Easter Sunday: He is Risen & Alive!
Matthew 28:16-17; John 20:24-29; Psalm 23:4
SERMON TRANSCRIPT
Happy Easter again. How's everybody doing? I'm glad you are here. And I'm excited this morning to be able to share some thoughts on our risen Savior today. And I want to kind of dig us in today to remind us that today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of our faith, and the ultimate proof that Jesus Christ defeated death. because he rose, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And Christianity does not rise or fall on a set of teachings, but it rises and falls on a single event today, Easter, an empty tomb, and a risen Savior. And it is our heart, it is our desire that you know more about this risen Savior. And I wanna share in a little bit more about what this means for us today. But if you would, I'd like to just quickly pray again. Heavenly Father, God, we thank you for today, a day to celebrate you. And I pray today that we'll be honored by our worship and the preaching of your word. We ask God that because of what you've done to help us in our faith, in your goodness, in your grace, your power, and your love, that you would transform lives through the risen Jesus. We pray all of this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Well, Easter Sunday is the day that Jesus rose from the dead. And he made, if you guys know, 13 post-resurrection appearances that is recorded in the New Testament before ascending back to heaven. He appeared to the women at the tomb. He appeared to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. He appeared to the 10 disciples. He appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time. He appeared to the disciples during a meal. He appeared to disciples while fishing, and he appeared to disciples on a mountain. If you want to know, yes, Jesus is both a beach guy and a mountain guy, okay? He appeared. There are so many accounts of when Jesus appeared post-death on the cross and resurrection that we know that it is true.
But today I wanna focus in on the appearance on Matthew 28 on the mountain of Galilee just before his ascension. See, this post-resurrection Jesus, I think this verse is sometimes often missed. Jesus, so I'll walk you through it. Jesus comes in, we celebrate last Sunday, Palm Sunday. He enters in Jerusalem on a donkey. Why a donkey, not a horse? Well, donkey symbolizes peace and healing and hope. And so Jesus comes in. It's a little bit different than what they thought it would be because the disciples and the people who were following, they thought he was going to overthrow the Roman Empire and become the new Caesar, the new king that would rule on earth. But that wasn't Jesus' plan. He had a much larger plan in store. And so he'd go through the week. And then on last Friday, if you were here with us, we celebrated a Good Friday service. And if you know what a Good Friday service is about, it's the recount and the moments when Jesus goes, He is arrested, and then he is taken before multiple governmental leaders. He is tortured. He is then executed on the cross, a criminal's death. We call it Good Friday, but I tell you, it's not so good if you're Jesus or you were a follower of Jesus that moment. But we know it's good because we know Easter is coming, right? And so Jesus goes in the grave. He dies. He is buried. And the world thought this was it. The world thought that's the end of the story. But we know Jesus is like, uh-uh, I still got more. I still got more I wanna share. I still got more I gotta do. I still got more I have to redeem. And Easter Sunday, when the women, Mary and the other Mary went to the tomb just to check on and see what was going on, they found an empty tomb. They found a stone rolled away and they met an angel, A couple angels, I believe. And it says, why are you here? Why are you looking for the living among the dead? I love that line. Because Mary and Mary, they thought it was over. They were just coming to pay respects to the one that they loved.
But Jesus had another part of the story to tell still. And so then Jesus appears multiple times, like I just said, but he has this one moment when he appears before the disciples on the mountain of Galilee before he ascended into heaven. And I always thought that this ascension moment when Jesus goes into heaven was just like slow motion, epic, like Hans Zimmer movie score, just crescendo of a moment. But what if it was like Iron Man? What if Jesus was just like, peace out guys, and just bolted. And then you get like the camera angle from his head down to earth. like what okay sorry i was just that's random thoughts with Chris in his office prepping a okay right there transition but Jesus is meeting with the disciples and he gives them their divine assignment in this moment and that is to go into all the world and tell everybody about Jesus tell them about the gospel tell them that the Jesus the son of god was sinless who became our sin died on the cross and was raised again. Anybody who believes in him will be forgiven and transformed.
