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Dr. Kurt Bjorklund concludes the message series "Final Hours" on Easter focusing on the truth of the risen Christ.

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Welcome, Happy Easter. It is great to be gathered here in Wexford, in the Strip District, Butler, the Chapel and Online. Over the last several weeks we've been looking at Jesus’ final hours. And today we come to the event known as the Resurrection; an event that I believe has changed the world.

And I want to read the first portion of Matthew 28 for you and with you, here's what we read: “After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. There was a violent earthquake, for an angel the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; He has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell His disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, and clasped his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers and go to Galilee; there they will see me.” This is the Word of the Lord.

Father, we ask as we are gathered, that you would speak wherever we're coming from, whether it's years of faith or more; people who gather today, not certain about Jesus or the resurrection, or even if there is a God to pray to. God, I pray that my words would reflect your word in content, tone, and emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

So, when it comes to the resurrection, there are many different ways that you can see this or think about it. But one of the ways that seems popular in our culture when it comes to the resurrection is to say, “If it's good for you, if you're one of those people of faith who it somehow helps you navigate your world to believe that this man, Jesus, rose from the dead all these years ago, go ahead and believe it, because maybe that helps you somehow.”

And the idea is that this is a little bit like one of Aesop's fables. You remember Aesop's fables. They're stories that have a nice little point that are clearly not true. This is one of those stories that you hear, and you say, “Oh, I get it.” So, for example, the phrase sour grapes come from one of Aesop's fables because there was a fox that ran and jumped for grapes and couldn't jump high enough to get the grapes. The other foxes were able to get grapes. And this fox wasn't, and he tried again. And then he just said, well, all the grapes are probably sour anyway.  So, when you say it must be sour grapes, that somebody expresses something, you're saying, well, it's based on a not true story that has a nice point.

There are a lot of people who feel that way about this idea of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If it has a nice point for you, you go ahead and believe. But as for me, I'm not convinced. In fact, one well-known politician called the resurrection in Christianity, specifically superstitious nonsense. One author, a man named Christopher Hitchens, who’s written aggressively and antagonistic toward Christians, said this about Christianity. He said it's either literal truth-speaking, especially about the resurrection is essentially true, or it's a fraud and an immoral one at that. I think Christopher Hitchens says something that needs to be grappled with because writing from a non-Christian perspective, what he said is either there's something to this that is true and it changes everything or this is not true. And then he would go so far as to say it's immoral. It doesn't just have a nice story, a nice point, but it leads people somewhere that he believes is ultimately unhelpful.

And what I would like to do today is just point to this account that Matthew gives us of the resurrection in Matthew 28 and say that it challenges us on three levels. There are three words for us in this, and they're caught up in the little phrase come and see, don't be afraid, and go and tell.

And the first word is a word that I'm just going to say is a word for our head. And the reason I say this is because a couple of times here we're told that the angels said, come and see. The idea was to say that Jesus is alive and here's why. This is a word for our heads because your experience and my experience is that dead people don't come to life again, that once they're dead, they stay dead. And so, the reason that this is a word for our head or a reason to investigate this is, as Christopher Hitchens says, this is either literally true or it is false. And it means nothing. And Christianity rests on the idea that Jesus Christ came back from death. And it is either something that's delusional and a perpetual myth or its truth. And it changes everything.

I want you to see in verse one, something that's striking, and that is it says, “After Sabbath at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.” And the reason that this is striking is that here you have the account of two witnesses that are placed at the tomb, and they are the first to encounter this risen Jesus. There is a man named Richard Bauckham who wrote several scholarly works on Christianity and history. And in one of his works, he talks about the idea of legend versus history. How in ancient writing, legend was something that was disseminated without footnotes or people's names. And that history was written with people's names. So, these names, Mary Magdalene and Mary being here are intended to be there so that people who read Matthew's account could say, “Do you know, Mary? Go ask Mary if this is how this went down.”

