4/17/22 Matthew 28:1-10 “The Greatest Holiday Ever!” or “Are You Stuck on Good Friday or Easter Sunday?”

15 Apr 4/17/22 Matthew 28:1-10 “The Greatest Holiday Ever!” or “Are You Stuck on Good Friday or Easter Sunday?”

I think that Easter morning is the greatest morning of the year.  I know that we have had a ha

4/17/22     Matthew 28:1-10         “The Greatest Holiday Ever!” or “Are You Stuck on Good Friday or Easter Sunday?”

rd winter but it seems that spring is trying to get here.  And it will because God has given our world seasons.  I praise the Lord that we live in an area where there are four seasons.  Easter morning is a time when we know spring is here or at least almost here.  It is a day when we dress up in our finest.  It is a day when we try to leave all our troubles behind.  It is a day of fine food and I hope you that you take time out and have a nice meal for this Easter.  But what I think that makes this such a joyful day is that this is the day that Jesus saved millions if not billions of lives.  This is the day of the beginning of the promise that Jesus will always be there.  This is the day that Jesus saved my life and maybe yours too.  I would have been dead forever if Jesus hadn’t done what He did on Easter.  For me, it is a very exciting day.  It is almost as exciting as the day I first met Jesus.  I remember being so excited that first day Jesus had cleansed me of all my sins.  He had washed everything away and I was so grateful that I was on fire for the Lord.  It was exciting and it still is exciting.  I praise the Lord that He sent me out to various churches and online to minister His word.  Thank you, Jesus.  I think that this would have been a great ending for a sermon but unfortunately, we are just beginning.  Today, I would like us to focus on the great news of this passage and see if some of this joy will spill into your lives today.

I have had a question that I have wondered about for years and finally Evelyn Weston has answered it.  Joseph of Arimathea was a very wealthy Pharisee, a member of the council, and a secret follower of Jesus. It was Joseph who went to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body after the crucifixion. And it was Joseph who supplied the tomb for Jesus’ burial.  My question is ‘why would a rich, well to do man give up his burial spot when it seems, as I understand it, that premium sites like that were hard to get?’  Well, I’m not the only one with this question as someone of the time pulled Joseph of Arimathea aside and said “Joseph that was such a beautiful, costly, hand-hewn tomb. Why on earth did you give it to someone else to be buried in?”  Joseph just smiled. “Why not? He only needed it for the weekend.”

I doubt if this story ever happened but just look at the truth of it.  Jesus didn’t need that tomb for very long.  We find out here that Jesus who is the father of life, the giver of life, cannot be held by death.  He cannot be held by a tomb.  Jesus is stronger than death.  With Jesus there is no death!!  This should be a statement that you grab onto and embrace.  Jesus gives us hope when there seems to be very little.

This is the same hope that we get today.  Remember:  Low in the grave he lay, Jesus, my Savior.  Waiting the coming day, Jesus, my Lord!  Up from the grave He arose!!  For those of you who might be a little skeptical, think about this.  Mohammed didn’t get up!  Confucius didn’t get up!  Buddha didn’t get up!  Joseph Smith is dead as is Jim Jones and David Koresh.  All religious founders of the world for all time are all dead or will be dead.  But Jesus is alive!  He’s alive!  He actually physically arose from the dead!  This has got to give us goose bumps today to know that Jesus is right here with us.

I love the fact that He is right here.  And how do I know this?  Many of you folks have heard me talk of the evidence before.  We have a mountain of evidence that all these things happened just the way we have been told in the Bible.  We have the physical evidence that supports that this happened.  We have the historical evidence that this happens.  We have over 500 witnesses who saw this happened.  I could go on and on here as there have been many books written about the massive amounts of evidence that Jesus was who He said He was and that all these things are true.  There is so much evidence for Jesus that I think you could take all the evidence for all the other religions of the world and combine them together and the evidence for Christ would be 1000’s of times greater, maybe millions of times greater than all other religions combined.  And I will stick by that statement.

Now if you are still skeptical, I want to show you the most convincing piece of evidence that I know.  You are looking at him right now.  I am evidence that Jesus is exactly who He said He is.  I asked Jesus into my life and He changed it all.  The moment I first believed, I knew that something great had just happened to me.  The first thing that I did was I sat down and began to read the Bible.  I had never done this or anything like this in my life.  Jesus changed me.

All this I tell you so that you may have hope.  Maybe your life has been more like Good Friday than Easter Sunday.  There are so many things that can go wrong in life.  We live in an economy where inflation is at a record high, money is tight, and things just look bleak.  We are being told by our government and the media that we are to hate everyone around us.  We have wars and rumors of wars.  Just about everything we read or hear on the news is false.  Our society wants us to divorce, to live in lifestyles that are sinful and never ever be kind to our neighbors.  Everywhere we look we see that we are dying and there is no hope.  There is no hope for our health, our wealth or our spiritual well-being.  We feel that we are on the cross on Good Friday and there will be no Saturday.

But you couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Jesus rose from the grave on Sunday.  You have to be careful of this because there are many so-called Christian denominations out there that don’t believe in the resurrection.  Don’t be fooled.  But because of this actual resurrection, there is hope for you also.  No matter what is wrong in your life, it is not the end.  Jesus asks that you come to Him.  Give Him your life.  Confess to Him and surrender your life.  When you do this you will see in an instant that there is hope.  There is lots of hope.  I know this because I used to live a life of no hope, absolutely no hope.  Then I came to Jesus and I found that there is not just hope, but the promise of a life forever.  This is part of the Great News that we get from knowing Jesus.  Easter is personal for me because it was on this day that Jesus saved my life!

