Tag: Easter

The Reason Why

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It all comes down to this. The whole of the Christian faith hangs on a single peg: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Today, as we celebrate our risen Savior and wrap up our series, All Signs Point to Jesus, we are talking about the resurrection, what it means, and why it matters so much. Let’s dive right in!

The Reason Why

When you live in a houseful of boys (including the turtle), you build stuff. It’s just what you do. I’ve long since lost count of the number of Lego sets that have been built in my house, but that is far from the only construction medium our boys have used. We went through a season when they were really into Keva blocks. The name sounds fancy, but they’re basically over-sized Jenga blocks that you can use to build all sorts of things. Because of their shape and size, though, while you can build some pretty elaborate creations, most of them wind up sitting on a really tiny foundation point. In fact, for most of the coolest things we built, there was usually a single block or maybe two that was holding up the whole thing. If you were to take out that one point, the whole structure would noisily collapse in a great heap. Well, while Christianity is a bit sturdier of a structure than anything we ever built with Keva blocks, it nonetheless rests on a single foundation point. This morning, I want to talk with you about what that is and why it matters. 

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See

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We have spent the past six weeks looking at different miracles Jesus performed over the course of His ministry. Some of the miracles have been pretty dramatic. Others fairly easily blend into the background of all the other miracles Jesus did. Some were directly beneficial to a particular individual or group. At least one didn’t seem like it really helped anyone. For all of the variety among these miracles, the one thing the apostle John notes that draws them all together is the fact that they were all really signs intended to point beyond the miracles themselves to something deeper and richer lying behind them: a vision of God’s kingdom and who Jesus really was. This next miraculous sign brings attention and emphasis to Jesus’ efforts to help us see. Let’s talk about His healing a man born blind.

See

For someone accustomed to sight, being blindfolded can be a disorienting experience. I remember once our youth minister did an activity to teach us about trusting Jesus where they had us all put on blindfolds, loaded us in the church van, and took us to a park across town, but didn’t tell us where we were going. If you can believe it, I was the smart-alecky kid who kept up with all the turns the van made and knew exactly where we were the whole time. That’s not totally my fault though, as the driver took all the main roads and didn’t try to disguise the route at all. It so happened that I had a pretty thorough map of the city firmly rooted in my memory then. Without that, though, I would have been sorely tempted to peek through the blindfold just so I knew where I was. Being able to see is essential to getting through life.

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Helping Us See

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This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series that is going to take us from now to Easter. The question of who Jesus is, is the most important question anyone could ever ask or answer. Over the course of this series, we are going to be walking through the various signs Jesus produced which the apostle John noted in His Gospel were all pointers to His true identity. Each sign helps us to get a better sense of just who Jesus was. Let’s get this journey started with a trip to a wedding.

Helping Us See

Who is Jesus? That’s one of the most significant questions that anyone could ask or answer. The only one with potentially greater significance is the question of whether or not there is a God in the first place. Literally everything hinges on the answer to that question. And that may sound like somewhat of a grandiose claim, but think about it. Let’s say someone protests our claim here by pointing to science. “The question of the existence of God or the identity of Jesus is irrelevant,” they might argue, “because science does for us all the things our ignorant ancestors naively relied on some made up god to give them.” Okay, but why do you think science as you know it exists in the first place? Because of a belief in God on the part of some really smart men and women in the past. Actually, that’s not quite right. They didn’t merely believe in God, they believed in a specific and historically unique understanding of God that made their efforts to study and strive to understand how the world works in an organized fashion reasonable in a way that no other worldview had ever done. And, honestly, they only believed in God as they did because they and their forebears had a certain answer to the question of who Jesus is; an answer that was at least mostly consistent with the broadly orthodox position on it dating back to the very first believers. So, yes, the question of who Jesus is really is the most important question anyone could ever ask. 

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Good News

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Happy Easter Monday! Everything has been leading to this. Jesus’ last week before His death on a Roman cross was action-packed to say the least. Just the things He said and did then have changed the world many times over. But as He always knew, the cross was coming, and come it did. What seemed like a total defeat for Jesus’ fledgling movement turned out to be the catalyst for its total success. On the third day, much to everyone’s surprise, Jesus was alive again. As we finish up our series, A Journey to the Cross with Mark, let’s talk about why this surprising news was just so good.

P.S. This will be the only post for this week. We are taking a few days off as a family. I’ll look forward to being back with you next week!

Good News

Have you ever had something good happen that you didn’t expect? That’s always fun. You’re just humming along, minding your own business, and then, BAM! Something happens to totally make your day. Everybody needs a day like that at least once in a while. What’s even more fun, though, is watching somebody else react to some unexpected good news. If you can catch it right, you can see the dawn of realization come on their face. You can watch as the clouds of confusion gradually lift and they experience the sheer joy of the moment. Videos of little kids reacting to a military parent surprising them with an unexpected homecoming come to mind here. Those things make me tear up every single time I see one. What may be the most fun of all, though, is seeing someone react to something good that they don’t even have a category for until they experience it. In those moments, you can almost watch their brains short-circuit. If they were a computer, their screen would just be flashing a “does not compute” message over and over again as their synapses were trying to figure out how to process the news in ways that will make any kind of sense out of what they are experiencing. And then the joy on the other side of the wall is often the purest, most intense joy you will find. Well, this morning, I want to talk with you for a few minutes about some people who had just this kind of an experience. 

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Morning Musing: John 20:19

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“When it was evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Jesus’ final week before His death was pretty action packed. And we have studied all of it in nearly endless detail. I don’t necessarily mean that we as a church have, but scholars have done this work several times over. We can pretty well piece together what happened on every single day of Jesus’ last week. 

Except for one. 

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