Finding Joy in the Resurrection
Notes
Transcript
How many of you are familiar with the minimalistic and decluttering trends that made headlines in recent years?
Marie Kondo was one of the popular proponents of this idea.
It’s the idea of finding happiness in life by getting rid of stuff you don’t need and keeping things nice and tidy.
Here’s an excerpt from one of her six rules of tidying:
In the KonMari Method™, your feelings are the standard for decision making – specifically, knowing what sparks joy. To determine this when tidying, the key is to pick up each object one at a time, and ask yourself quietly, “Does this spark joy?” Pay attention to how your body responds. Joy is personal, so everyone will experience it differently; Marie describes it as “…a little thrill, as if the cells in your body are slowly rising.”
Through the process of selecting only those things that inspire joy, you can identify precisely what you love – and what you need.
[1]
While there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with self-reflection and examining your emotions—in fact, I would recommend it in a lot of ways—there are several problems with this particular idea.
One of them is that no object can really bring joy. It might make us happy to look at or make our lives easier in some way, but that kind of happiness is fleeting and hard to really say is joy. Styles change, stuff breaks, and then our joy is gone.
The other challenge is this: some of you may have reached a place where you say, “Sean, to be honest, if I followed that rule, I would just throw out my entire house. In fact, I would toss everything in my life, because there is something going on right now that makes it where I can’t find joy in anything.”
For those who find joy either fleeting or maybe even impossible to find, I want to turn your attention to God’s Word to find something that can bring us lifetimes of joy.
Biblical joy isn’t about fleeting happiness or a fake, unrealistic optimism.
Instead, the joy God offers is a deeply rooted condition of our hearts that draws us back to unshakeable truths that we rely on every moment of our lives.
These truths are things like the certainty that through Jesus’s death and resurrection, God has shown that he loves me, that he is in control of my life, and that he is in charge of the universe, and that one day, I will be with him forever.
We have talked about it and sung about it this morning, but I want us to focus for a few minutes on Jesus’s resurrection today.
Open your Bibles to Luke 24. We are going to quickly introduce the events that occur in the first part of the chapter, and then we are going to slow down some on verses 36-49 to find four ways that Jesus’s resurrection can bring us joy.
Like the first people who heard about it, we find great joy in the Resurrection of Jesus.
Keep in mind what has taken place.
Jesus has spent about three years publicly displaying God’s power by working miracles and through authoritative teaching like no one had ever heard.
He seemed to many to be the fulfillment of the promise God had made to send someone to rescue his people—one who would be called “the Messiah” in Hebrew or “the Christ” in Greek.
The Jewish leaders were jealous of Jesus’s fame, so they forced the Roman governor to have Jesus beaten and executed by being hung on a cross to die.
He died late on a Friday afternoon, and because of the Jewish ceremonial laws, they could not properly prepare his body for burial.
Saturday came and went, and the Bible doesn’t tell us anything about what went on. From what we see the following day, we can imagine that the disciples hid, afraid the leaders might come after them next.
Their hearts were broken, and their hopes for the Messiah that would deliver them have been dashed.
Early Sunday morning, a group of women came to finish the burial customs they didn’t have time for on Friday.
However, 24:1-8 tells us that they found the tomb empty and Jesus’s body gone!
They encountered two men, likely angels, who reminded them of Jesus’s words that told everyone he would be crucified and rise again.
The women ran and told the disciples, Jesus’s closest followers, and their leader, Peter, goes to check it out for himself and also finds the tomb empty and Jesus’s body gone.
Luke tells us that on that day, two of Jesus’s followers were walking to a town called Emmaus.
Unexpectedly, Jesus comes up to them and starts talking with them.
Let’s pick up in verse 15-18...
They were discussing everything that had happened—maybe the Triumphal Entry, the final fights Jesus had with the Pharisees, certainly the crucifixion and Jesus’s death, and the rumors that he had risen from the dead.
Jesus asks them to explain what has happened.
After they do, he begins to point to all the passages in the Old Testament that foretold that the Messiah would come and suffer and rise again.
