THE BENEFITS OF CHRIST’S RESURRECTION

THE BENEFITS OF CHRIST’S RESURRECTION 1 Peter 1:3 April 8, 2007 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction HE IS RISEN! HE IS RISEN INDEED! That very chant has been believed and confessed by believers for two millennia. Our text this morning is 1 Peter 1:3 – Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1. Historical – The Resurrection of Jesus Vindicated His Atoning Death The story is told of a group of paratroopers who underwent some hurry-up training for an important mission that required a parachute jump. The drill instructor told them exactly what to do: jump, wait a few seconds and pull the cord. If nothing happened, to pull the emergency cord. Then the D.I. also said “When you land, there will be a truck there to pick you up.” They made their jump. One man pulled the cord and nothing happened. So he pulled the emergency cord—nothing. He looked over at a jumper falling alongside him, whose parachute had also failed, and said, “I knew we couldn’t trust that D.I.—and I bet there won’t be a truck waiting for us either!”  We are born again into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Peter says. If Christ did not rise from the dead, then our religion is nothing more than a placebo. Used for testing the true effectiveness of the real drug, drug companies sometimes give “dummy” pills to subjects in test groups. They do this because the mind is powerful, and some people feel that because they’ve taken a pill they are better, even though the tablet was not medicated. Paul argued in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Christ did not rise from the dead then Christians are like people on placebos. They confess that they feel better and act better, but faith can do nothing outside their own fabrication. Their hope is vain and God is nothing more than a figment of their imagination. Why is that true? Because Jesus said He died for the forgiveness of the sins of believers, that by His substitutionary suffering He made it possible for them to be reconciled to God. He also said He would rise again from the grave on the third day. If He did not rise, He did not forgive and redeem. And faith is a placebo. But if He did rise from the dead, it’s all true: His prediction, His pardon, His promise and His power to save. You see, the resurrection of Jesus vindicates all that Jesus said and did. And that is why belief in the resurrection of Jesus is an essential part of gospel faith. Paul said that the gospel message is: Christ died our sins, according to the scripture, he was buried, and he was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures. Alfred Hitchcock was a great story teller- master of horror and the surprise ending. He made some really great movies and hosted a weekly TV program. One chilling episode featured a wicked woman  who had hurt people most of her adult life and she had finally killed  a man. This time she didn’t get away with it. She was brought to trial and found guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. As they escorted her out of the courtroom in handcuffs she screamed at the judge, “Whatever prison you put me in I will escape from.” He waved her off and she walked out. In the next scene you find her taking the bus ride from freedom to behind bars. Just before she goes into the gate of the prison she looks out the window and sees an old man working from a wooden cart. He is covering a fresh gravesite with dirt. She thinks to  herself, “If I’m ever going to get out of these walls, I have to know  someone who has a key to the gate. And he has a key.” She  begins to turn it over in her mind. As time passes, she becomes acquainted with the old graveyard caretaker, is a prisoner himself.  She learns that whenever someone in prison dies there is a bell that tolls to announce that someone else has died. The old man not only took care of preparing them for burial, he also built the caskets,  placed the dead in them, put them on his old wooden wheeled cart,  took them outside the gate and buried them. She happened to find out that he suffered from cataracts and he had no money to pay for the surgery that would help him to see  again. She said to him, “I have plenty of money on the outside.  You help me out of this prison and I will make sure you get the  money to help restore your eyesight.” He said, “I can’t do that.”  She said, “No, no. Let me tell you the plan. When I hear the bell toll, I’ll come down to the room where you are putting the body and  crawl in the casket and lie alongside the corpse. Time passes, the bell tolls, she slips from her cot, makes her way down the eerie hallway and then down the steps to the room. She  looks around the dimly lit room, sees the casket, opens the lid,  climbs up and squeezes in beside the body, now cold from death and pulls the lid down tightly. And she begins to smile. In a matter  of hours she feels the rolling of the cart. She is on her way out the   prison gate to the gravesite. She feels the casket tilt and drop into  the hole. She hears the lumps of dirt begin to hit the casket and  now she has a grin from ear to ear. She knew that according to her plan the next morning the old man would come and dig up the casket, let her out and set her free. Morning came, but the old man didn’t. By afternoon she begins to break into a sweat and wonders, “Where is he?” By nightfall she fears the worst. Not knowing what else to do she strikes a match and notices the face of the corpse. First she notices the cataracts. It is the old man who had promised to get her out of the grave! She had calculated everything but the most important thing. If you’re going to get out of the grave, you’ve got to trust someone who is not going to die. Only Christ qualifies. Only the one who has conquered death can come through on promises. The resurrection of Jesus confirms, ratifies, vindicates and verifies all that God said and intended to do through the life, suffering and death of His Son. As a result you serve a LIVING Savior and have a LIVING