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Why I Believe in the Resurrection, Part 2

From the series Why I Believe

In this program, Chip tells us the integrity of the Christian message hinges on the resurrection of Jesus. He continues his look, that began in our previous program, at the proofs that Jesus is who He said He is…that He’s God, that He rose from the dead, and is alive today.

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Message Transcript

Did Jesus really die? Maybe He took, I’ve heard people say, “Maybe He took some special herbs and He got His heart rate to go way, way, way slow and it only appeared as though He died.”

See, if Jesus didn’t die, then He wasn’t resurrected. And if He’s not resurrected, atheists and the apostle Paul would agree, nothing works. Everything rises and falls on the resurrection.

And so, let’s look and ask ourselves: did, in fact, He really die? At the time of His death, both friend and foe thought He had died. Why? The Roman guards were the most formidable group of soldiers in the world. Think Navy SEALS in our day. They were professional executers.

There was a reason why they didn’t break His legs, because He was already dead. But to make sure, they took a spear and they put it in His side and if any of you doctors are here or people into biology, you know that around the heart it’s called the pericardial sac. There’s a fluid around the heart and it says when that spear went in, both water and blood comes out.

Putting a spear right through someone’s heart is a pretty indication that He actually was killed. But it goes beyond that. Beyond the medical evidence, He has a burial in which about seventy pounds of spices and linin are wrapped around Him.

It’s absolutely incredible to think that He didn’t die. His burial was secure. Well, then the next line of argument is, “Okay, if I assume He’s a good man. And if I really believe He did those miracles. And if I believe He really died, maybe the disciples actually went to the wrong tomb. Maybe it’s just a really big mistake.”

Well, His tomb was very public and it was very secure. A man named Joseph of Arimathea who was a wealthy, high-profile member of the Sanhedrin – the Roman guards, they put a seal on this burial spot. Everyone knew where it was. The size of the tomb; I wish you could have been there. I wish you could see it. I have actually been to Israel and watched right there at the Garden Tomb and the tomb is, think, we tend to think of graves like we have. It’s more like a cave.

And there was an opening the cave and then there was this long, kind of like a ditch about this deep. And a huge stone that weighed tons, it took four or five men and then it would drop in. And so, it was then had a Roman seal around it and so, that burial grave was absolutely secure. Some say it would take up to twenty-five people to move that stone.

And so, as we go through the line of thinking, His death was undisputed, His burial was public and secure, and then I think at this point then you get where you start to weigh this evidence.

And I love what someone has done. What is the evidence? Is there any convincing evidence? In other words, if we took all that we could know in history and all that we know from the New Testament documents, and all that we know from extra-biblical resources and we could just weigh them like a lawyer weighs evidence, is there enough evidence to convict Jesus of being raised from the dead?

Now, this is really interesting because I don’t know why, but it seems like lawyers find themselves doing this and then something amazing happens to their life.

There was a lawyer named Simon Greenleaf. He actually was one of the founders of Harvard Law School; he was an atheist. And one of his students who was an evangelical believer questioned him and said, “You should dig into all the evidence and weigh it, just like you would in a trial and see what happens.”

Well, he ends up becoming a Christian. A man named Frank [Morison], in an earlier time, same thing, was an atheist and he decided he is going to check it out and he’ll destroy this whole story. And he became the author of a book called Who Moved the Stone?

Josh McDowell did the same thing. In our day, a guy named Lee Strobel, he was a journalist and he decided, his wife had come to know Christ and he felt, “Oh my gosh, I have such a great wife, but she is off on this religious tangent.” And he shares in his book The Case for Christ, he says, “Her life was so winsome, so loving, it had such an impact as she began to follow Jesus,” that he said, “I had to explore it for myself. I had to disprove it to show her that this is just a fairy tale.”

So, what I want to do is I want to walk through some very specific evidence that legal minds have gone through to ask and answer the question: could this possibly be true? And this is what I went through with my friend.

And, again, the way I went through it was not like, “You ought, you should.” It was, “Hey, what do you think about this? This is strong evidence.” First and foremost, His death and resurrection were predicted by the prophets, foretold hundreds of years before it happened, very specifically. Jesus actually openly predicted His own death numerous times and His future resurrection.

We know there is eyewitness accounts of over five hundred witnesses in twelve different locations. The transformation of the disciples – unexplainable. These are guys that were scared to death and now they boldly proclaim this. The transformation of the Roman Empire.

The transformation – I wish, I’m reading a book right now by Jeremiah [Johnston] called Unimaginable. And what he does, it’s the best research I have ever read about what it was actually like in the first century. And he talks about the poverty and the slavery and the suffering and the early deaths and talks about just how difficult it was for people and how marginalized women were.

And then he talks about the power that the gospel of these ordinary people – in fact, the early disciples were uneducated. We hear in the book of Acts that these uneducated and untrained me, we know that they were with Jesus because despite their lack of education, this bold, loving, winsome faith, literally, turned the world upside down.

By 313 A.D., Rodney Stark in his excellent book The Rise of Christianity and later, The Triumph of Christianity talks about the Roman Empire being transformed by this man named Jesus and His followers who risk all their life and staked all their life on one thing. And this was their message: He was dead and now He is alive and we are eyewitnesses. We have seen Him, we have touched Him, we have eaten with Him. For forty days He talked to us about the kingdom of God and this resurrection power that raised Him from the dead dwells in us now. It dwells in every, single believer.

And now, that power is in us to live this radical, new kind of life. And as they did, the world changed. Women were treated like human beings. Slavery and some of the worst things that were happening in the Roman world, little by little, began to change.

The conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Think of the worst leader in the world. Think of the head of North Korea and hearing that he just became a Christian. That’s how radical it was, Saul of Tarsus to the apostle Paul.

He was a great intellect. He was zealous. And what we know in our day is when very zealous, religious people are convinced of something, they can do radical things. And he was going through and killing Christian after Christian after Christian.

Christians were public enemy number one, and he is going to get rid of them. And he thought he was on the right track and bam! He meets – who? The resurrected Jesus. And the world changed!

Thirteen of those twenty-seven books of the New Testament are written. And so, we have this amazing transformation of the Roman Empire. All this evidence piled one upon another, the best legal minds have weighed the evidence and say it’s conclusive. It is conclusive. Jesus rose from the dead.

If you have an open heart and an open mind and you actually look at the facts, these brilliant minds from every era have said it’s true.

And what I can tell you is something that is very experiential, but it’s really important to me. I don’t have the best legal mind, but I can tell you He changed my life.

I grew up in a home where I had a dad that really loved me, but went through a very painful war and they didn’t talk about PTSD and he became a full-blown alcoholic. Now, I can tell you about a life that gets changed and marrying a woman whose father was an alcoholic and how God can stop what has happened in your past and break addictions and bring two people together and create a family that is completely different.

My mind was changed. My life was changed. My values have changed. My morals have changed. God has given me a love for people, but I’ll tell you what, I didn’t even care about and some of them I hated. And there is no explanation except the resurrected Christ – are you ready? He lives inside of me in the person of the Holy Spirit.

These seven reasons are why I I’m still a Christian. That’s what I shared with my friend. I said, “I’m still a Christian because when I had my moment of doubt,” and doubts are okay! Doubts drive us to find the truth! But this is why I’m still a Christian, but it’s not why I became a Christian.

I became a Christian because of one, single word. You ready? Here’s the word: Punky. That’s the name of my sister. You see, the most powerful apologetic is not lots of reasons, lots of history, and lots of smart lawyers. I appreciate all of that. I needed to hear all that.

My sister Punky, in high school, had a friend named Tammy and unbeknownst to me or my family, Tammy came from a strong, Christian family and my sister came to know the Lord in high school.

Here’s what I can tell you, my sister is the kindest, most loving, most wonderful person I had ever known and ever met. And if any of you have been in a family with addiction and any know what it’s like to live in an alcoholic family and you walk on eggshells and dad might blow up and mom is enabling and there’s a lot of junk going on, my sister Punky, it was like, Wow!

I would come in with my friends, my basketball buddies and, “Hey, can I get you guys a sandwich?” I grew up in an area where drugs were everywhere. And I didn’t, I never took a drug, but I didn’t not take drugs because I believed in God. I didn’t take drugs because I thought it would hurt me. I didn’t take drugs because I thought to myself, Punky would be so disappointed.

And all I knew was someday, someway I wanted to be like my sister. You see, the most powerful apologetic – people didn’t come to Jesus because He had all the answers, even though He had all the answers. They came to Jesus because He was so approachable. He was so loving. He was so kind.

There was a winsomeness and a holiness to His life and when He takes up residence and people surrender their life, this becomes how they live. It doesn’t mean they’re perfect. But they are different. They are holy. They are godly. They are caring.

And so, here’s our conclusion. What we know is the evidence is overwhelming with regard to the resurrection. And here’s what it means. It means it validates Jesus’ claim that He’s the way, the truth, and the life. That no one comes the Father except through Him.

Second, it gives us absolute hope for the future. I travel a lot in China and I travel a lot in the Middle East and I’m not afraid to die. But I’m not afraid to die because Jesus promised, “Because I live, you will live also.” But when you’re going to go preach at a pastor’s conference in a black SUV is in front of you and a police car is behind you and the guy has a machine gun who gets in where you’re going because it’s not very safe where you’re going to go, there are a little quivers that go on inside.

But I have to tell you, now, I want – I pray I live a long life and I get to see my grandchildren grow up. But here’s power. My future is absolutely secure. I can tell you, I’m not afraid to die. And that means you don’t have to be afraid of what people think. That means you don’t have to be afraid of all the political correctness. This means that you have the power within you, your future is secure and we live out of that.

The third thing that it means is not only His claims are validated and we have absolute hope, it offers spiritual life right now. One of the things I like to do is write my name in verses. Sort of personalize them. And most all of you are followers of Christ and I think that’s wonderful.

But maybe this will ring true or maybe some of you are thinking to yourself, I would really like to explore this, but I don’t know exactly what it looks like. Let me read for you one of the most famous verses in the Bible and then I’m going to ask you to do the same.

“God so loved Chip that He gave His one and only Son that if Chip believes in Him, Chip shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn Chip, but to save Chip through Him.”

We are living in a day where Christians are intimidated and afraid. We are living in a day when people need hope and deliverance from addictions and from struggles. I have lived in a world where I have watched people believe and receive the gift of eternal life through the resurrected Christ and I have watched them break addictions. I watched them say no more to materialism, I have watched them come out of homosexual lifestyles, I have watched them decide to give their time and their energy and their money to help people that no one else cares about. And it is the very life of Christ in them.

Here’s the takeaway: if you believe that Jesus rose from the dead, you have all the power you need to be a Christian who lives like a Christian by His grace. And so, Father, I ask that You help this to move from our heads to the very depths of our heart. Lord, that rather than whine or complain or see the problems in the world, may we grasp that everything we need we already have. Would You help us to love those who oppose us, will You help us to live holy lives, will You help us to be men and women with a resurrected power every moment of every day? In Jesus’ name, amen.