Easter 2026

So glad you are here this morning — and a special welcome to those joining us online.

INTRODUCTION

I want you to look at that cross for a moment.

When you walked in this morning it was bare wood. And many of you — as you came through those doors — stopped and placed a flower on it. And what was bare wood when the morning began is becoming something alive and beautiful.

That image is the whole sermon. Everything I say this morning is just an explanation of what you're already looking at.

Bare wood. An instrument of death. Transformed into life.

That is Easter. Happy Easter.

He is risen! (He is risen indeed!) He is risen! (He is risen indeed!)

We do believe it. We believe in the resurrection of Jesus. We believe he died on the cross, and that through that death we can have forgiveness of sins. We believe he was buried in a borrowed tomb. And yes — we believe that on the third day he rose from the dead.

We are living in an age where we are conditioned to be suspicious — and honestly, for good reason.

Think about how realistic AI has become. Just about any picture can be manipulated to show something that never happened. Videos too. Some of them are hilarious — I recently saw one of cats cooking spaghetti, watching it boil over, and then erupting in laughter. Funny stuff.

But there's a darker side to it. The term is deepfake — it's actually a combination of the words "deep learning" and "fake." It's something that looks completely real — sounds real, moves real, feels real — and is entirely fabricated. A public figure says something they never said. An event appears to have happened that never happened. The technology has gotten so sophisticated that we genuinely cannot trust our own eyes anymore.

And it is bleeding into everything. When we see something extraordinary — something that seems too significant to be real — the first instinct for a growing number of people, especially younger people, is not wonder. It is suspicion. Is this real? Is someone manipulating me? Is this just very sophisticated special effects?

We live with this low-grade skepticism.

So let me say this clearly on Easter Sunday: the resurrection is not a deepfake. It really happened.

1 Corinthians 15:17 — "And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins."

The gospel writers present it as historical fact. Paul and the other New Testament authors present it as historical fact. The early church staked everything on it. In fact, Paul went so far as to say that if there is no resurrection, our faith is futile. If the cross was the end of Jesus, we have no hope.

Matthew 16:21 — "From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."

And if there is no resurrection, then Jesus is a liar — because he predicted it, on multiple occasions.

But he didn't just predict his own resurrection. He actually taught the resurrection principle — and that's what we've been exploring together over the last four weeks.

If you haven't been with us, we have been working through one of the most counterintuitive teachings Jesus ever gave —

Luke 9:23–24 — "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it."

Jesus taught that if we really want to live we have to first die — die to ourselves, die to our impulses, die to our misguided desires — and live for him. That is life.

We looked at this verse last week where Jesus says he is a seed and that we too are called to be seeds:

John 12:24–25 — "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life."

We may affirm this in our minds — say amen to the preacher — but it is so hard to really believe it and live by it. And we are not alone. This is a hard teaching. Let's walk with the disciples through what happened in the days leading up to the resurrection.

THE WEEK EVERYTHING FELL APART

You are one of the twelve. You left everything to follow this man — your fishing boat, your tax collector's table, your family, your income, your reputation, your entire sense of what your life was going to look like. You gave it all up. Three years ago you made the most radical act of self-denial imaginable and you have been living with the consequences ever since.

And it was worth it. Every uncomfortable mile on dusty roads, every confused look from your family, every night sleeping under the stars with no fixed address — it was worth it. Because you had seen things. You had watched him open blind eyes and make lame men walk and call dead men out of tombs. You had heard him speak and felt something shift in the air. You had come to believe — really believe, in the deepest part of you — that this was the one. That this was the moment Israel had been waiting for. That the kingdom was coming and you had a front row seat.

And then came Palm Sunday. The crowd waving palm branches, shouting Hosanna, throwing their cloaks in the road. The whole city buzzing. This was it. This was the moment.

And then came Thursday night. Things start falling apart.

The garden. The torches. The soldiers. Judas — Judas — walking toward Jesus with a kiss on his lips and betrayal in his heart. And then the arrest. And Peter, desperate and terrified, pulling out a sword and swinging it wildly before Jesus stopped him with a word.

And then they ran. All of them. Scattered into the darkness like frightened animals, leaving him alone with the soldiers.

Peter followed at a distance — close enough to watch, far enough to be safe. And when a servant girl looked at him across a courtyard fire and said you were with him — Peter said no. Three times. No. I don't know him.

And then the trials. The beatings. Pilate washing his hands. The crowd — the same crowd that had shouted Hosanna five days earlier — now screaming crucify him. And the cross. The long, brutal, humiliating walk to Golgotha. And the nails.

John was there. He stood at the foot of the cross and he watched. He watched the man he had left everything to follow hang there in agony for six hours. He watched him cry out my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He watched him say it is finished. He watched him die.

And when it was over — when the soldiers confirmed he was dead and the body was taken down and laid in a borrowed tomb and the stone was rolled across the entrance — the disciples went behind locked doors.

John was there. Peter was there. Hiding. Grieving. Terrified that they would be next.

Three years of self-denial. Three years of giving everything up. And it had come to this — a borrowed tomb and a locked room and the wreckage of everything they had believed.

Has all of this been for nothing? Is this the end? Is a life of self-denial really the pathway to life?

