tomb and a resurrected king.
[00:31:25] If you need anything this morning, we'll have people willing to pray with you in the back. I'm willing to pray with you down here if you want to give your life to Jesus. My goodness, what a day to do it on. The tomb is empty. He is risen. Let's stand and sing.
