I am the Resurrection

Where is he?  Where?  Where is he?  How many times had she asked that question over the past four days.  Her only brother had come down with some mysterious virus and nobody could do anything for him.  Well nobody except for their friend Jesus.  How many times had he reached out his hand and the blind had seen, or the lame had walked.  If there was any hope for Lazarus it would only be through Jesus.  Granted she hadn’t actually asked Jesus to come, she had only sent word that His friend was deathly ill.  If Jesus was the friend that he professed to be wouldn’t he have come.  But she had waited and Lazarus got worse, and she waited and Lazarus died, and she waited and Lazarus had been buried.   Jesus had healed the paralytic and he didn’t even know him, he healed the blind man who was just a face in the crowd, surely he would come for his friend.    And still the thought tormented her: where was he? Surely she couldn’t have misjudged Jesus so badly.  He had eaten at their table and slept under their roof surely that had meant something to him, or maybe not. 

And then a murmur began to weave its way through the crowd that had gathered to mourn with the two sisters, “The master is here, Jesus has arrived.”  And Martha couldn’t help herself, she was on her feet rushing to meet her friend.  The thought that had burned in her heart was already on her lips,  John 11:21 Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.

I don’t think it was said with a mean or vindictive spirit, but I don’t think it was simply a statement of fact either.  I think she was disappointed in Jesus and felt betrayed and I’m sure the question even though unasked could be read in her eyes, “When you heard he was sick, why didn’t you come then?” 

Max Lucado says that “The grave unearths our view of God” And he’s right how often have we heard “God if you existed my child wouldn’t have died, if you’d have answered my prayers my life wouldn’t be empty, if you cared my mother wouldn’t have developed cancer.”? 

How often are we guilty of dealing with God in that very same way as Martha.  Demanding to know why he doesn’t do it the way we want it done, when we want it done?  The experts tell us that it would have been a two day walk from where Jesus heard the news to Bethany, and you all know how an expert is defined?  X being the unknown quantity, spurt being a drip under pressure.  So if we take the experts’ word for the distance and add to it the two days that Jesus waited before he left we come up with a grand total of four days, the exact number of days that Lazarus had been in the grave.  So it really wouldn’t have made a difference even if Jesus had headed out as soon as he heard the news, he still would have been two days late.

And then as Jesus looked into the grief filled eyes of Martha we read John 11:23 Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Well Martha had no doubt about what Jesus was talking about, she knew that he was just doing the funeral home pleasantries, you know “Well they are in a better place”  “their suffering is over”  And she responded and said John 11:24 “Yes,” Martha said, “he will rise when everyone else rises, at the last day.”

You see, even though Martha was a woman of faith and she had no doubt that God could handle the future she wasn’t all that sure that he could handle the present.  She trusted God with tomorrow but she didn’t know how she was going to get through today with her grief and sorrow.  She knew in her heart of hearts that she would see her brother in the next life, but she missed him in this life. 

And Jesus looked at her again and said John 11:25 Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying.” If you don’t know the rest of the story Martha takes Jesus to meet her other sibling Mary, and Jesus asks them to take him to their brother’s grave.  And it is in this part of the story that we discover the shortest verse in the bible, John 11:35 Then Jesus wept. If you every wanted to know how Jesus feels about the death of your loved one, the death of your spouse, or your parent or your child it is summed up in these three words, Then Jesus wept.

Even though Jesus knew that he not only could raise Lazarus from the dead but would indeed raise his friend from the dead, he still wept. Death is a terrible thing; it may be a transition to a better life but often times it is a painful transition. In his song “Prop me Up beside the Jukebox When I die”  Country singer Joe Diffie sings “I’m not afraid of dying it’s the thought of being dead.”  I beg to differ with Mr. Diffie, “I’m not afraid of being dead, I have an assurance of an eternity with my God but I kind of agree with Woody Allen who said, “I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.”

Grief is a human emotion, even when we know that our loved ones have gone to a better place that grief and sorrow needs to be expressed.  Mourning is a natural part of the grief process, and if we skip it, then it will eventually return to haunt us.  There will come times in our life when we need to take time to cry.

