The message of Easter

Today I got to give the address at the Trinity Chrisitan School Easter assembly. My rector was meant to give the address but couldn't, so yesterday I mashed two previous talks together, one from last week at Youth and one from my sermon on the resurrection. So below is a lot of repeated content. Afterwards, I got positive comments from the staff, so that was quite encouraging.

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Happy Easter everyone. My name is Andrew Vella, I am the Youth Minister at St Matt's just across the carpark. This is my first year doing this gig and this is the first time I have come here to one of your assemblies, so thank you for having me. I have been asked to speak about Easter.

Easter, we know this right?

Now you may be thinking that you know this story, you hear this every year. You know Jesus dies on the cross and comes back from the dead. So do I. In fact, every Easter my family go to Katoomba to hear talks about this. You would think we wouldn’t need to do this every year, surely, we get the gist of it right?

But there is a great difference between knowing some facts about someone and knowing that someone personally. Just last week at our Youth Group on Friday some Year 7 kid who goes to this school told me that Jesus will forgive anyone who asks for forgiveness. I then asked him if he has ever asked God for forgiveness and he said “no”.

There is a great difference between knowing that you can be forgiven and knowing that you are forgiven. There is a great difference between knowing that Jesus rose from the dead and knowing that you too will rise from the dead.

If you have good news or a good story to tell, we all want to relive it, retell it and remember it. Do you have the same conversations with your friends? Or remember the same moments or events in the past because they make you laugh? We remember Easter every year because it is good news. It is deadly serious, but it gives us joy and it changes everything.

On the cross, we see that we have been forgiven, and in the resurrection, we see that we have assurance that it is true and that death has been defeated.

The need for forgiveness

Now you may not think you need forgiveness from God. You are like, I have never killed anyone, I haven’t seen an R rated movie, I don’t swear, I’ve never shoplifted etc. And that is good. But we all know deep down that we are not perfect and when we stuff up, we make excuses as to why we are the exception. Now, I don’t know you deep down, but God does and He says, no one is righteous not even one. There is no one who does what is right and never sins (Rom 3:10, Ecc 7:20).

Is God right? Does He know what He is talking about?

The truth is, there is a problem is all of us. Some of us are better at hiding it than others, but the problem comes from within us all. Jesus says it is out of the heart that evil comes. Things like sexual immorality, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly (Mark 7:21-22) these things come from within us all. Is that you? Jesus says doing these things makes us defiled, unclean, imperfect which means we cannot be in the presence of God who is pure, holy and perfect. We cannot be with God.

We cannot be with God because we have all fallen short of Him. This is really bad news, as God said that after death we will all face judgement (Heb 9:27). After we die - and we all going to die, we will have to give an account to a holy and perfect God about how we lived, and I have already said that God knows you haven’t lived a good life. This is bad. You will receive justice for your actions and be taken away from God. On your own, you cannot get yourself out of this mess. You are not the exception to the rule. You are helpless, lost and in darkness.

Death and judgement, this is all bad news, but there is very good news. I am telling you first the bad news because it is true and because I love you and want you to know about the good news. The good news is the message of Easter. Jesus offers you forgiveness, at great cost to himself. Jesus also has conquered death and given you his victory.

Jesus forgives

While on the cross, when Jesus is dying the rulers sneered at him, the soldiers mocked him and even a criminal dying on this own cross insulted him. While all that was going on in Luke 23 we see that Jesus said: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Jesus forgives them. All of them[1]. Those who are killing him, mocking him and insulting him. Those who sin has put him on the cross. Everyone. We are all lost and in darkness. We all need to be rescued from God’s judgement. Jesus takes our judgement from God and brings us home. Jesus even forgives one of the criminals who is dying next to him. The criminal asked to be remembered by Jesus and Jesus assures him that today he would be with him in paradise.

The criminal was forgiven just before his death and welcomed into Jesus’ kingdom. It is never too late, there is never a wrong time to come back to your senses and return to God.

I don’t know if you noticed but when you forgive someone, you are taking on a cost to yourself. If someone breaks something of yours and you say they are forgiven, you are taking on that loss, not making them pay back what they have done. You are saying your relationship is more important than the thing that was broken.