But here's why this is even more striking. If you are going to fabricate something at that time, you would not have chosen two women to be your witnesses. And the reason is that women weren't allowed to testify in court because their testimony wasn't considered to be reliable. And so, the fact that the gospel account takes two women and says here is how we know this happened is not a way that you would fabricate the story.

And in fact, we get the official story in verses 11 through 15, where we're told that the disciples were said to have gone and stolen the body. That's what the guards were to tell everybody. But here's the problem with that, if the disciples, most of whom were martyred because of their insistence that Jesus rose from the dead, all they would have had to do at any point was say, “Yeah, we stole the body and we threw it in the river somewhere. Don't kill me.” I don't know about you, but when a lie starts to cost more than the truth, what do we do with the lie? We stop telling the lie, right?

I remember when my wife and I were dating before we were married. She used to love action movies. And then we got married and the truth came out. She doesn't want to watch action movies anymore. Now, to be fair, I have acted like I liked romantic comedies. But as soon as you're married, you're like, I don't need to impress her anymore. I don't have to act like I like romantic comedies. I'd rather watch an action movie. It's human nature. And the disciples were martyred when all they had to do was say, “Yeah, yeah, we stole the body.

Now, some people have presumed that maybe they went to the wrong tomb, or maybe Jesus wasn't all the way dead. He was just mostly dead. Kind of like that old Princess Bride movie, you know? He's just mostly dead. He's not fully dead. And then he came back to life, and he went all Rambo on the guards who were there. Others would say that he was resuscitated in the cool of the tomb. But Jesus’ message to those of us who struggle with this is to come and see. Maybe you come here today with more doubts than beliefs. Maybe you came here out of obligation. Not because this is a celebration for you. And I just want to encourage you to investigate this, because if it's true, it changes everything. And I hope if you investigate it, that you'll have the intellectual honesty to go all the way to investigate it. Maybe read a book like C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity or N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian, or Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, and investigate and go where it takes you. Because I've examined this, and I believe that it is a reliable thing to say that Jesus rose from the dead and it changes everything.

But this word for the mind isn't just that Jesus is alive, or he rose from the dead. But it also goes to something else. And again, I want to quote Christopher Hitchens. Here's what he says that the rules of religion (and he's speaking of any religion) produce what he calls hypocrites and frauds. And what he's saying is that it produces hypocrites and frauds, because what happens is when you embrace a religion, you have all of these rules that you can't keep. Here's how he puts it. He says, “The pathetic moral spectacle would not be necessary if the original rules were ones that were possible to obey.” So, on one hand, he has a great understanding of faith, especially Christianity, he says there are all these rules and you can't obey them. This is called the law and here's what he says needs to happen with it. He says, “They put an impossible restraint on human behavior that can only be met in one of two ways. One, continual scourging and mortification of the flesh (he uses biblical language here) with an incessant wrestling with impure thoughts which become actual once they are named or imagined. Or two, that we have organized hypocrisy where forbidden actions are celebrated as something else.”

But here's what Christopher Hitchens, I believe has wrong. The message of Jesus’ resurrection is not come and follow my example and be good like Jesus. It is the message that Jesus’ death on the cross paid for your sin and my sin and made it so that my standing with God is not based on what I did or didn't do in my past, my present, or my future. But it's based on what Jesus Christ has done. And His death means that I don't have to and I can't perform my way into acceptance. And His resurrection validates that ultimately.

And I love, it's not in Matthew's account, but it's in Mark's account, where when he says go and tell, and tell Peter. And the reason I love this is, do you remember what happened to Peter in the accounts of the night of the cross? He was the one who denied Jesus three times. And what Jesus doesn't do is he doesn't say, go and tell everyone except Peter. Peter isn't part of it anymore. He doesn't say Peter can go to hell. He doesn't say Peter is offensive. He says, go and tell Peter I'm alive because you can't perform your way. But you see, this goes against our natural mind that says, I have to perform, I have to do certain things.

