Resurrection Realities

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CrossPointe Community Church
P O Box 126
Chippewa Lake, OH 44215

ANNOUNCEMENT

Now that we have live-streaming capability, this printed online worship service will be abbreviated to include just any important announcements, a prayer, the scripture texts, and the sermon. You may access the live video worship service via the video link above.

MORNING PRAYER

Alan Robbins

Dear Heavenly Father, From the words of today’s prayer song
“Alleluia, Alleluia, give thanks to the Risen Lord.”
What a great uplifting message this song brings as we continue our thoughts during the Easter Season. Knowing the power of the Risen Lord and the hope it brings to all Christians, and the life with Jesus in Heaven.
A special prayer for my sister, Linda Graebe, who has recently been removed from life support. God, please reach out to hold Linda and her family, but also reach out and hold all those that are grieving, for all those that are ill, for all those that are hurting in any way, and prayers for our own needs.
We pray for God’s strength and God’s heart and God’s Peace to those families and leaders in Ukraine and neighboring countries as they fight the evils that surround them.
A special thought to the compassion and generosity of the Chippewa Lake Lions Club as they have helped Cross Pointe Community Church deliver its Mission of bringing God’s Grace to our community.
Let us take a few moments to silently pray for those in need and those on the Church’s prayer list.
Thank you Lord, as we give God’s Glory ….and Grace…… and Joy….and Refuge…… and Strength….. and Love ….and Peace ….and the Holy Spirit to our community and the world in which we live.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen

SCRIPTURE

But tell me this—since we preach that Christ rose from the dead, why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. And we apostles would all be lying about God—for we have said that God raised Christ from the grave. But that can’t be true if there is no resurrection of the dead. And if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.
But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died. So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man. Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life.
I Corinthians 15:12-22

MESSAGE

Resurrection Realities

Randy K’Meyer

I read about a person who wrote the following to a local newspaper advice columnist: “Dear Uticus, Our preacher said on Easter that Jesus just swooned on the cross and that His disciples nursed Him back to health. What do you think? Sincerely, Bewildered.”

The columnist replied, “Dear Bewildered, beat your preacher 39 times with a lead-tipped whip, nail him to a cross, hang him in the sun for six hours, run a spear through his heart, embalm him, and then put him in a tomb for 36 hours, and see what happens. Sincerely, Uticus.” ¹

I start with that because it introduces us to the Christian discipline of Apologetics. The English word, ‘apology’ comes from a Greek word that means ‘to give a defense.’ Christian apologetics, then, is the science of being able to defend the Christian faith against those who would say, for example, Jesus did not rise from the dead because He didn’t die, He simply swooned on the cross.

Apologetics then involves gathering and presenting evidence to show why we believe what we believe.

Today, I want to give you four reasons we believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

I do this to encourage you in your faith. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul assures his readers that because Jesus was raised, they can be confident that they too will be raised. (4:14) And he concludes the paragraph with, “Therefore, encourage one another with these words” (4:18).

I also wish to help you share what’s important about your faith with others. In Peter’s first letter to the church, he writes: “And if someone asks about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it with gentleness and respect” (I Peter 3:15-16). That’s what Christian apologetics is all about.

The Apostle Paul is engaging in a little apologetics in today’s passage:

And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. In that case, all who have died believing in Christ are lost! And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead.

Here are four reasons we believe in the resurrection:

First and foremost, we believe in the resurrection because of the literary evidence contained in the Bible.

There are more than 66,000 early Bible manuscripts that talk about the resurrection. To be sure, there are slight variations in the manuscripts, but nothing invalidates the reliability of the big picture of the resurrection.

Literary scholars know that the Biblical accounts of the Resurrection include inconvenient and unflattering details that do not fit the expectations of a fabricated account. One glaring example concerns the fact that women are the first witnesses of the Resurrection. In a culture that did not admit the testimony of a woman as valid evidence in a court of law, this detail is surprising.

Author, Rick Mattson, illustrates the reliability of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and resurrection by asking people to imagine that four friends named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John attend a baseball game and afterward write down what they saw.