But then the story takes an unexpected turn Jesus demands that the tomb be opened, remember in that day and age tombs were often dug in the side of a hill and sealed with a large rock, and entire families would be interred together.  The sisters objected, “He’s been dead for four days, the smell will be terrible.”  And Jesus responded and said John 11:40 Jesus responded, “Didn’t I tell you that you would see God’s glory if you believe?”   And you know the rest of the story, Jesus stands before the open tomb and calls out “Lazarus come out.”  And he did, Jesus did what nobody else could do, he gave life were there was no life.  With one command Jesus proved the reality of his words John 11:25 Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying.   And the response to that is found in John 11:45 Many of the people who were with Mary believed in Jesus when they saw this happen. Well, who wouldn’t believe?  Well apparently not everybody or they wouldn’t have crucified him.

And you are thinking “If I saw Jesus raise somebody from dead I’d believe. That would be all I need.”  Last week we looked at what Jesus meant when he said “I am the Life” and when he gave life back to Lazarus and the widow’s son and  Jarius’ daughter he showed that he could perform miracles but he didn’t just say “I am the Life”  he also said “I am the resurrection” and that is the very heart of the matter for us today.  “I am the resurrection!”

And the issue of the resurrection isn’t just one of those doctrines that we can accept or not accept it is at the very core of who we are as Christ Followers.  Paul told the early believers in the Corinthian church 1 Corinthians 15:17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins.  My question would be: If you don’t believe Jesus when he said “I am the Resurrection” if you don’t believe that was proved in his resurrection then why would you call yourself a Christ Follower?  Who is the Christ you are following, because if you can’t believe the resurrection then you are just following another dead prophet.

And maybe you are thinking: “I want to believe but there are issues.”  And those are probably the same issues that others have had.

Some sayThe Resurrection is Impossible.  On the face of it this is probably the most common objection to the resurrection.  Dead men aren’t alive they are dead.  And I will be the first to admit, it is impossible.  But then again if it wasn’t impossible it wouldn’t mean a whole lot would it.  Within the scope of things Christians have never denied this point as a matter of fact it is the foundation of our faith. 

Our faith acknowledges that a person cannot come back from the dead, but our faith doesn’t believe that Jesus was just a person; instead we believe that he was God.  And if God put the rules of nature into force then God can step outside the rules of nature.  We see that time and time again throughout the bible, they are called miracles and you either believe in the supernatural or you don’t.  We believe that his birth, the virgin birth was miraculous and we believe that his resurrection was miraculous.

And we believe it not just because one person said it happened but because the bible records numerous people who witnessed it.  The first were the ladies who are mentioned as being the first to the tomb, and then we read that Christ appeared to the 11 remaining apostles and then other disciples.  Paul spells it out for us in 1 Corinthians 15:4-7 He was buried, and he was raised from the dead on the third day, just as the Scriptures said. He was seen by Peter and then by the Twelve. After that, he was seen by more than 500 of his followers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles.

And perhaps you are thinking: Ok, I’ll buy into the fact the tomb was empty, so what? There could be other explanations.  And there have been various theories presented throughout the years.

Maybe The Women Went to the Wrong Tomb.  Obviously the women were upset, they had witnessed the brutal execution of a close friend, it was early in the morning and maybe in their confusion and in the dark they arrived at a tomb that hadn’t been used yet and thought that it was the tomb that Jesus should have been in but wasn’t.

But let’s think it through, Jesus wasn’t buried in an unknown tomb, two thousand years later we even know the name of the man who donated the tomb, it was Joseph of Arimathea.  And we are even told in Luke 23:55 As his body was taken away, the women from Galilee followed and saw the tomb where his body was placed.  They had been there just two days before and even if they had gotten mixed up and went to the wrong tomb don’t you think Joseph or someone else would have pointed out their mistake?  Instead we read that Peter went to the tomb and it was empty. 

And if this was indeed the wrong tomb then logic would tell us that there had to be a right tomb, a tomb with Jesus body in it.  And if there was a right tomb with a body then it would have been a relatively simple thing for the Jewish leaders and Roman authorities to say “Hey dummies, you went to the wrong grave, here’s the right grave with the body of Jesus right where it’s supposed to be.”   But they didn’t, why?  Because the woman had gone to the right grave and there was no body in it.

3) It was the Right Tomb but the Body Had Been Removed.  Ok, the question then begs to be asked; Who stole the body?  A) The Romans  B) The Jews or C) the Disciples.

Well we can deal with the first two together because the Romans and the Jews had nothing to gain by removing and hiding Christ’s body and everything to lose.  The Jews and the Romans didn’t want an empty tomb to bolster the claims of the Christ Followers, they wanted a body.  They wanted to be able to say “Hey look everyone, Jesus didn’t rise from the dead here’s his body and he’s still dead.”  But they couldn’t do that because they didn’t have a body. 

