Epiphany - 8 - Celebrating the Power to Live in Christ

2/23/2025

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20

1 Corinthians 15:12–20 NIV

12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. 20 But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

O perfect Love,

whose compassionate power transforms sin into health

and temporal dust into eternal glory:

grant us a gracious faith,

so that we may face our trials with confidence,

and become a blessing

to friend and enemy alike in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Celebrating the Power to Live in Christ

Where is Your Hope?

We’ve experienced more snow this winter than in many years- more snow than we knew how to handle. Not to mention the cold, the ice, and everything else that comes with it. Perhaps we’ve been spoiled for years without even realizing it.

In fact, I’ve heard more people in the last two weeks reference that famous winter back in 1978 and 79, a generation ago, when the snow, ice, and cold kept everything frozen and closed for weeks. Some of you remember that winter. I did a little research this week on how far that winter weather spread that year. It turns out it affected more than just Indiana and the Midwestern United States; it spread all the way to England. The entire United Kingdom endured extremely low temperatures, blizzards, and ice, and even some tidal waves that came ashore and swept away cars from parking lots.

Historians say “The severe winter conditions were part of what became known as the “Winter of Discontent,” a time of widespread strikes and economic challenges in the UK. The cold weather persisted into early 1979, making it a historically notable winter.”

Some time during that crazy winter, cooped up with nowhere to go and followed by a year of economic trouble, a man named Douglas Adams wrote a book called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s a story about a man named Richard, who goes on a journey to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, and then saves the world from destruction. He manages to do this all with nothing but a bath towel. The book is part science fiction, part comedy, and full of satire about the impossibility of making it through each day in our world. In the last 45 years, it has been remade into radio dramas, TV series, and movies. Douglas Adams and his story have inspired this practice of revealing truth using bizarre and unbelievable situations.

That’s probably what the disciples felt every day they walked with Jesus. After witnessing him die and rise from the dead, I don’t think anything improved; in fact, I believe it got worse. It is hard enough to believe that God would come down from heaven and walk among us as a person. Trying to believe that we could follow him and do the things he did seems impossible. We spent too many years locked in by our limitations, surrounded by sin, like the snow we’ve experienced, enduring the day-to-day devastation caused by that combination. In fact, some of us reach points in our lives where we get stuck in the winter of discontent of ’78 and ’79 and can’t even imagine a way out, let alone find it.

We can get stuck trying to follow our calling without the hope that God is working through us. It makes us feel like we are trudging through, one day at a time, with no hope for tomorrow- barely surviving and not thriving. That is not a life faithfully following Jesus, because following Christ leads us to do the impossible.

Witnesses

Christ leads us to do the impossible because we are witnesses for him. When we think of witnesses, we often envision individuals using their words rather than their actions. Words hold significant importance. However, when it comes to witnessing and sharing about something like Jesus, salvation, and the hope of resurrection, we require more than just words.

You and I know this for a fact because we needed more than words before we were going to believe it ourselves. Can you imagine what our world would be like if Jesus had come and only preached about God but did not do any miracles or demonstrate God‘s love through his life in any way? We wouldn’t be here if that were the case. There would be no gospel or New Testament. And frankly, there wouldn’t be an Old Testament either. There would be no Israel if God had not parted the Red Sea. If He had just sent Moses to talk to the Egyptian rulers and the Hebrew people, but they were left to figure out how to free themselves, they would never have left Egypt. Moses told God that they wouldn’t believe him if He only came with words, so from the very beginning, God gave him impossible deeds to perform as a witness to the truth of God‘s word. We are no better than Moses and certainly not better than Jesus.

We need to remember, though, that this letter to the Corinthians was read to some of the people there who didn’t know the stories about Moses and the Red Sea. To them, any talk about gods referred to statues or wooden figurines that represented ideas people could rally around, like school mascots, but they had no real power themselves. The idea of a resurrection, a physical resurrection, was even harder to swallow. Many of the Jewish leaders had even given up on this idea.

In the days of Moses, the Egyptians believed in a physical resurrection, at least among the royal families. They also thought that a sense of justice was connected to resurrection. When the dead were raised, their hearts and lives were judged, and they were rewarded or punished based on how well they had lived.

Over a thousand years later, during the time of Jesus, many people had abandoned the idea of justice and physical resurrection. They had witnessed powerful people take advantage of the weak and defenseless and commit terrible acts without facing justice. They were sometimes compelled to worship these figures, even after they died, as their followers continued to venerate them. All the people encountered a lack of justice in this world and a growing hope that if an afterlife existed, it might have nothing to do with this life. Perhaps we would all become free, floating spirits, uniting without names or faces, like breezes merging with the winds encompassing the Earth or raindrops in the ocean. If there is no justice in the world, and it doesn’t matter how we live today, why should it matter after we die?

That is the landscape of belief in the world that Jesus confronted, both from his own people and the Gentiles who lived among and around them. Those who still believed that justice would be done found it difficult to maintain their faith, especially when God had given them no word for nearly 500 years. For them, miracles were a thing of the past. It’s really hard to preach and teach about hope and the resurrection to people who have known only how to survive for generations.

But Jesus witnessed the truth of God‘s love and purpose for our lives throughout eternity. When we follow Jesus, we are also called to be witnesses of that. It’s a struggle, but it is necessary.