And it might be that some of us, the reason we struggle with Christianity, struggle with faith is that down deep we know that we haven't kept the law or the standards of God, and we don't want to keep the standards of God. And so, we say, “You know what? I'm just going to put this aside for a while. Maybe I'll come back to it someday.” But the message of the cross of Easter is that Jesus has done what you and I cannot do. So that's a word for our head, a challenge for our head.

But there's a second word here. The second challenge and I'm just going to say, it's a challenge for our heart. And I say this because we read these words and this was the angel that said, don't be afraid, to the women. Certainly, that had an immediate context. The women would have been afraid of seeing an angel. But I don't think it's a coincidence that these words appear and then that they're uttered again by Jesus in verse ten, “don't be afraid”, because what is happening is there's something much greater to this idea that Jesus is alive. I don't think it's a coincidence that the most repeated command in the Bible is don't be afraid, 365 times. So, some people have said there's one for every day of the year and so here you get these women coming from the tomb and Jesus meets them and says, “Don't be afraid, I'm alive. I'm alive.”

I don't know what your life situation is today, but I would guess in a group this size and gathered at our other campuses and online that some of us that come may be afraid for our future because we don't know if we have enough resources to pay for the things that are ahead. Maybe we feel hemmed in from opportunities. Maybe we are afraid of being alone. Maybe we're facing a season alone that we didn't think we'd be alone. Maybe we're in a season where we're wondering about something significant in the world. Don't be afraid is God's way of saying I'm alive and you do not have to carry the burdens of this life on your own.

I saw some statements about slogans of insurance companies recently. Here were a few. One said, “guarantees for the if in life.” It would be nice if insurance could take away this one. Another one said, “take away rest and you can do anything.” There's still another that said, “cash if you die, cash if you don't, you just get cash.” And a more familiar one said, “you're in good hands.” You know, buying insurance is a reasonable thing. It's a good thing. But insurance is still you and me trying to hedge our bets. The resurrected Jesus being alive and saying, do not be afraid, is a word for our hearts.

I remember several years ago I was invited to go rock climbing and not just your casual rock climbing. This was on the face of a mountain. And it felt to me like it was 200 feet high but was probably 20, but it felt high. And when you go mountain climbing, if you've ever done this, you get instructed with this whole belay on and belay thing where you get tied in so that if you fall, you have this rope that hangs on to you. And there's somebody with a pulley up top, and there's somebody down below who lets out just a little bit of rope so that if you can't hold on to the rock face and you fall, you are hanging there by the rope. I came to believe that on belay and belay on was French for you must be crazy.

And as I was climbing this rock face, and I was up by probably ten or twenty feet, probably 40, or 50 feet in the air. I remember looking down and thinking to myself, the rope is holding me in. And do you want to know what? It made no difference to me at the moment because I could tell myself it was true intellectually. But my heart experience was, I'm afraid, I don't want to fall. And some of us right now are having a hard experience in our season of life, of fear. And if you're a follower of Jesus Christ, then God is alive and for you where you are.

You heard earlier about a new series we're starting next weekend that we're calling Happier. And one of the key questions that we're going to explore is, is God really for us? Is God for you? Because one of the things that keep us from wanting to do what God says is the belief that if we do it, our life won't be happy, that it won't work out. But when we say God is for us, then we can obey or follow God anywhere because we have a sense of saying this God is trustworthy and so we have a word for our minds. We have a word for our hearts.

And then I would say there's a word for our hands. And this is in this little phrase, go and tell. And it first appears when he says to him, go and tell the disciples. And then it comes again at the end of the chapter in what's known as the Great Commission, verse 18. “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.’“

And the reason I say this is a word for our hands is that the idea of Christianity isn't just come to Jesus and believe and punch a ticket for something in the future, but it's that God has a mission for every person. And that is to become, and the word that's used here is a disciple, make disciples, to become a disciple, and to help other people become disciples. And this has at least two elements. One is personal to say if I become a follower of Jesus, and we use the word follower probably more today than disciple, but sometimes that's confusing because you can follow somebody on Twitter or some platform and you have no intention of emulating them, but in the Bible, to be a follower, to be a disciple, meant that you said, I am going to live my life like the one that I follow.