Instead we read this account of what happened after the tomb was found empty Matthew 28:12-13 A meeting with the elders was called, and they decided to give the soldiers a large bribe. They told the soldiers, “You must say, ‘Jesus’ disciples came during the night while we were sleeping, and they stole his body.’ 

So maybe the disciples did steal the body.  But why?  When Christ was arrested the apostles all scattered.  We only hear about two of them actually following Christ and John hid in the shadows and Peter denied that he even knew Jesus. 

So all of a sudden this sorry lot become ninja’s sneaking up on a group of highly trained Roman soldiers, roll aside the stone that sealed the tomb and disappear into the night carrying the body of their friend.  And then they use this act of deception to found a religion based on a high moral code of integrity and honesty.  Seems a little far-fetched to me.  But there is no record of the soldiers being punished for falling asleep on duty, no record of the apostle’s being forced to tell where the body was hidden.

Add to that the fact that every one of the disciple eventually faced persecution and death for their faith and not one of them broke and admitted where they hid the body.  They were a braver bunch then I would have been, I hate pain, I probably would have made up secrets.

I know that there are all kinds of people who are willing to die for what they believe in, remember 9/11 and all the suicide bombers we hear about on the news.  They are willing to die for their faith because they believe that it is true, but if the apostle had of stolen the body of Jesus they would have been willing to die for something they knew was false.

Jesus Wasn’t Really Dead and it was all a Ploy Some people have called this the swoon theory.  There are some people and even some churches that teach Jesus wasn’t dead but he was simply unconscious and in the coolness of the tomb he revived and people thought he had been raised from the dead. 

If you understood the reality of the crucifixion you would realize just how implausible this theory is.  The Romans crucified people all the time, and it was done to kill people not just render them unconscious.  They knew the difference between “He’s Dead” and “He’s simply sleeping.”

Think about it, by the time he got to the trial he had already been awake for 24 hours, then he was repeatedly beaten, flogged by a Roman soldier, forced to carry a cross to his place of execution, had a crown of thorns pressed into his head, was nailed to a cross and left for hours in the Palestinian sun and then had a spear thrust into his side. 

A Roman centurion who supposedly had all kinds of experience at this kind of thing pronouncing him dead, he pulled down off the cross and stuck into a cold tomb where apparently with no medical help he spontaneously revives, moves the rock in front of the tomb, slips by the Roman Guard and then this half dead bedraggled man in desperate need of medical help convinces his apostles that he is the risen Lord and conqueror of death. 

And the reason people teach this is because they find the resurrection hard to believe.  OK.

Some Object Because The Resurrection Accounts are Contradictory.  And if we read the accounts in the four gospels they do all contain different details.  But if they were all the same their objection would be that they were obviously just copying one another.

The question should be are the key elements the same?  And they are, they went to the tomb and they found it empty.  Who arrived there first or second is really irrelevant.  Were there angels inside or outside? Depends on who you ask and when they got there.   On my first trip to Africa we discovered that if you asked the five of us who went to describe the trip you would find it hard to believe that we had been together for 14 days.  You would hear things from me that you wouldn’t hear from the other four and vice versa does that mean those things didn’t happen?  No, it means that event had more meaning for some of us, or we noticed something that others didn’t.

While we were in Sierra Leone I saw a monkey run across the road, the two guys in the backseat missed it and the monkey was gone when the other vehicle passed by, does that mean that there was no monkey?  I asked our driver what type of monkey it was and he said it had to be a fast monkey because the rebels had eaten all the slow monkeys.

Last summer Angela and I went on vacation, if you asked some people they would tell you that we went on an Alaskan Cruise.  Other’s would tell you that we visited my cousin Lindy and her family in Vancouver.  You might even hear that we were at Whistler and Blackcomb.  Others would tell you that we went to Seattle and reconnected with a couple who had been in our Youth Group in Australia.  So who was correct?  They all were. 

So where are you at this morning?  There are two questions that you need to answer before you leave here today.  The first one is “Did Jesus truly rise from the dead?”  Remember the scripture that we started with 1 Corinthians 15:17 And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is useless and you are still guilty of your sins. 

The second question of course is even more important and this is “If Jesus truly did rise from the dead what does that mean for me?”  It’s not enough to believe here, in your head if you don’t do anything with it here, in your heart. 