SATURDAY

Nobody talks much about Saturday. We go from Good Friday to Easter Sunday and skip right over the day in between. But Saturday deserves a moment.

Saturday is the day of silence. The day when the stone is still in place. The day when the tomb is still sealed. The day when there is no answer yet to the question the disciples were asking behind their locked door.

Saturday is the day that self-denial looks most like a fool's errand.

And I want to suggest to you that most of us know what Saturday feels like. We have lived there. The moment when you have poured yourself out and have nothing to show for it. The moment when the promise seems to have died and you are not sure anything is coming next. The moment when surrender feels like it has led nowhere but loss.

The disciples lived there for a day. Some of us have lived there for years.

SUNDAY

And then Sunday came.

Mary Magdalene arrived at the tomb before sunrise and found the stone rolled away. She ran to get Peter and John. They came running. John outran Peter, got there first — looked in, saw the burial cloths lying there, and believed. Peter went in, saw the same thing, and stood there bewildered.

And then — in the upper room, behind the locked door — Jesus appeared. Not a vision. Not a ghost. Not a deepfake. He showed them his hands and his side. He ate with them. He talked with them. He breathed on them.

And then to Peter — a separate, private, tender moment on the beach. A charcoal fire. Fish cooking. And Jesus asking Peter three times — once for every denial — do you love me? Not to shame him. To restore him. To take the worst moment of Peter's life and redeem it completely.

Three years of self-denial. A cross. A tomb. A Saturday of silence.

And then — this.

The ground gave it back. Not as it went in — but as something unimaginably more alive. More glorious. More powerful than anything they had known before.

Has all of this been for nothing?

No. No — it has been for everything.

THE VINDICATION OF SELF-DENIAL

The resurrection is not just the happy ending to a sad story. It is the ultimate, definitive, God-signed vindication of the way of self-denial.

Jesus gave everything away. He held nothing back. He denied himself completely — all the way to a cross, all the way to a tomb, all the way to the most total act of surrender in human history. And God raised him from the dead.

The resurrection is God saying: this is what self-denial leads to. This is where the road goes. The seed does not stay in the ground.

Think about the harvest that came from that one act of surrender. Every hospital built in the name of Jesus. Every school opened to educate the poor because followers of Jesus believed every person bore the image of God. Every movement for human dignity that drew its moral energy from the teaching of a carpenter from Galilee. Every life rescued from addiction, every marriage pulled back from the edge, every person who found hope in the darkest moment of their life because someone told them about an empty tomb.

All of it — every bit of it — is the harvest of one seed that fell into the ground on a Friday and came back on a Sunday.

And the disciples who stood at that cross thinking has this all been for nothing — those same disciples went on to turn the world upside down. Peter, who denied Jesus three times in a courtyard, stood up fifty days later and preached to thousands. John, who watched the crucifixion from the foot of the cross, wrote words that are still changing lives two thousand years later.

JIM ELLIOT

A young missionary named Jim Elliot understood this. Before he was killed at 28 years old — speared to death by the very people he had gone to reach in the jungles of Ecuador — he wrote these words in his journal:

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."

(Play video)

What looked like loss at the time — what seemed to contradict everything Jesus had taught about life coming through death — actually proved the principle in the most powerful way imaginable.

It was only in the death of those men that life came to the very people who killed them.

THE INVITATION

I want to speak now to two groups of people in this room.

If you have been here for this entire series — you have been wrestling with what it means to take up your cross daily. You have been sitting with the uncomfortable truth that the life Jesus calls us to is not the life our culture tells us to pursue. Culture, even our own fleshly selves, tell us the way to life is to fulfill those impulses. Satisfy our desires as soon as we can and as often as we can and as much as we can. And we resist — like Jesus did when tempted by Satan. And you have been asking, quietly, whether it's worth it.

The empty tomb is your answer. It is worth it. Not just here and now — but forever.

And if this is your first Sunday here in a long time — or maybe your first Sunday ever — I want you to hear this clearly. The resurrection of Jesus is not a beautiful story or a spiritual metaphor. It is a historical event. Real witnesses. Real evidence. Real transformation in real people across two thousand years of history.

And it is an invitation. Not just to believe a fact, but to step into a life. The life Jesus described in Luke 9 — the life that comes through surrender, through self-denial, through letting go of your grip on your own agenda — that life is available to you today.

The promise Jesus made is the one promise that actually came true. The seed fell into the ground. And on the third day, the ground gave it back.

Now look at that cross one more time.

That is what self-denial looks like. It starts as bare wood. It looks like loss. It looks like an ending. But surrender it to God — and life breaks out all over it.

That is the promise of Easter. That is the promise Jesus made and kept. You will come alive only when you die to yourself.

The empty tomb is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of yours.

He is risen. (He is risen indeed.)

SONG LEAD-IN

We have been talking this morning about a love that gave everything — that held nothing back — that went all the way to a cross and all the way into a tomb so that you and I could have life.

That kind of love is hard to put into words.

But some words come close.

The love of Jesus is not shallow. It is not conditional. It is not the kind of love that gives up when things get hard. It is deep. It is vast. It is unmeasured and boundless and free.

And it is rolling toward you right now.

Let's sing together — O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus.