The Resurrection of Love

He is risen! Good morning. Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, risen from the dead, a historical fact as sure as any you have ever heard. People saw Him. They spoke with Him, and He spoke with them. They touched Him, and He touched them. He was not a ghost. He was not a figment of their imagination. He was real. He was flesh and blood, and yet, somehow, more. I want to start this morning by reading the account in the gospel of Mark.

It was the third hour when they crucified Him. The written notice of the charge against Him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. They crucified two robbers with Him, one on His right and one on His left. Those who passed by hurled insults at Him, shaking their heads and saying, “So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself!” – Mark 15:25-30

If you do not know what irony is, this passage is a good example. Jesus was going to destroy the “temple” and build it in three days, but the “temple” wasn’t the mere building down there in Jerusalem; the place that had been the location of the Holy of Holies, the Holy Spirit. The “temple” was another location of God, the body of Jesus Christ. And no, it wasn’t that He couldn’t come down from the cross; it was that He wouldn’t. He had come to Earth for this very reason, and He was not going to stop. To come down from that cross might have saved Himself, but it would have lost the whole world. Jesus had come to lay down His life, to pay for their sins.

The Death of Love

I want to tell two stories today. One story is about me. The other story is about Jesus.

Last Sunday, a few of us were talking after church. We were marveling at God’s grace toward us in spite of ourselves. Do you know what I mean? Every Christian can tell how they stubbornly sinned and rejected God, but He kept on loving us, He kept on calling us, He kept on sending people after us, until we accepted His love. In spite of whatever we might have done, God wants us to turn to him because he loves every one of us.

Bob Schmitt mentioned that we should put out on the sign in front of the church for everyone to see, “Sinners Anonymous, All are welcome.” The reason is that when we’ve been walking with the Lord for a while, sometimes others can’t really see how the Lord has cleaned us up and put our lives back together. The truth of the matter is that in every single believer, in every single Christian, in every single Christ-follower, there is a messed up sinner who was saved by the grace of God. Any good thing that is in our lives now, any love that we can express to others, any kindness or sacrifice that we can make, it comes from the love of God.

Power Revealed

2 Peter 3
 
Welcome! Today we are going to talk about all kinds of interesting things: mortality and immortality, nuclear particles and forces, the nature of time… like I said, all kinds of interesting things! To start, I would like to ask you to raise your hand if you know you are going to die. Well, this is kind of a trick question, because it tests what you really believe about the return of the Lord Jesus Christ. If your first response was to automatically raise your hand and think, "Of course I am going to die!" then this reveals that the second coming of Christ is either something you don’t truly believe or it is something you think will happen in some far away future. Well, if this describes you, I hope that today’s message from 2 Peter 3 will give you the biblical way to think about these things.

We simply don’t know when Jesus will return. It may well happen before we die, in which case we will avoid death. But there is one person who absolutely knew he would die before Jesus’ return. Do you know who this is? It is Peter! During Jesus’ meeting with Peter after the resurrection, the meeting in which Jesus restored Peter and called on him to take care of Jesus’ sheep, to feed Jesus’ lambs, Jesus told Peter this:

Power Corrupted

2 Peter 2

Welcome! Last week and the week before we looked at II Peter Chapter 1 which exhorted us to take radical steps in growing our character. Two weeks ago, we learned that God has equipped us with everything we need to live for Him, and we learned that living for Him means, in part, being like a choir-master, actively striving to assemble a choir of “heroic” goodness, knowledge applied to life, Olympic athlete-like self-control, Winston Churchill-like perseverance, godliness based on the continual worship of God, brotherly kindness based on deep caring for one another, and agape, love that delights to sacrifice self for the sake of others.