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Our theme for 2022 is “Begin Again”
This series is called, “Believe Again”
You may have already believed the gospel, but it is time to believe again.
We began with “Believe in Jesus”
Then we talked about believing in spiritual reality.
We talked about how an encounter with Jesus leads to transformation, living in both realities.
We talked about life - remember the great circle of life - God’s life in us and flowing through us?
We talked about light and how light displaces darkness and exposes what is hidden.
We talked about truth and freedom.
- that knowing the truth about God and about yourself sets you free from guilt and condemnation.
last time we talked about how Jesus shows us the Father as a Good Shepherd who loves us and who has a plan to redeem us.
There are two things that anyone needs to know about God in order to trust Him with your life.
God is good.
- We have established that.
God is powerful.
- This is today’s topic.
If God is powerful, but not good, then God could be evil.
- You might fear Him, but you would never trust Him.
If God is good, but not powerful.
- Then you might like the idea of God, but you wouldn’t expect God to help you or to intervene in your life.
Which do you believe?
Is God good?
Is God powerful?
Is God both good and powerful?
Our problem with recognizing God as powerful is that we don’t recognize true power.
Power (in our thinking) is the ability to bend people to your will.
It is the capacity to control vast amounts of wealth and influence.
It is the ability to exert force and cause mass destruction (only as a last resort, of course) but the fact that you can is power.
Is that power, or is that just being a bully?
There is another way of thinking about power.
Which is more difficult and which requires more control, to unleash your fury or to restrain yourself?
Which is more likely to win: extreme force or unlimited patient persistence?
Which is a more effective strategy for lasting change: the ability to destroy or the capacity to create?
God is not just powerful, he is the definition of power, and power, by His definition, is not what we usually think.
The power of resurrection.
Today we are in John chapters 11 and 12.
It is the story of Lazarus.
This is arguably the greatest of Jesus’ miracles - he raised a man from the dead!
It is a long story to read, so I encourage you to have you Bibles open and browse it while I am speaking and I will be highlighting some specific passages.
You know the end of the story, but Jesus’ disciples didn’t.
Do you remember getting the news that someone significant has died?
Do you remember where you were?
Do you remember how you felt?
Do your remember the impact, like a sucker punch to your gut?
You feel helpless, perhaps even hopeless, like your world is coming crashing down on you.
Death is so powerful, so ominous, so final.
The Bible calls it the last and final enemy.
But does death have the last word?
Death is not the worst that can happen.
Most people think that death is the worst thing that can happen to them or to someone they love, but is it really?
In this story, Jesus said that Lazarus’ sickness would not end in death.
In fact, Lazarus probably died within a day or two of the news reaching Jesus, certainly before he could have reached him.
Martha is going to say, “if only you had been here.”
But the truth is that it would have been too late.
But is it too late?
Is it ever too late?
That depends on what you think “too late” is.
Is death really final?
Is physical reality ultimate, or is her another reality?
When a person ceases to physically exist, when their body gives out, are they really gone?
Jesus says, death is not the end of the story - the glory of God is going to be how this story ends.
If death was the worst thing that could happen to a person, then survival would be the ultimate goal of life.
Soldiers would not fight for freedom, because there would be no freedom in death.
Firemen would not risk their lives to save lives that might already be lost.
Police would not put themselves in harms way to protect the innocent.
There would be no standing up to bullies who threaten to destroy life, because the only instinct would be to preserve one’s own life.
But death is not the worst that can happen.
Life, light and goodness are all in God.
Death is just the end of mortal life - there is another kind of life after death.
There is spiritual reality and spiritual life!
Even death (mortal death) has an end.
Death itself will be destroyed.
But the goodness, life and light of God goes on forever.
So dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you.
Dying without hope in Christ is the worst thing that can happen.
Separation from God (which is what “hell” is) - now that is far worse than death!
So what is life then?
Believing is really living!
I called this series “believe again” because sometimes we believe, but somewhere along the way, we stopped really believing.
What have we been saying all along in this message series?
Believing in Jesus is encountering a new reality.
Living and believing in Jesus is living in both realities.
Yes, we still live in the real world with physical bodies, pain, suffering and oppression.
But we also live in a spiritual reality which transcends what we know and see.
In that reality, death is just a passage into a fuller expression of life.
But to show us that this other reality is totally real, God transforms our present physical reality to become more like His transcendent spiritual reality.
This world can be a difficult place, but when you live in both realities, your spiritual reality can transform your physical reality!
All you have to do is believe - live in both realities!
The power of resurrection is the glory of God.
So what is resurrection power?
- it is the power to reverse death!
Not only is death not final, but it can be undone.
In 2018 Marvel came out with the Avengers movie “Infinity War”.
Major spoiler alert here: at the end of the movie Thanos (ironically sounds like thanatos the Greek word for death) snaps his fingers and half of all life in the universe vanishes.
People were literally traumatized by that movie!
It seemed so final.
I won’t tell you how, but when the next movie, Endgame, came out in 2019.
It was all reversed, five years later according to the story line.
On one hand, like the biblical story, it shows that the end is never really the end.
But all of the Marvel movies since then they ironically refer to the event as “the blip” but the characters are all greatly impacted in both positive and negative ways.
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