When they reach their destination, the men invite their traveling companion to stop with them.
As Jesus blesses and breaks the bread to hand to them, they realize it is him, and he immediately vanishes.
The men run the seven miles back to Jerusalem to tell the others what has happened.
What happens next gives us four reasons why we can have joy in Jesus’s resurrection this Easter:
The first reason we can have joy is because:
1) Jesus is alive!
1) Jesus is alive!
Pick up in verse 36-37.
Other gospel writers give us one detail that Luke doesn’t: the disciples had locked themselves into the room where they were hiding.
While the two who had seen Jesus on the road to Emmaus are telling the story, suddenly, Jesus shows up in the locked room with them!
Remember, this is the same guy who had died on a cross where a large amount of blood had been drained from his body and he likely died from some combination of his lungs and the area around his heart filling with fluid. He was beaten beyond recognition, crucified, and laid in a tomb.
He was undeniably dead.
And yet, all of a sudden, he is standing in the middle of the room with them!
You can’t half blame them for thinking he was a ghost. I mean, we had been hearing rumors of people seeing him, but he was dead!
However, as Jesus stood before them in that room, he had been raised bodily from the grave.
This is the first and most important point that we celebrate today: Jesus is physically alive.
The resurrection of Jesus was not theoretical or simply spiritual. His physical body of skin and bone and organs and tissues was raised to life.
To prove that he wasn’t a ghost, Jesus invites them to look at him and see the scars and touch him to see that he is real.
If that wasn’t enough, we have a somewhat comical picture next. Pick up in 40-43...
To prove that he really was physically raised, Jesus asks them for something to eat.
Have you ever watched a cartoon or a movie where a ghost tries to drink something and it just pours through them onto the ground?
That didn’t happen to Jesus. They handed him a piece of fish and he ate it!
He was really, physically, materially alive, and he still is.
Why does that matter?
Because that means that Jesus had defeated death.
You see, we die as people because we sinned and broke God’s law. The first people who ever lived did, and we have all been cursed to die ever since.
Our physical death is a marker of the fact that we also died spiritually and are separated from God.
There is nothing that you and I can do on our own to bring ourselves back to life spiritually or physically.
However, what Jesus did on the cross was to take that sentence of death that I deserve for my sin and pay the price completely.
He died my death on the cross, so when he was raised from the dead, that meant that he had been all the way through death and come out the other side.
While there are accounts of people being resuscitated back to life in the Bible, all of those people still died a second time.
Jesus is the only one who died and has been raised to a new kind of life where he will never die again.
He was raised physically, truly, completely because he paid the debt to its end and came back.
We can find joy in the reality that Jesus came back to life after dying our death.
Anyone who will surrender his life to Jesus’s control can find joy because Jesus is alive! That means that for those who respond to his death and resurrection by surrendering their lives and calling out for him to save them can find the same life that Jesus offers.
When he draws us to himself and we surrender to him, he makes us alive spiritually and one day will either raise or transform us physically to have a body like his.
We don’t have the physical resurrection yet—Christians still die, and we will until he comes back to set things right.
However, because Jesus is raised, we can find joy and hope because we know he makes us alive spiritually now and physically one day in the future.
No matter what happens, we can find joy because he is alive.
Not only that, but we can find joy because...
2) Jesus fulfilled God’s promises.
2) Jesus fulfilled God’s promises.
Pick up in verse 44-45...
Jesus fulfilled the promises God had made for thousands of years that he would send someone to rescue his people.
This may not seem like a huge deal, but here’s what is so vital about this: If God kept these promises, then we can trust that he will keep all the rest of them.
We don’t have a time to review all these promises because they are scattered throughout the entire Old Testament.
However, Jesus does bring up the Law of Moses, so let’s talk about that for a second.
What’s the first book in the five books of the Law? Genesis.
Think about the promises we have talked about God making over the last few months.
For those who haven’t been with us, we have been looking at the book of Genesis, which is the first book in the Bible. The parts we have looked at have dealt with the promises God made to a man named Abraham and his descendants.