So it says this in Matthew 28, then the 11 disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. They saw Jesus, they worshiped him, but some of them doubted. If you want to take any notes this morning, you want to write something down on that program you got when he came in, you might want to write down today's message, and it's dealing with our doubt. Dealing with our doubt. I've come to see an honest observation about human nature is that it's strangely encouraging when we see other people struggle. And I would add to that, it's strangely encouraging to see when even those who saw the risen Savior Jesus, the disciples, struggled. And seeing that the disciples struggled and still had doubts, I don't know about you, but that makes me feel a little bit better about myself. There have been times in life when I've really struggled. There's times in life when I've had a lot of doubts. Whether it was a tough season of parenting, those hard times in my marriage, difficult moments of leading churches as a pastor. And there have been moments in those times when people have asked me, hey, Chris, how you doing? And I'm honest with people. I won't put the face on. I won't be like, hey, I'm great, fantastic. Everything's great. That's not who I am. I can't be that guy. I'll be honest. And there have been times when I've had surprising responses. They'd ask me how I'm doing. Hey, you know, just really hard season of parenting right now. Well, that makes me feel so good, they said to me. I'm like, what? Yeah, just in a really hard season with the church. Well, you know, that makes me just feel so thankful. What? And it's a funny realization is that sometimes our pain blesses other people because it reminds them that they're not alone. People have even responded to me and were like, I didn't know pastors had bad days. And I'm like, what kind of pastors you've been hanging around? Because I want a little bit of what they got, right? I miss that day in Bible college when they're like, okay, here's your card where you never have a bad day. Do you take that? I miss that day. But there's something profound when we see other people who struggle and who have a hard time in life and have doubts. That's okay. Because I think the reality of doubt is just life.
Reality of doubt is the Christian life. And many of us have experienced these seasons in life where God feels so incredibly close to us. Like almost you can just reach out and you can just touch him, right? What I would call these, I would call these thin moments where we feel like this gap between heaven and earth is just so thin that God is just right there. But the reality is there's other times where we go, hey, God, are you even out there? Are you even there? Can you even hear me? Are you real? Is any of this stuff in this book that we say is supposed to be the book, is any of it true? God, you feel so far away. and doubt can feel so incredibly scary and lonely, especially in the church. And then questions begin to arise. Are we making all this stuff up? What if God isn't gonna show up? And it's sad to see that many people leave the church not because God isn't good, but because they have questions that they don't feel safe asking. So can I ask you a question today? Do you ever battle with doubt? I've been wrestling with this this week, and I kind of took a step back from that question and asked, why do we doubt? Like, where does this come from? Sometimes in life we have questions of the Bible that we can't fully understand. We have situations that just seem unfair. Good people suffering. Bad things happening to innocent people. Global suffering. Wars. Children hurting. And we get to these moments and we begin to think of like, where's God? Where's God in the midst of all of this pain and this hurt? Maybe we have some unresolved pain that Christians maybe we looked up to growing up in life that they let us down. Or maybe where church was supposed to be the safe place, you were wounded in that safe place. Maybe it was with a lack of grace from other Christians. I call this bumper sticker theology. You ever seen those? God said it, I believe it, that settles it. This is black and white with no room for bend. And you know what happens to a stick that won't bend? It breaks. And that same thing happened to those people when there was no room for honest, real, authentic conversation and the church broke them and it breaks my heart. but I think the hopeful truth about doubt is that there's something on the other side that our doubts when handled properly can become a huge catalyst for a stronger faith in Jesus and that doubts don't have to take you away from God but rather doubts can actually draw you to God that when you have your doubts and you're honest about those, that you can become closer to God as you wrestle with those because faith is a journey, not a destination. I want to say that again. I want you guys to get that today, that faith is a journey, not a destination. You will never graduate with a PhD in faith. You never will. You will never arrive at a perfect doubt-free faith life. there is no such thing as a flawless faith 24-7. It just doesn't exist.
If you've ever been a parent, been around a parent, there have been struggles. And parenting, I tell you, the more I go through it, is not for the weak of heart. And there'll come a moment when they begin to ask questions about your faith. don't panic. Okay? Don't panic. But what they're doing is they've watched your faith, consistent or inconsistent, whatever it is, and they're trying to figure out if your faith can be their faith. And I would say that the church and the home should be the safest place in the world to ask the hardest questions. That's where they should go to. Not to Google, not to AI, not to some podcast, some YouTube channel. You should be the place where they can come and be honest, be like, I don't know, let's figure this out together. I have people come ask me theological questions and I'll say, I don't know, but let's figure it out together. We're starting a new series, Pastor Andrei talked about next week, tough questions. Because we got to wrestle with this stuff, right? Because sweeping under the rug just doesn't help anything. We have to wrestle with it. Because faith is a journey, not a destination. The strongest faith is not a faith that doesn't doubt. The strongest faith is the faith that grows through your doubts. Guys, the disciples saw the living, the very much dead, and then the living against Savior, and what? They had doubts. That's okay.