If 0% of the four reports harmonized with each other, we’d think the guys got their wires crossed and attended separate events. By contrast, if the accounts were 100% verbatim, or pretty close to it, we would think Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John huddled in a room somewhere to fabricate a single harmonized account. But what if the reports were in the 70% range, roughly speaking? What if the big picture was very similar, though some of the details different? Say Mark’s account of the baseball game was the shortest and most selective. Matthew’s account was longer and more organized. Luke highlighted some of the underrated players and a distressed female fan who got beaned by a foul ball. John’s was the most philosophical about baseball. Despite these slightly differing reports, they have much in common: the Cleveland Indians (Guardians) beat the New York Yankees 8-4; the game was played in Cleveland, such and such players were the goats, and one player in particular stood out as the clear hero of the game; hitting a grand slam in the 9th to seal a come-from-behind victory. And that’s just what we have in the four Gospels.” ²

Four accounts that differ slightly in some of the details; just as happens in courts of law today when there is more than one witness. But all four agree as it concerns the big picture fact that Jesus “died for our sins according to the scriptures, was buried and raised from the dead on the third day according to the scriptures” (I Corinthians 15:3-4).

Second, the literary evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is so convincing that hundreds of scientists and scholars who set out to disprove it now embrace it as fact.

CBN News ran an article a week ago Sunday titled, Cold-Case Investigator Turns to Science to Disprove Christ’s Resurrection, Gets Shocked by the Evidence.

As a successful cold-case detective, J. Warner Wallace became so well-known at solving decades-old murders, he ended up as the foremost expert on national TV true crime shows. But as an atheist, he decided to turn his superior detective skills on disproving the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. When Wallace looked at the evidence, he found four facts to be substantiated by both friends and foes of Christianity:
1. Jesus died on the cross and was buried.
2. Jesus’ tomb was empty and no one ever produced his body.
3. Jesus’ disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead.
4. Jesus’ disciples were otherwise unexplainably transformed.
After his investigative work, Wallace was so convinced in the evidence that Jesus both died and lived again that he wrote Cold Case Christianity.” ³

Simon Greenleaf was one of the founders of Harvard Law School. In his three-volume text, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, Greenleaf literally wrote the rules of evidence for the U.S. legal system. He was an atheist until he accepted a challenge by his students to investigate the case for Christ’s resurrection. After personally collecting and examining the evidence based on rules of evidence that he helped establish, Greenleaf became a believer. ⁴

Dr. Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, explains why he and his Christian colleagues at MIT believe in a literal, bodily, historical resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the case of Jesus’ resurrection, we must consider the historical evidence, and the historical evidence for the resurrection is as good as if not better than for any event of ancient history.” ⁵

The Guinness Book of World Records says the most successful attorney in history is Sir Lionel Luckhoo, who got his 245th consecutive murder acquittal on January 1, 1985. This was an incredible feat nobody has ever come close to duplicating. Luckhoo took his expertise in law and combed through the evidence to see if the resurrection of Jesus stood the test of legal evidence. This was his conclusion:

I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof that leaves absolutely no room for doubt.” ⁶

We believe in the resurrection because none of us would be here today if the resurrection was a lie, in other words, there would be no church.

The reason that there is a church at all today is because many people saw the Risen Lord Jesus alive again back then after He was clearly dead. Luke states that He appeared many times over a period of 40 days. (Acts 1:3) Paul says Jesus was seen by a crowd of over 500 people at one time. (I Co. 15:6) Those early Christians staked their reputation on the resurrection of Christ and the church caught fire, spread rapidly and continues to thrive today!

A couple of years ago, The Wall Street Journal published an article by a George Weigel titled, The Easter Effect and How It Changed the World in which he begins by asking:

How did this happen? How did a ragtag band of nobodies from the far edges of the Mediterranean become such a dominant force in just 2 ½ centuries? What happened to them was the Easter Effect. There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection”: their encounter with the one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross.” ⁷

Dr. Joshua Swamidass, Professor of Medicine at Washington University, writes,

Without the Resurrection, 2,000 years of history are left begging for explanation, like a movie missing a key scene. No other event in all recorded history has reached so far across national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, political, and geographic borders. The message spread with unreasonable success across the world. During just the first few centuries, it spread without political or military power, prevailing against the ruthless efforts of dedicated, organized and violent opposition. How did a small band of disempowered Jews in an occupied territory of ancient Rome accomplish this unequaled act? What happened so many years ago that reframed all human history?” ⁸

Why did all the disciples who followed Jesus before He was crucified spend the rest of their days afterward traveling to distant places preaching and teaching and ministering to others in Christ’s name despite terrible persecution for doing so? Indeed, why did all of them give up their lives for the cause of Christ? I tell you why; the only reasonable explanation is that they were absolutely convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had seen Jesus alive again after He died on a Roman cross!

Let me ask you: ‘Would you have given up your life for a known lie?’

But here we are 21 centuries later celebrating the greatest news ever heard! So we believe in the resurrection of Jesus because it and it alone could have catapulted the church into the centuries that followed with such vigor.

We also believe in the resurrection of Jesus, not only because it radically altered the lives of the early disciples, but also because it has altered our lives for the better!

The resurrection not only demonstrates God’s power over death, but it also demonstrates the power of the living Christ to bring marvelous change to people’s lives today.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for by His great mercy He has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead!” (I Peter 1:3).

Nicole Cliff became a Christian on July 7, 2015, after what she called “a very pleasant adult life of firm atheism.” In an article titled, How God Messed Up My Happy Atheist Life, she writes, “The idea of a benign deity who created and loved us was obviously nonsense, and all that awaits us beyond the grave is oblivion.”

But later here’s how she describes what happened to her:

First, I said ‘Be with me’ to an empty room. It was embarrassing. I didn’t know why I said it, or to whom. I brushed it off, I moved on, I didn’t think about it again. Second, I read Dallas Willard’s obituary that talked about his faith in Christ and a few minutes into reading the piece, I burst into tears. I read more Christian books and every time I was moved all over again. I emailed a Christian friend and asked if we could talk about Jesus. But about an hour before our call, I knew: I believed that Jesus really was who He said He was. So when my friend called, I told her, awkwardly, that I wanted to have a relationship with God, and we prayed. Since then, I have been dunked by a pastor in the Pacific Ocean. I have celebrated communion on a beach; I go to church, I pray. Obviously, it’s been very beautiful.” ⁹

Dr. Swamidass again: “If Jesus really rose from the dead, it reorders everything. Just like falling in love, it changes our view of the world.” ¹⁰

We believe in the power of the resurrection today because the Living Christ offers us forgiveness, a fresh start, a new beginning; the opportunity to live a new kind of life where we can let go of the past, ask God to help us live better lives in the future and look forward with confidence to a forever life.

Or as some wag put it: The tomb was left empty so that your life could be made full.

“But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. He is the first of a great harvest of all who have died … Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life” (I Co. 15:20, 22).

In one of his lighter moments, Benjamin Franklin penned his own epitaph. Franklin is characterized in our history books as a deist, a believer in a clock-maker God who created the universe and then let it go and has nothing to do with life on earth. But we need to re-examine that idea in light of the epitaph he wrote for himself: “The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out, and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more perfect edition, corrected and amended by the author.” ¹¹

Ben Franklin and I have two things in common: 1) trust in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and, 2) being amateur astronomers. I’m sure he would have loved these closing words as much as I do:

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” ¹²

1 Did Jesus Die On The Cross? | Salt For Sermons
Saltforsermons.org

3 Cold-Case Investigator Turns to Science to Disprove Christ’s Resurrection, Gets Shocked by the Evidence
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/march/cold-case-investigator-turns-to-science-to-try-to-disprove-christs-resurrection?fbclid=IwAR1ntGDHGSMLG0vVRAiRAaledEgkFjeUc0VjlKDPvkT1efwVLFyatVZQT_4

5 Ian Hutchinson, Can a scientist believe in the resurrection? Three hypotheses.
Veritas Forum (3-25-16)

6 Sir Lionel Luckhoo, The Question Answered: Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? Luckhoo Booklets, back page.
http://www.hawaiichristiansonline.com/sir_lionel.html

7 George Weigel, The Easter Effect and How it Changed the World.
[The Wall Street Journal (3-30-18)]

8 Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass, Is There Evidence for Easter? A Scientist’s List,
The Veritas Forum (4-15-17, 4/21/19)

9 Adapted from Nicole Cliffe, How God Messed Up My Happy Atheist Life.
[Christianity Today (5-20-16)]

10 Dr. S. Joshua Swamidass, Is There Evidence for Easter? A Scientist’s List,
The Veritas Forum (4-15-17, 4/21/19)

11 http://saltforsermons.org.uk/benjamin-franklins-epitaph/

12 Sarah Williams, Twilight Hours: A Legacy Of Verse
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/248153-though-my-soul-may-set-in-darkness-it-will-rise