If someone hurts you by gossiping about you, or insulting you or not including you in things, and you forgive them, then you are taking on that cost, you are absorbing that hurt and not paying them back with what they deserve.

And Jesus, on the cross, is taking on our penalty, the judgement that we deserve before God because we have done wrong to God and others. He takes on that cost because he values our relationship with Him. He wants us to come to our sense and return to Him. He offers us forgiveness now. Today.

Jesus suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God (1 Peter 3:18).

In Christ, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace (Eph 1:7).

God has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom by the Son he loves, in which we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins (Col 1:13-14)

You may feel like you have done pretty some wrong things in your life, that you have even betrayed Jesus. But Jesus can forgive you[2]. He forgave those who put Him on the cross, He can forgive you. Today you can be with him, today you can have joy and forgiveness from God. It means giving up your own ways and obeying Him. You can confess your sins to God and let His forgiveness cleanse you from all unrighteousness. There is no better time than today to do this.

The connection to the cross, lame man healed

But how do you know Jesus really can forgive sins? Is all of this true? How do you know this isn’t all just hot air and a waste of your time? This is not some 21st-century problem, the people in the 1st century also weren’t gullible. They wanted proof that something is true.

You may have heard the healing story of the paralysed man who was lowered through the roof of a house by four mates. These guys lower their friend down in front of Jesus and Jesus says to the guy “Your sins are forgiven”

What a let down (pun intended). They were disappointed, they wanted their friend to walk. The teachers there also get uppity saying that Jesus doesn’t have the right or power to forgive sins - so what does Jesus say? “What’s easier, to say your sins are forgiven or to get a lame man to walk?”

You can’t see if your sins are forgiven. No black mist comes from your body with your sins are gone, you don’t all of a sudden lose a few kilograms because your sins have now been taken away. How are we to know what Jesus says was true? Well what does Jesus go on to says? So that you know he has the power to forgive sins, he tells the lame man to get up and walk… and he does.

Jesus died for our sins on the cross, and so that we know He really did it, He rose from the grave. He overcame sin and death. We have assurance that it is true because of the resurrection.

The importance of the resurrection

A senior boy who is here today last year told me, that “if you don’t have the resurrection you’ve got nothing”. I think he was right on the money. As Paul says at the start of 1 Corinthians 15, that if there was no resurrection then preaching is useless, your faith is in vain, Christians would be lying about God, we would all still be in our sins and Christians who believe this stuff should be pitied by others. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then Christianity is false and I don’t want a part of it.

But Jesus did rise from the dead. There is far too much evidence from eyewitnesses to deny it. This means we can flip the script[3], this means preaching isn’t futile, your faith is not in vain, I am telling the truth about God, our sins have been forgiven and we should have compassion for those who do not believe this message.

Jesus' resurrection is the nail in the wall in which the painting of Christianity hangs. You take out that nail and it all falls and smashes to the ground.[4]

Because Jesus rose from the dead on Easter Sunday, we can have confidence that we too will rise from the dead. On that first Easter morning, Jesus had a real physical, material body, and we too will have a real physical, material body built for a new earth, a new creation which is going last forever.

It’s like there is a dress code for the new creation. In order to be admitted, you must be imperishable. The new creation will never end, so you must be fit for that as well. You too must have a never-ending body.

Death sucks

Be immortal. This is what fairy tales are about. In 2013 Google said they are going to solve death for us[5]. It’s a little hard so give them a little time. As one children’s author said, the company who has read all your email hasn’t read a story. They have just cast themselves as the villain. Anytime someone in a story grasps for immortality it never works out well for them[6].

Death makes smart people say some foolish things. When we lost our baby at 20 weeks the nurse told us that he had gone to be a star in the sky. No one believes that. A star is a massive ball of gas millions of lightyears away burning at millions of degrees. No one believes a baby turns into that, the nurse didn’t and I definitely don’t. What am I five?

I know it is not popular to talk about death because there is Netflix to watch, Fortnight to play, Macca’s to eat and clothes to buy, but death and our own mortality is certain. If you are not prepared to die today, can I urge you to think long and hard on your eternity...

You can’t beat death -- but as Christians, we know a guy who did, who gives us His victory.

As Christians, we aren’t strangers with death. Our God came down into the human predicament and experienced it first hand and then rose again.