And there's one in particular I want to talk about a little bit this morning that I think gets a bad rap. And then he had the nickname, the Doubting the Disciple. and there's some rough nicknames in the Bible. You guys ever like looked at the nickname? There's some good ones and there's some really bad ones. This one's up there on the really bad side. And I wanna start a campaign today to change the perspective on doubting Thomas. You go on a journey with me? But I wanna be honest here about who Thomas was. He gets a bad rap. He's the one who doubted. And yet that Bible verse says, the disciples doubted. He's not the only one, okay? But I want to dignify doubting Thomas today. We're going to be in John chapter 20. We're going to have it on screens. But I want to introduce you to Thomas. It says, but Thomas was one of the 12, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples were telling him, we've seen the Lord, we've seen the Lord, we've seen the Lord. But he said to them, if I don't see the mark of the nails in his hands, put my finger into the mark and put my hand into his side, I will never believe. See, here's the thing with Thomas. He wasn't with them when Jesus appeared. So I don't blame the dude for saying, hey guys, that's great, but I'm not too sure about this. Because the others are telling him, we've seen the Lord, we've seen the Lord, we've seen the Lord. There's actually a Greek term in this, which is mean an active, repeated tense. It's like when you're in the car and the kids, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? The disciples are like, we've seen the Lord, we've seen Lord, we've seen the Lord, we've seen the Lord, we've seen the Lord don't know. And this is why they call him Doubting Thomas, but he's getting a bad rap.
The other's disciples only believed because they had seen Jesus. Thomas is just being honest. He's a realist. Here's why I don't believe that Thomas really deserves the title Doubting Thomas, because when we go back and we see other moments when he is mentioned in Scripture, he's actually really strong in his faith and his courage there was a moment when Jesus was going to back to see his friend Lazarus who had died it'd been 10 four days since he had died and Thomas says hey Jesus let's go it's time to go back that we may die with him it's courage it's not fear there's another time in john 14 when when Jesus said he was going to prepare a place and Thomas goes, hey, Lord, where are you going? We don't know where you're going. How can we know the way to get there? Thomas wasn't doubting. He just wanted to know a couple of details. He just wanted to know the route. He was ready to put it into his GPS to get there, but Jesus hadn't given him the destination yet. He just wanted to know details. Questions don't make you bad. They make you human. questions don't make you bad they make you human. Oswald Chambers has this great quote that said “Doubting is not always a sign that man is wrong it may be a sign that he's thinking”
And so Jesus i i would love to have been where Jesus was when he when because he's almighty he's all present he's everywhere he's he's hearing Thomas talk to the disciples and say Like, he's alive, he's alive, he's alive. And Thomas is like, no, no, not until I touch and until I see him face and I put my hands in. And I bet Jesus was just like, bet. Jesus is like, okay, I see you. I hear you, Thomas. I see you, Thomas. I'm coming. So verse 26 says, “A week later, his disciples were indoors again and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ Then he said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here and look at my hands. Reach out your hand, put it in my side. Don't be faithless, but believe.’ And Thomas responded, ‘My Lord and my God.’ Jesus said, ‘Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.’”
So a week later Thomas shows back up even though he doubts check that a week later Thomas is still hanging around those people still with his doubts but he's showing back up so I'd encourage you today maybe you came to church willingly maybe you didn't but you're showing up okay it's half the battle you're showing up Jesus appeared to him, looked him straight in the eye and said, touch and see. Put your finger here. Look at my hands. Put your hand on my side. Stop doubting and believe. Jesus gave Thomas exactly what he asked for. Thomas said three very specific things and Jesus says the exact same things to him. Whoa. What a gift. How amazing. Have you guys ever had a moment where you were praying for something in life and then Jesus shows up and gives you that exact same thing, maybe even more? That blows our minds, right? Thomas's response, what does he say? My Lord, my God. I love it.
Jesus is not a standoff savior. Jesus is not a standoff savior. He is willing to be touched and he meets us in our doubts. And one of the coolest things I think that comes out of this is Thomas's legacy. We don't really talk about what happened to Thomas after this moment very much in the church, But actually Thomas goes on to serve faithfully as one of the first missionaries in the world. He goes and he preaches the gospel in India for about 40 years. And then he is martyred for his death. He is stabbed multiple times in the stomach and dies a painful, painful death. Guys, Thomas doesn't do that without walking through doubt. That Thomas is proof that doubts do not disqualify your faith. And if you've ever been told, maybe in the church before, or maybe by another Christian or something, you can't have any doubt, you have to believe everything, I want to tell you, Jesus says, bring your doubts. Come on, let's go. Jesus wants them. And God is so much bigger than them that your doubt, you might think, is the biggest doubt in the world. God ain't scared of it. He's not afraid. Thomas's martyrdom reminds us that the same risen Jesus who met Thomas in his doubt still needs ours. So here is what I know. here's what I know. I don't know nothing. I don't. I don't know what later today is going to bring or tomorrow or next week or who knows next year. We may be back here a year from now celebrating Easter again. We might not be. Some of you might be celebrating Easter face-to-face with Jesus. That's just the reality. We just don't know. Even the last 30 days has radically changed our world. But here's what I do know. That Jesus' resurrection empowers us to keep walking. Empowers us to keep walking through the highs of life and in the celebrations, but especially through the darkest and hardest valleys of uncertainty.