He promised to make Abraham a great nation and to bless the whole world through his descendants. Here’s one great example:
I will indeed bless you and make your offspring as numerous as the stars of the sky and the sand on the seashore. Your offspring will possess the city gates of their enemies.
And all the nations of the earth will be blessed by your offspring because you have obeyed my command.”
So, God promised that all the nations of the earth would be blessed by Abraham’s offspring.
That word “offspring” is translated as “seed” in other translations.
Paul, a man who followed Jesus after Jesus’s resurrection, would later write this:
Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. He does not say “and to seeds,” as though referring to many, but referring to one, and to your seed, who is Christ.
That’s what Jesus was telling the disciples that day—he is the seed that was promised to Abraham, the one through whom all the nations will be blessed.
God had kept his promise to send someone through Abraham to bless the world, which is what Jesus did through his death, burial, and resurrection.
We can have joy in the resurrection, then, because it is an incredible demonstration of the fact that God keeps his word!
He promised he would bless the world, and he did it.
The full blessing of this is still to come, because one day Jesus will return and set up his physical kingdom on earth.
However, right now we have the blessing of knowing that...
3) Jesus forgives our sins.
3) Jesus forgives our sins.
In verse 47, Jesus mentions “repentance for forgiveness of sins.”
There is some discussion about whether it should be “repentance for” or “repentance and”
When we look at all the Bible teaches about repentance and forgiveness, we see that either one can capture the biblical idea.
We talked about repentance last week. That’s the idea of recognizing my sinfulness and acknowledging that I need Jesus to forgive and save me. It comes with the commitment that I will confess my sin, agreeing with God that it is wrong, and that through the strength he supplies, I will commit to turning from that sin.
Throughout the New Testament, the call to follow Jesus is a call to repent of our sins and trust in the forgiveness God gives.
As we have talked about, forgiveness is only possible because Jesus already paid the debt we owed to God for our sin.
God can’t just sweep our sin under the rug and pretend that it didn’t happen; that would make him unjust.
Someone had to be punished.
So Jesus was punished for us, and now he offers us forgiveness instead of the judgment we deserve.
Again, the resurrection proves that his sacrifice on our behalf for forgiveness has been accepted.
Talk about something that sparks joy! If you are in Christ today, your sins are forgiven. The debt has been paid, and you are free in Christ. If you are not yet following Jesus, you can surrender to him today and find forgiveness.
His resurrection gives us so much cause for joy!
Let’s look briefly at one final way Jesus’s resurrection brings joy.
4) Jesus sends us out.
4) Jesus sends us out.
Pick up in verse 47-49.
Those whose lives have been filled with joy because of Jesus’s resurrection have also been sent out to take the message to others.
That call isn’t simply for those who are pastors or missionaries or the like; it is a call for all of us whose minds God has opened and who understand this truth.
You may not have been in the room with the disciples that night, but you are witnesses of these things.
Although the disciples hadn’t received the empowering of the Holy Spirit yet, we who have followed Christ sure have.
Why does that bring us joy?
Because we have the greatest privilege and purpose the world has ever known.
Wherever you go and whatever you do for a living or study or spend time on as a hobby, you have a chance to share what Jesus has done.
You have the privilege of representing your king, living like Jesus and seeking to lead others to do the same.
Part of why you may be facing this challenge or struggling in that area is because God is allowing you to be a testimony to him in a unique way in a unique place.
What greater joy than to know that wherever you are, God is putting you there to represent him well.
Those gathered in the room that night were afraid they were seeing a ghost.
Their fear changed to overwhelming joy when they realized that Jesus had really been raised.
He is alive, and so we can be made alive.
He fulfilled God’s promises, so we know God will keep his word.
He forgives sins, so we can rejoice that he made our hearts clean.
He sends us out, so we can find joy in living out our purpose for him.
Endnotes:
[1] https://konmari.com/marie-kondo-rules-of-tidying-sparks-joy/