And for some of us, the work or the challenge to our hands is to say, have I become somebody who's a partial disciple? I want the benefits of Jesus and eternity, but I don't want to actually surrender my life to this Jesus. What some of us do is we simply say, God, give me the good stuff, but don't ask anything of me. It's a little bit like a kid who decides that he or she wants to become a concert pianist, and they start taking piano lessons. But then the sun shines and they want to go outside and play. And so, they forget about their lesson. And before long, they don't do what's required to be what they want to be, or being a disciple means that we say, God, I will obey all that you command. And the challenge to our hands is to say, God, I'm going to live with a complete surrender to you. But not only that, I'm going to invite other people into this.

And here's what this is about. We often talk about the great commission, and the going out, and sometimes people are uncomfortable with that because they say, I just want to live a good life. I don't want to proselytize anybody but this isn't about proselytizing people. This is about saying if several thousand people called Orchard Hill their church home, lived in the communities that we live in with a sense of purpose, and brought the kingdom to where we are, to the hospitals that we work in, the schools that we attend or work in, the businesses that were part of, the neighborhoods, the dorm rooms, if we lived the kingdom principles and pointed people to Jesus Christ, that is discipleship. That is living the great commission. That is saying, God, I know that Jesus is alive and I wanted to bring His reality here.

The story has been told about Steve Jobs and Apple when it was in its early days, and Steve Jobs realized that he needed to spend more time on his creative endeavors than on managing the company because management was taking him away from his creative side developing products. So, he approached a man named John Sculley, who at the time was the CEO of Pepsi, and he approached him and basically tried to woo him to come to Apple. And Apple was small. Pepsi was huge at the time, and he tried to get him with stock options and all of the opportunities for growth. And John Sculley kept saying, no, I'm good. I'm at Pepsi. This is good. And so, Steve Jobs finally took one last run at him. And in his last run, he went to him and he said, listen, John, I'm offering you a chance to change the world. Do you want to settle for selling sugar water for the rest of your life? Now, if you work at Pepsi or Coke, you can do that and build the kingdom.

But here's what's real, and that is wherever you are, whatever you do, if Jesus really is alive, then simply saying, I'm going to put in my years and buy some nice things and take some nice trips and retire early and have a good life is not the life that Jesus invites you into. He invites you to something much greater. I love how Martin Luther once put it. He said, “The Christian is called to live as if Jesus died yesterday, as if he rose this morning, and as if he's coming back tomorrow.” To live with a sense of urgency.

I don't know what words you need today, whether you need a word for your head, a word for your heart, or a word for your hands. But what I know is that Jesus’ resurrection is an event that changes the world because it changes the lives of those who wrestle with it and believe it. My hope, my prayer, is that you won't walk away from this weekend and simply say it's kind of like an Aesop's fable. It's a nice story with a point for those who think they need it. But instead, you would walk away saying, this is either essentially true and it changes everything, or this is a made-up story that has no relevance in my life.

Maybe in 20-30 minutes, you can't wrestle with all of the information, but I hope that maybe you'll commit to taking some next steps. Maybe attending here on weekends or if this isn't your home, maybe a church where you are, maybe online, maybe reading one of the books we talked about, but I would hope that you wouldn't just walk away and say it's a nice idea that some people believe. This is something that requires you and me to deal with it on the deepest level of our hearts and our souls.

Let's pray together, God, we ask today that you would help each one of us here to not just go through the motions of a religious observance around Easter and Good Friday, but that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ would indeed be central. God, I pray even in this moment, that for those who maybe have never come to a point of saying, Jesus, I know that I need a Savior because I thought it was about my performance would even now say, if you're really alive, if you really died for me, will you be my savior? And God for those who maybe are here and right now, their hearts are filled with fear about the future. I pray that the reality of you being a living God would change the way we experience what we're walking through. And God, I pray for each of us who believe that Jesus did indeed come to life after the death and resurrection, that we would embrace the commission and the call to go and tell and to make disciples of all nations. And we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.