It’s necessary to continue struggling with the hope of resurrection because we are witnesses of God, whether we want to be or not. The world doesn’t wait for us to go to the courthouse and swear on the Bible. They observe our testimony all day long, wherever we go. Just like us, they make excuses, believing that if we can get away with something, they should be able to as well. Even worse, Paul says that when our words and actions suggest that we don’t believe what Jesus says is true, we make Him out to be a liar, and we become blasphemers about God. This is one of the worst things to be guilty of when we face our own judgment.

Inheritance

This entire passage is structured like a legal argument in a courtroom. Paul was certain of the resurrection because he met Jesus after Jesus had died. Not just a ghost or a vision of Jesus- Paul truly met Jesus.

However, for the sake of argument, he argues that if there is no resurrection and we preach and witness about it, then we, as Christians, would be the blasphemers teaching something about God that is not true. We would be the ones facing harsher judgment, not the doubters and skeptics. This implies that how we believe and live out that belief matters even more.

However, it is even worse for the doubters and skeptics. Remember, the resurrection is not merely about finding new life on the other side of death. It’s about justice being served, wrongs being made right, righteousness being rewarded, and evil being punished. If there is no justice in the end, there is no forgiveness for sin. There is no good triumphing over evil. Evil prevails, and we remain dead in our sins. It means today is the best we will ever have as we lose more and more every day. If we have no physical resurrection, then we have already lost everything, and we have no hope.

What’s the big deal about a physical resurrection being different from a spiritual one? That relates more to Jesus than to us at first. Last week, we learned that our primary belief about Jesus is that he died for our sins. That is the bare bones, the first brick in the foundation, belief in our faith. But how can we be sure he died for our sins? We know he died. But lots of people have died. Millions have suffered cruel and unjust deaths, much like Jesus. But they didn’t die for us, and they certainly didn’t die for our sins.

We know Jesus died for our sins because he claimed it himself, and the prophets of the Old Testament foretold his work. However, that is not enough proof. To demonstrate to the world that God accepted his righteous sacrifice, God raised him from the dead after three days in the tomb without the help of anyone else. The stone rolled away from the empty tomb serves as proof of salvation, not just of resurrection, akin to how the parting of the Red Sea symbolized freedom for the Hebrew people rather than merely a momentary escape.

In the Sermon on the Mount, after Jesus taught the crowds how to follow God faithfully, he concluded with the example of building a house on solid rock rather than sand. When we give up our belief in the resurrection, we are not just building on sand—we are building with sand, and that is what we will inherit after we die. It doesn’t matter how beautiful our sandcastle looks. The tide is coming in, and we know what happens to sandcastles when they face the waves.

Where is Our Hope?

Our primary belief about Christ, the foundation of everything, is that he died for our sins. The second part of that belief is that three days later, he rose from the dead. These two beliefs stand together like the commandments about loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves. We don’t get to pick one or the other. Jesus is both our suffering Savior and our risen Lord.

Think about that for a moment. Jesus is both your suffering Savior and your risen Lord.

I think living in the light of the resurrection and eternal life is not so much and hoping to get a new head, shoulders, knees, and toes — although the Lord knows I could use them. It’s about receiving a new heart. It’s about living every moment of every day, knowing I am loved by my suffering Savior, and I love Him in return as my risen Lord. He went through the sea of death for me, and He left a dry path behind Him in His wake, calling me to follow Him home.

If I am wrong, if we are wrong, we have no hope. But we know better. We know there is right and wrong, sin and righteousness. We know there will eventually be justice, even if we don’t see it in this lifetime. And we recognize that this means we need forgiveness because we cannot stand before justice without facing punishment ourselves. And we know Jesus, our suffering savior, came into this world to offer us that forgiveness and to bring us healing from the devastating effects of sin in our lives and our world. And we know we will inherit a resurrection with him and eternal life with our risen Lord.

We may not be as smart as Paul or use as many big words as he does, but we know all this the same way that Paul does. We know it because we know Jesus. We’re not witnessing about ideas of forgiveness and resurrection. We’re telling the world about a person we’ve met. We’re inviting them to follow us as we follow Him wherever He leads us. We know we don’t have to have it all figured out because Jesus never left us. And the power of His Spirit helps us to understand all that we need to know for each step of the way.

Where is our Hope? Our hope is in Jesus. The sun may not come up tomorrow. It may take some time, like in 78 and 79, leaving us in a winter of discontent. Like these first disciples, we may face an invasion of our world and a persecution of our faith, with nothing to defend ourselves with except a bath towel. But we will follow Jesus, our fearless leader, washing the feet of our enemies until they meet our Lord and Savior in the witness of our words and actions until He saves the world and leads us to new life in a way only He can do.

Where are you struggling to hold onto Hope today?

Where do you see the light of Jesus shining through the clouds?

Closing Prayer

You alone, oh Lord, are the source of our strength and the hope that carries us through each day. There are so many things in life, our universe, and everything we do not understand. But we know you. And we trust you. On the days we are like Your disciples and tell You that we do not know the way You are going, you remind us that You are the way. When we can’t imagine the life you want us to live, you remind us that you are the life. All we need is found in you. And when we find ourselves confused, unable to tell which end is up and what is the truth, you remind us that you are the truth. You are not just an idea. You are our savior and Lord, the God we know and love. Keep us close. In Jesus name, amen.