When Jesus said “I am the resurrection”  he didn’t say “I will be resurrected”, he said “I am the resurrection”  and he is our resurrection and that promise is as true today as it was when he said it.

A lot of people are going to miss Heaven by a matter of inches. They’re good people, maybe attend church weekly, and have even read the Bible and agree with it all. But they’re still going to miss Heaven by a matter of inches, because they believe in their head but they haven’t received in their heart. They have a knowledge of who Jesus was but they have no experience of who Jesus is. And that’s tragic. 

I am the Life

It’s funny, I don’t have a favorite German Chancellor or a favourite African dictator but I do have a couple of favorite American Presidents.  I have enjoyed reading the quiet wit of Calvin Coolidge, don’t know what he was like as a president but he said some quotable things.  Although it happened when I was really young I have heard enough people talk about Camelot to wonder how things would have turned out if JFK had of lived, sometimes I put Bill Clinton on the list, but that’s just to annoy my republican friends.  But my  all-time favourite US president would have to be Abraham Lincoln, and that is probably true for a lot of people.  Partly, because as I have mentioned before, he is a distant relative of mine on my Mother’s side, but also because of his stand against slavery and how he handled the entire issue of forgiveness following the defeat of the south in the US Civil war, or as some people refer to it, the war of Northern Aggression.  My respect and admiration for Lincoln has only increased with my recent discovery that he was also a vampire hunter.  A vampire hunter can you imagine?

It was Abraham Lincoln who said and lived the adage “And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”  It seems that sometimes we are so consumed with getting as many years as possible we forget to enrich them and treat each year as special.  We become caught up in a quest for quantity over quality.   And it becomes easy to fall into one of two traps.  We either live like there is no tomorrow or we live like there is no today.  But Jesus was apparently concerned with how we live in the present and also how we would live in the forever.  There were times, very few but there were times that he raised the dead to life, Lazarus, Jarius’ daughter and the widows son.  In that case he was adding years to their lives, when he offers us eternal life he is offering to extend our lives.  And because of how he called us to live, and love and forgive he was offering to put more life in our years, to make our lives fuller. 

In the scripture that Colin read for us Jesus told those who followed him John 14:6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”  And in the first part of this month we looked at what it meant for Jesus to be the “Way” and the “Truth”.  Jesus didn’t say he would point us to the way or show us the truth he stated that he was the way and he was the truth.  And Jesus didn’t say he was one way or one truth he said he was the way and the truth. 

If we asked people today how they came to Cornerstone this morning we would discover that there are a variety of ways to come to our church.  If we were talking about direction you could arrive here up the Hammonds Plains Rd. or down the Hammonds Plains Rd.  You could come up Gatehouse Run or out Kingswood Dr.  and it would make no difference, because you would have arrived at your destination.  There are many ways to arrive at Cornerstone, and you could come via any of those ways by a variety of modes of transportation.  You could ride a bicycle, or walk, or come by car or motorcycle.  I guess you could probably parachute in or land a helicopter in the parking lot if you wanted. 

However Jesus said very clearly and without hesitation, John 14:6 Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”  And so very clearly Jesus said there was no other way to find God and no other way to find the truth about God other than through the Son of God.  And I know that sounds narrow and dogmatic and it is meant to be, because the truth has to be narrow and dogmatic about itself.  And if your vision of Jesus is a much more inclusive Jesus than you have never read the story of Jesus because in it not only does he say he is the only way and the only truth he also makes comments like Matthew 7:14 But the gateway to life is very narrow and the road is difficult, and only a few ever find it.   And while I feel that every person should have the opportunity to hear the story about Jesus I understand that not every person will embrace the truth about Jesus.  And not every person will choose to embrace the life that Jesus offers.  So what is this life that Jesus speaks of?

It is a life on both sides of the line.  If our lives were defined by a time line most people would view it as having two finite points, a beginning and an end.  Birth and death.  And so when we talk about life it is the period of time that fits between here and here. 