Psalm 23, David writing this to God, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” Here's the realization. Faith is not an absence of doubt, but faith is a means to push through doubt. And the resurrection of Jesus makes all of this possible. So maybe you're in that valley of doubt today. Keep walking. That valley is no place to set up a camp and start roasting some marshmallows. Keep walking. The resurrection of Jesus Christ makes all of this possible. Don't let doubt be a dead end. Keep showing up. Keep asking questions. Keep pressing into God. You don't need a faultless faith. You just need a little bit of faith. Guys, I'll be honest. I don't know all the details of the resurrection. I don't know how Jesus did it. I don't know how God did it. What I read in the accounts and people who have done way deeper research on this stuff, even medical doctors, I was listening today or this week to a podcast was talking about the physical pain and agony that Jesus went through. I was like, there's no way he should be alive. There's honestly no way he should have made it even to the cross still breathing. And yet he did. So there's times I will be honest. I wrestle with doubt there's times i'll come in here during the week and i'll sit here on this front row and i'll just pray and i'll ask god I don'll under I don't know I don't understand it I don't get you. I don' know what you're doing None of this makes sense I see what you're doing over here in this place and that'S awesome and I love it I see what you're doing over here. I see what you're doing over here. I see what you're doing And I wrestle with doubt, but I'm reminded of Thomas. I'm reminded of Thomas who saw Jesus and yet still had doubt, but Jesus met him in that place. And he believed so strongly, Thomas did, that he gave his life for Jesus. Hebrews 6:12 says, “Faith and patience inherit promises.” Faithfulness begins when our faith seems insane. Faithfulness begins when our faith seems insane.
So your doubts, when handled properly, do not have to drive you away from God. They can actually draw you closer to him. And faith is a journey, not a destination. So can I give you an invite this morning? Come to Jesus. Bring your doubts to him. Come to Jesus. Bring your doubts to him. If you have doubts, come to Jesus. If you're struggling, come to Jesus. If you have questions, bring them to Jesus. If you have baggage, addictions, pain, hurt, bring them to Jesus. If your life is full of unfair situations, church hurt, friend hurt, life hurt, take them to Jesus. Cast your cares on him because he cares for you. If you wanna hear anything today, cast your cares on him because he cares for you. And that the enemy wants to use your doubts to put a wedge between you and drive you away from God, but God wants you to use your doubts to draw him to himself. Faith is a journey, not a destination. Keep walking to Jesus. Keep walking, keep walking, and keep walking especially when you have doubts because the risen Jesus is waiting to meet you right in the middle of all your doubt.
Pray with me. Jesus, we thank you. God, we are so grateful that you rose again. And Jesus, today, we celebrate Easter with the entire globe shouting in unison that he is risen. He has risen indeed. and that even though the disciples who were so close to you still had doubt, you still met them in that doubt. And that Jesus, you even showed up in Thomas' life and said, hey, I heard you had some questions. I heard you needed to see some stuff. I'm here. And so God, I pray for us today that whether we've been walking with Jesus, doing this church thing for a super long time, that we might have some permission to have some doubts and to wrestle with those. Or maybe you're new to this Jesus thing and you're like, yeah, I know this doesn't make sense and this doesn't make sense. I don't get what you're doing here. I don't get this over here. God, I pray that they would just come to you and just have that conversation, that you would treat them just as you did Thomas hey, let's talk. I heard you got some questions. Or maybe you're here this morning and you're saying, Chris, I don't know, I'm here because I was dragged here. And I have a lot of doubt. Maybe you were in the church before and you've been hurt and you walked away and you're like, I never found myself back in a church again. Well, thanks for showing up. I wanna tell you about a Jesus who loves you. A Jesus who cares for you. A Jesus who wants something greater for your life. And he's here right now in this moment, ready to talk with you.
As we continue to pray with your heads bowed and eyes closed, I just want to provide an opportunity for those who have not yet placed their faith in Christ. I want to give you an opportunity to do that right now. And so, again, everyone's heads are bowed. If that's you, if you would like to put your faith in Jesus for the very first time, would you just lift your head and look up? We're going to say a prayer. I'm going to pray. You can say it out loud or you can just say it in your heart. And it goes like this. Again, if you've never put your faith, this is how you can do. Say, Father in heaven, I know that I have lived for myself instead of you. I have sinned against you, but I believe Jesus died for my sin. So I confess my sin and I ask you to forgive me. I bow to you as Lord and leader of my life. Help me to live for you from this day forward. In Jesus' name. God, we praise you for what you are doing. We praise you for the work that you do through your Holy Spirit, for the salvation that we have from Christ's death on the cross and that he rose again. If you prayed that prayer, with everyone's heads bowed, would you just look up and raise your hand really quickly if that was the first time you've prayed that prayer? Thank you. God, again, we just give you all the glory. We pray this in your name. Amen.