I was at a funeral last year for someone I worked with. She was my age when they died. She went to bed one Friday night and never work up. Her sister gave one of the eulogies, she was 38 weeks pregnant and spoke of the plans she had with her sister after her baby would be born, and then in anger, she said: “It’s just not fair”. And she is right. Death is not fair. No matter what The Lion King told you about the circle of life, death is un-natural[7]. We were not made for death. It is because we share in the image of Adam that we die, but there will come a day when we will share in the image of Jesus.

Death is not fair and something inside us should cry saying that it is not right. And right now, we are not clothed in immortality, and death the great enemy is on the side sitting just off the stage ready to take us all.

Here is a thought experiment.

Pretend you are an alien from the planet Neptune[8]. You are doing a PhD in agriculture. You are researching if Earth is suitable for farming. You are sent to Earth to do some firsthand research but due to the planet alignments and your research funding, you can only stay from April to August. You end up landing in Australian near Canberra. You spend your time looking around, examining plants, looking for fruit, going to orchards and then the mothership comes and takes you home.

What do you think your conclusion will be from your observation on Earth? You write your PhD and you say that Earth is not suitable for growing fruit, in fact, the place is dying. Everything you saw on Earth was dying, the fruit was not growing, leaves were falling, everything was getting colder and darker. And from your observations, this would be completely true. Everything you saw tells you this. It is just going to death.

And this is our world. Everything we see with our eyes tells us that death always wins and conquers everyone and everything. And we live like this, under death every day. We look both ways before crossing the road, we put a seatbelt on in the car, we mourn when yet another species is going extinct; we sometimes see doctors when we are sick, we hear news stories of people dying all the time. But the resurrection says death doesn’t win, God wins. You and I know that the alien should have stayed just a little bit longer. They should have waited for Spring, as that is when the first fruits come and a massive harvest follows. Christians have this mindset. The sun always rises after the darkness. Springtime always follows Winter.

The world says it is life now and death later. You have to grasp and experience and try because it is death later. YOLO - You only live once, and there is a fear of missing out so you have to experiment, try and consume, and don’t worry about the cost. You need to write your bucket list because when you're dead, you can’t do anything afterwards. But the resurrection says “no”. There is death now and life after.

The great final enemy of death will be killed. Death will die and we will rise again. When we put on the imperishable then we can taunt dead:

“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (v56-57)

God gives us the victory that Jesus achieved. Jesus rose from the dead and conquered sin and death and we get to share in that victory. On that day Death will not get a resurrection, we will.

Christians now may mourn, but we do not mourn as those without hope. Jesus felt the full sting of death on the cross and came out the other end. Jesus clothed Himself in death so we can be clothed in life. Death may hurt, but it is not fatal. We have hope. It may be Winter but Spring is coming.

This changes everything

The Easter story changes everything. It means that we have been forgiven from our sins. Those who have been forgiven can love and forgive others. Those who have confidence and assurance in the face of death, live counter-cultural lives now with hope knowing that their future is safe. This impacts every part of our life. What we believe about the future affects our behaviour today. It affects who we listen to, who we esteem, what we do with our time, it changes our identity. For we have been called to a bigger mission, one bigger than your ATAR. One bigger than the goal of getting a good job that makes lots of money.

God has called His people out of darkness and death, into a life of forgiveness, joy and hope. Our mission extends to the ends of the earth, to everyone we know around us and it has an everlasting impact on people’s lives.

Christians have the message of Easter, the story of forgiveness and life. This is good news to share and worth retelling and remembering.

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[1] I think I took this from The Jesus I Never Knew by Philip Yancey

[2] I think I took this from Luke: Gory to God in the Highest by Woodrow Kroll

[3] I took the “flip the script” line from Voddie Baucham (19th Nov 2006) The Reign of the King over Death (1 Cor 15:1-11) I downloaded this talk years ago but I couldn’t find it online anymore

[4] Jonny Gibson, Courage in Death (KEC2014)

[5] Google vs Death (Sep 30, 2013)

[6] N. D. Wilson (2013), Myth Wars: C.S. Lewis vs. Scientism

[7] I think I took this off Mark Driscoll, no idea where in particular

[8] Rory Shiner (2011), one of his talks from Engage 2011 (Katoomba Easter Convention)