We live our lives up to the line and some people view death as the finish line, at that point everything stops.  Stephen Hawking stated in one interview “I regard the brain as a computer that will stop working when its components fail. . . There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers — that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

But the bible tells us that death is a line that we can cross over.  It is not an ending it is simply a transition.  It is not a period as some people would teach but instead it is a comma.  So what is this life that Jesus has promised us?  Jesus told us that he didn’t come to show us the way, he is the way.  And Jesus didn’t come to point us to the truth he is the truth.  And so in the same way Jesus didn’t come to show us life he is life.  And when he is in us then we inherit the life he promised.  And what type of life is that?  In John chapter 10 Jesus makes this statement.   John 10:10 The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life.  Perhaps you are more familiar with that passage from the older translation where we read John 10:10 The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.  And the original word that was translated “abundantly” or “rich and satisfying” was a word that meant:  “a super abundance”, not just a full life but full to the point of flowing over.   Jesus didn’t tell us that we would just be putting in time, or that we would go through life with our eyes looking at the ground missing all the wonders that are being offered to us.  Sometimes it seems that some people are just content to live, to make it from today until tomorrow.  Some Christians it would appear are so looking forward to what life will be like in heaven they completely miss all that life has to offer on earth.   But is that what Jesus was offering when he promised his followers that they would have a “Super Abundance of life”?

Joseph Dongell tells us in the Wesleyan Bible Commentary “Nor will he (Jesus) congratulate himself if his sheep are weak and scrawny, merely alive. Rather, he bends every effort toward producing a healthy flock, a flock “abundantly” alive.”   Even though Jesus offers that abundance of life he won’t force it on us.  It is a gift, but like all gifts it can either be received or rejected.  Jesus offers us life, but in the end it will up to us to choose life. 

Joan Baez wrote “You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.”  Sometimes it’s easy to look around and wish for someone else’s life but that’s not the life you were given. And you will not be responsible to live someone else’s life.  Josh Billings who said “Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.”

Following Jesus doesn’t just mean that we will be different after we die but that we should be different before we die.  That our lives will not only be beneficial for us that our lives will be beneficial to others.  And in many ways it is a different life than the life the world promises us. 

So what is this the life that Jesus said he is and by default what is the life that he promises us as his followers?

John 15:12 This is my commandment: Love each other in the same way I have loved you.

It Was and Is a Life of Love  Do you remember the story of the Good Samaritan?  Do you remember how it started?  A man came to Jesus and asked the question Luke 10:25 One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?”   And so Jesus said you know what you are supposed to do, what is it the Law says?  And the man replied by saying Luke 10:27 The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’”  

Simple enough right?  That must be what Jesus thought because he replies by saying Luke 10:28 “Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!”   Simple, right?  Love God and love others. 

And Jesus reminded his followers that love would be such a defining factor in their lives that people would say “The only way they can love like that is because they follow Jesus.” 

But for Jesus love wasn’t just a feeling it was defined by action.  It was a love that reached out to those who were hurting, hurting physically, hurting emotionally and hurting spiritually and not only did he reach out to those who were hurting he did something about it. 

Too often today Christians try to define themselves by what they believe rather than how they behave.  But that isn’t how Jesus was defined and he didn’t say that is how we should be defined.  John 13:35 Jesus said “By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”  And sometimes it’s easy to forget that, because sometimes it is a lot easier to say we believe in Jesus than to demonstrate that.  Which is why when Jesus’ brother James was writing to the early church he had these words to say James 2:18-19 But someone will say, "You have faith, and I have works." Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe--and tremble!   

 So Jesus didn’t simply call his followers to believe in life of love he called them to live a life of love.  Which leads us to the second point.    Probably the best know sermon in the world is the Sermon on the Mount and as a part of that we read these words of Jesus Matthew 5:6 God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.

 It Was and Is a Life of Justice Jesus wasn’t just concerned about people in some nebulous wishy-washy way.  He sought to meet their needs, even if it meant stepping outside the boundaries from time to time.  Last week we looked at Jesus statement “I am the truth”  and that goes hand in hand with Benjamin Disraeli observation “Justice is truth in action.” 

And so people were healed on the Sabbath, and tax collectors and prostitutes were restored and the woman caught in adultery was spared.  And for two thousand years those who follow him, those who make up his church, have been called to live a life of Justice.     We have blown it at times.  The Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades weren’t our finest hours, but you can’t just take them in isolation.  The Crusades may have ended with Christians behaving badly but remember why they started.  They started when armies of volunteers left their homes and their families to make their way to the middle east to defend innocent Christians and Jews who were being slaughtered by the armies of Islam. 

