This Is Love

While preparing this message I came across the name John Dominic Crossan. He is a man so brilliant I could not untie the laces of his shoes, described as the premier scholar of the historical Jesus in the world. People travel to consult him just to understand the life of a young Jewish rabbi who lived more than two thousand years ago.

But there is a problem with dear old John Dominic Crossan. He believes in a historical Jesus, but he does not believe in a historical resurrection. In his telling, after Jesus died, His first disciples simply felt a real presence of Him. Peter felt Jesus forgiving him for the three denials. And as those first followers died, people began inventing stories about the risen Jesus, stories like the one about Mary Magdalene meeting Him at the tomb and being sent to tell the disciples to go to Galilee.

But no matter how smart a man like Crossan may be, here is the fact: the historical death and resurrection of Jesus is what defines Christianity. If it did not happen, we do not have Christianity. We just have another pleasant religion with a list of good and bad, and honestly, when it comes to moral rules, Jesus is nowhere near the top compared to other moral teachers.

Good news, not good instructions

That is the whole difference. Every other religion, philosophy, and faith says, here is what you must do or become in order to reach heaven, paradise, peace. Jesus came and showed us what God has already done to save us. That is why it is called good news, not good instructions.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.

1 Corinthians 15:3-5 (NIV)

God came in the person of His Son to show that He does not count your sins against you. Instead He heals you of them by dying for you and as you, and by rising from the grave He gives you a brand-new, sin-free life of power, the very life of God Himself. And He did all of it because He loves you. This is love. But if Jesus did not actually die and actually rise, if it is not a real event in history, then there is no good news at all.

This is why the resurrection is not a detail Christianity could survive without. It is the whole thing. Take it away and you are left holding a set of rules and a memory of a good man, and rules have never yet saved anyone. Leave it in place and everything shifts, because now the death and rising of Jesus are not a symbol of an idea, they are an event that happened to a real body in real history, and events have consequences you can actually step into.

And every piece of news calls for a response. Suppose I told you the Walmart in Laurel is closing and everything inside is being sold at ten percent of the price. Your very next question would be, how do I take advantage of this? What you do does not create the good news; the sale is real whether you show up or not. But how you respond determines whether you ever benefit from it. So here are three ways to respond to the news of Easter.

Let it change your view of God

When the angel told the women, “Jesus of Nazareth, the one you saw crucified three days ago, He is risen, He is not here,” it shattered their whole idea of God. Before the resurrection, even His disciples did not really believe Jesus was God. A good rabbi, a great teacher, maybe the Messiah who would rescue Israel, but God? No.

and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 1:4 (NIV)

Suddenly you look back over the life of Jesus and realize, this was God in action the whole time. This is what God is actually like. Everything we assumed about Him was wrong. And is that not the story of every one of us? We all, like sheep, kept turning away, kept running our own way, but God kept coming after us until, one day, we finally collapsed into His arms. Paul saw it and asked, what can separate us from the love of God? Nothing. If God is for me, what can be against me?

So let this be your prayer today: Lord, change my view of You. You are not a God who hates me. You are a God who loves me, even to the point of dying for me.

Let it change your view of yourself

The second response is to let Easter change how you see yourself. Get the order right, because it is life-changing. You are not valuable because God forgave your sins. God forgave you and saved you because you were already valuable to Him. You may be a son who got lost, but you are still a son.

You are not defined by your mistakes. You are defined by who God says you are. Yes, you may have messed up, but you are not a mess. Watch how tenderly this works at the empty tomb. The angel says, “Go, tell his disciples and Peter” (Mark 16:7). Why single out Peter? Because Jesus knew Peter was drowning in shame for denying Him three times, letting his worst moment define his whole future. So the message goes out with his name attached: go and tell Peter, specifically, that I want to see him.

Think about what that did to a man crushed by his own failure. The One he betrayed was asking for him by name, not to condemn him, but to restore him. That is exactly how the risen Jesus comes looking for you. He does not wait at Galilee for the version of you that has finally cleaned itself up. He sends word to the you that is still ashamed, still hiding, still rehearsing the denial, and He says, come, I want to see you.

So do not let your past mistakes define your present and your future. Peter could have stayed away, convinced he had forfeited his place. Instead the message reached him that he was still wanted, and everything in him had to answer that call. Let it reach you the same way. What God says about you outranks what you have done, and what He says is son, daughter, valued, wanted home.

Let it lead you back to Him

The third response is to let Easter lead you into a real relationship with God. In practice that means handing your life over to Jesus, believing Him, yielding to Him as Master. It means learning to be with Him so He can change you from the inside out, until you begin to live like Him, talk like Him, act like Him. Here we simply call it following Jesus, and we walk with people over about seven or eight weeks, thirty minutes after a service, to show them how.

Remember the news of the sale. It was real whether or not anyone walked through the doors, but only the ones who came got to carry anything home. The resurrection is like that. It is already true, already finished, already yours to step into, and yielding to Jesus is simply how you walk in and take hold of it. You are not earning the sale. You are responding to it.

Because being saved is so much more than cleaning up your life so you can be accepted by God when you die. God wants to get heaven into you now. He wants you living the best life possible, the life of God Himself, and He sent Jesus to give it to you. All you have to do now is yield to Him.

So if you want this Easter to be different, not a symbolic story you nod at once a year, but a true and living event in your own life, here is the invitation. Let it change your view of God. Let it change your view of yourself. And come to Jesus today and make Him your Lord. The tomb is empty. The love is real. And He is asking for you by name.