Don't Run by God's Gardener

The Gardener for a New Creation | Ken Shigematsu

We can be so busy and worried we forget the beauty and blessings of time with Christ.

Key Ideas

God loves you, and you don’t need to do anything spectacular to experience that love.We can experience life beyond death.Because of the resurrection (and the new creation that Jesus established when He rose from the dead), our lives have meaning.

Scripture References

● John 20:1-2; 11-18

● Genesis 3:8

Outline

The first lesson of the resurrection: God loves you, and you don’t need to do anything spectacular to experience that love.Opening story: losing his father in law.The first Easter did not start on a joyous note. Mary Magdalene had lost someone she loved, and who deeply cared about her.Noteworthy that the first person Jesus appeared to is a woman. It’s made even more remarkable by the fact that she had a checkered past.Audience participation: In your mind, picture a person who really loves you. How are they looking at you? What kind of energy do you feel from them in your heart?

“You don’t need to do anything sensational to be noticed and named and loved by Jesus.”

The second lesson of the resurrection: We can experience life beyond death.“Death used to be an executioner, but Jesus Christ has made him a gardener.” (George Herbert)The main goal of modern scientific research is to do away with death.We would be amortal, meaning we “do not have to die, not that we can’t die.” Professor Harari states that this would probably make us the most anxious people to have ever walked the face of the planet since it would be very scary to believe that you could live forever as long as you kept yourself safe.God, the gardener of the new creation.In Genesis, He walks in the garden in the cool of the day. At Easter, he appears in the garden at the break of day. When humans turn away from God in Eden, thorns & thistles infest the ground (literally and symbolically). When Jesus comes, He removes thorns & thistles from the earth and replaces them with beautiful flowers and abundant harvests.The resurrection takes us from paradise lost to paradise found.Third lesson of the resurrection: Our lives actually have meaning.“If we human beings are simply the result of some blind evolutionary process, then from a purely scientific point of view there is no goal to human life, there is no purpose, and there is no meaning.”-HarariIf this is to be believed, then Shakespeare’s Macbeth is right: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”But the resurrection gives us meaning because the decisions we make now can and will affect eternity.Call to salvation: Jesus loves you!If you accept Jesus, you will, among other things, receive eternal life. Eternal life is life with God now and life with God forever in a life to come.