Remember who it was who founded hospitals and schools, orphanages, homes for unwed mothers and hospices for aids patients.  When a natural disaster hits it is the World Visions and the World Hopes and the Compassions and Samaritan Purses who are first on the ground with aid.  When I travel through Africa the majority of hospitals and clinics have been started and are staffed by Christian churches.  When someone had to take a stand against slavery it was preachers like Wesley and Wilberforce who effectively got the trade in human beings ended in the British Empire and it was churches that said “No more” and began the abolitionist movement in the United States and who organized the underground railroad to help slaves escape.  And right in the front of that movement was a small denomination called the Wesleyans. 

And when women didn’t have the right to vote, or make an honest living and were considered to be little more than the property of their husbands it was the church that took a stand.  And the first meeting in the US of the woman’s rights movement in July of 1845 wasn’t held in a lodge or a hall it was held in a church, a Wesleyan Church in Seneca Falls NY.  And when the world was turning a blind eye to the carnage of the civil war in Sierra Leone it was a Christian Agency that turned the international spotlight on the atrocities that were happening and it was that same Christian agency that organized Limbs of Hope providing prosthesis for tens of thousands of amputees who had lost their limbs to rebel soldiers, and that agency was World Hope the relief arm of the Wesleyan Church. 

So we are called to a life of justice.  Of standing up for the underdog, or making the world and our neighbourhoods a better place to live.  And so when someone has to take a stand against bullying in school it should be the Christians kids, and when someone has to take a stand against employers who exploit employees and the environment it should be Christians.  And when a politician drapes himself in the mantle of Christianity he better display the justice and compassion of Christ. 

On the night that he was arrested Jesus celebrated the Passover feast with his 12 closest friends and it was from this meal that we have our sacrament of communion.  Matthew 26:28 (Jesus said) “For this is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and his people. It is poured out as a sacrifice to forgive the sins of many.”

 It Was and Is a Life of Forgiveness  Even the greatest skeptics acknowledge the love and compassion of Jesus.  And part of what he taught and lived was forgiveness for others.  And yet 2000 years ago that didn’t prevent him from eventually being killed. And it was in his death more so than even in his life that his teaching about forgiveness became a reality.  It is easy to command others to forgive when you don’t have much to forgive.  Up to the cross it seemed that all Jesus had to forgive others for were the nasty things they said about him.  And yet on the cross, after having been lied about and beaten and humiliated.  After having been sentenced to die in the most painful and lingering way known to the Romans he doesn’t curse those who betrayed him and denied him, he doesn’t condemn those who beat him and nailed him to the cross instead we are told that he looks down from the cross and says, Luke 23:34 Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”  

And he calls us his followers to live a life of forgiveness as well, and it’s not a suggestion it is a commandment.  Matthew 6:14-15 “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Sometimes when I talk to people they imply that they have not yet come to a place emotionally where they are ready to forgive.  “I’m just not ready yet.”  You need to understand that forgiveness is an action not an emotion.  It is something we do not something we feel and like every other action or activity we will choose to do it or not.

Her name was 66730, or at least that was the name she went by. Her father had died in a German Concentration camp as did her sister. Her freedom, her dignity, her humanity had been stripped away by those who imprisoned her and yet she survived. And not only did she survive she went on to minister to some of the very people who had been responsible for what had happened to her.  You probably know her as Corrie Ten Boom and she said  “Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.”  And I would suspect that Corrie Ten Boom had a lot more to forgive than any one of us.

If we go back to the line of life, we have been talking about how Jesus effects our lives in between the lines.  How we live in the here and now.  But what about on the other side of the line?  That question was asked of Jesus over and over again in the gospels.    Mark 10:17 As Jesus was starting out on his way to Jerusalem, a man came running up to him, knelt down, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”   He was asking “what must I do to live on the other side of the line?”

It Was and Is Life Forever We are told in John 3:36 Anyone who believes in God’s Son has eternal life. Anyone who doesn’t obey the Son will never experience eternal life but remains under God’s angry judgment.   You did see that there were two conditions there believe and obey?  It’s not enough to believe if we don’t believe in him enough to obey, and it’s not enough to simply try to live by his commandments without believing that he was and is the Son of God.

Perhaps you are thinking “He preacher, what if you are wrong, what if there is no life after death?”  Well then what have I lost, but what if I’m right?

If you have never embraced the life that Jesus has for you then today is the day.  The bible tells us in 2 Corinthians 6:2 For God says, “At just the right time, I heard you. On the day of salvation, I helped you.” Indeed, the “right time” is now. Today is the day of salvation.”