HOPE. 2. Here and Now – New Life in Christ: Abundant Life NOW During His earthly ministry Jesus promised those who follow Him in faith would not only live beyond the grave, but they would also, through the Holy Spirit, experience a new life in the here and now. He said His followers would have life and it would be life abundant. Of course, He was echoing the long standing promises of the Old Testament concerning the blessed life promised to the faithful in the new age. When we come to Christ in genuine faith, some very exciting things begin to happen in our lives. The biggest and most immediate changes are very simply – we are forgiven of our sins and set free from guilt and condemnation. The other momentous gift God gives us converts to Christ is the incomparable blessing of His Holy Spirit to live in our lives. He brings all kinds of help to us, including gifts and fruit, strength over our enemy and sin, power to witness for Christ, and on and on goes this great list. So new life in Christ does not become only a promise to us in this life to be fulfilled in the next life. It is a present reality. Realizing that I’m often the only one doing the encouraging from this podium, and that you deserve more variety, I’ve engaged the help of a couple of others to preach this point. I asked a couple of individuals who’ve been part of this fellowship, and Christians, for varying lengths of time. I asked each to share just a short response to this question: What has new life in Christ come to mean to me? We’ll have them come now, one at a time, beginning with Marcus Gregory. Now you know this can be very disconcerting. In fact, many of you are sitting there thinking, “I’m glad he didn’t ask me!” In fact our four volunteers may be asking, “Why did I say yes?” At this point four members shared their personal testimonies. 3. Hereafter – Resurrection to Eternal Life in Heaven with Him – a living HOPE - all this and heaven, too! Seven years ago, there was an African student named Lawrence who was attending seminary—in fact, it was Covenant Theological Seminary, where Shawn attends. The story is told that when he was to give his first sermon in his elementary preaching class (ironically, the very class that Shawn is taking this semester), he chose a text that describes the joys we’ll share when Christ returns and ushers us to our heavenly home. "I've been in the United States for several months now," he began. "I've seen the great wealth that is here—the fine homes and cars and clothes. I've listened to many sermons in churches here, too. But I've yet to hear one sermon about heaven. Because everyone has so much in this country, no one preaches about heaven. People here don't seem to need it. In my country most people have very little, so we preach on heaven all the time. We know how much we need it." Though New Testament gives us a small glimpse of what heaven is like, we really don’t have a clue. And most of us satisfy ourselves with the understanding that it will be far more wonderful than we can imagine. C. S. Lewis told a story of an artist who was thrown into a dungeon whose only light came from a barred window high above. In the dungeon, the woman gave birth to a son. As he grew, she told him about the outside world, a world of wheat fields and mountain streams and cresting emerald waves crashing on golden shores. But the boy couldn't understand her words. So with the drawing pad and pencils she had brought with her into the dungeon, she drew him pictures. At first she thought he understood. But one day while talking with him, she realized he didn't. He thought the outside world was made up of charcoal-gray pencil lines on faded-white backgrounds, and concluded that the world outside the dungeon was less than the world inside. The story is a parable, showing us in much the same way the artist tried to show her son, that all we see before us are merely pencil sketches of the world beyond us. Every person is a stick-figured image of God; every place of natural beauty, a charcoal rendering of Paradise; every pleasure, a flat and faded version of the joy that awaits us. But we need to be boosted to a window before we can see beyond the lines of our own experience. Only then will we see how big the trees are, how bright the flowers, how breathtaking the view. So the apostle Peter says, the best I can do, even with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is to remind you of this awesome truth—that we have been born again into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Eric Barker was a missionary to Portugal for over 50 years. In the early 1940's when WWII was ravaging Europe, friends told him he should get his family out of there. So he put his wife and his 8 children on a boat to England. He got a message just before church the following Sunday. He stood up and told his congregation, "I just received word that my wife and all 8 children have safely reached home." The service continued. They didn't find out until later what he really meant. The boat they were on had been sunk by a Nazi submarine. All his family had drowned. But he spoke the truth. He had received word that his wife and all his children had safely reached home. Here is the essence of what Peter will later in this epistle call our “blessed hope”: We have God’s own Spirit living within us and His Word as His reminder as well that, no matter how difficult this world may seem, how distracting and discouraging, how broken and battered we become, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we are one day going home. Conclusion We are called to live the short years of this life with the instruction of His Word and the encouragement of His Spirit, looking forward to all that He has for us, then and now. We are privileged to live at the intersection of eternal life and abundant life. We praise our living, resurrected Lord until that glorious day when we see Him face to face. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 1 Peter 1:3 Signed interpretation of “We Will Dance”     [Back to Top]