This hope that we get from Jesus comes from the forgiveness of sins.  In Luke’s version of the story Jesus says, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.”  Jesus was seeking forgiveness from the Father for the very people who had hung Him to die.  He was asking forgiveness for those who made fun of Him.  He sought forgiveness for everyone around, and that includes you today.  Jesus Christ wants to forgive you of all your sins!  And He will if you just come to Him and ask.

A question that keeps coming up from this is “Who can give forgiveness?”  I’m going to try my best to answer this.  We can go to each other and ask forgiveness and that is ok.  You can go to a priest and ask and that is ok.  There are many ways that we can interact with each other and we will have forgiveness, but it won’t be complete forgiveness.

Real forgiveness only comes when we interact in some way with Jesus.  It all begins with you asking Jesus for forgiveness.  Now I know that you really don’t need this because you are all basically good people.  Right?  I would probably go along with you on this to some degree but I want you to remember that God hates all sin.  It doesn’t matter if it is big time sin or just the little stuff, God hates it.  So, I want you to think about your life a little.  Are you that good?  Are your thoughts always good?  Remember that Jesus knows everything about you.  There is nothing you can hide from Him.  Have you ever told a little white lie?  Have you always loved your neighbor or do you say bad things about people?

I could go on and on here but I hope you get the point.  There is not a person listening that would be able to stand in front of God and be clean.  We are all sinners.  There are no exceptions.  That is the fact and this is the Good News.  Jesus will forgive you if you just go to Him.  Don’t ever think that Christians are any better than the rest of the people.  Christians need to be going to Jesus every day and asking for forgiveness also.  We all need it and we all need to be asking for it.  This is how the system of the Lord works. We all know this.  We just have to practice it a little more.

Greg Yount tells the story of a soap maker who was not saved.  He was walking along the road with a preacher one day and he said to the preacher, “The gospel you preach has not done much good. There is still a lot of wickedness in the world, and wicked people, too.” Quietly they walked on. The preacher did not reply to his friend’s comment until they passed a dirty little child making mud pies in the gutter. With this before them, the preacher spoke, “I see that soap has not done much good in the world; for there is still much dirt in the world, and many dirty people.”  “O, well, you know,” said the soap maker, “soap is only useful when it is applied.”  “Exactly,” said the preacher, “so it is with the gospel we proclaim.”  The moral of this story is that we need to practice what we preach.  You need to practice what you preach.  That is one of the biggest bugaboos that we have in today’s world.  We claim to be Christian but we refuse to practice what we are told in the Bible.

Now, I would like to talk of one more thing that happened on that cross so many years ago.  This is something that has been a problem forever.  I think that people were just as empty in those days as we are today.  When we invite Jesus into our hearts, He will take out the emptiness and fill us with purpose.

I know and meet people like this every day.  People schedule every minute of the day.  People will do things just so that they can be busy.  We like to fill our lives by doing things that really don’t matter to anyone.  Now don’t get me wrong on these things.  Often times these are great things to be doing if you are doing them for the right reasons.

Here’s what I mean.  I used to like to be busy all the time.  I would work my shift and then I would try to be busy after work doing something.  It might have been golf or curling or shopping or doing things with the family.  It was anything that I could do so that I didn’t have to face myself.  And do you know what night I hated the most?  It was Sunday night.  I would have nothing to do on a Sunday night because generally things weren’t open on this night.  I would be bored out of my tree on Sunday nights.

Then I met Jesus about 30 years ago.  He filled my life with purpose.  Suddenly I had things to do on Sundays and all other days.  I had things to do that were for the kingdom.  I played with the family in the name of the kingdom.  I still golfed and did many of the other things I used to do but I had a definite purpose in life.  I was doing a lot of the same things but I had a whole new perspective.  Jesus had filled my emptiness.  I no longer had times of restless, aimless wandering about in life.  On this day almost 2000 years ago, Jesus saved my life and filled me with hope as He forgave me of my sins and gave me a new purpose in life that is second to none.  I’ve lived life on both sides and being with Jesus is so, so much better than being without Him.  It is the best life that you can have.  Join Him today.  It is a decision that you will never regret.

Remember this today as we continue to celebrate the physically resurrected Jesus.  There is a great story told by Ed Amundson about a 74-year-old woman named Hally who saw Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ.”  This is a great movie and I highly recommend it.  The result of her seeing this movie was that she gave her life to Christ.

After she saw the film, she was so moved that she contacted all her brothers, sisters, her sons and daughter-in-laws and made them go see it as well.  As she and her whole family were being seated in a theater that had stadium like seating, she fell down the steps.  The family was going rush her to the hospital as she was obviously hurt quite badly but the woman refused.  She demanded that they sit down and watch the movie.  After the movie she engaged each of her family members by asking them whether they had a relationship with Jesus Christ or not. She took the time to passionately present the Gospel to them.  Then they finally took her to the hospital where they found she had 3 broken ribs and several other serious injuries.  That Saturday the pastor called to cancel her baptism the next day.  She became irate and demanded, “If Jesus Christ could suffer what He did for me, I can suffer through this for Him!” AND SHE DID!!!  That Sunday morning with 3 broken ribs and all, Hally Raisor was baptized in full view of her astonished family.  Later on she became bed-ridden and was nearing the end of her life. But she was not in the least bit afraid to go meet the one who saved her soul—Jesus Christ.  2000 years ago Jesus saved my life.  He will do the same for all of you.  Praise the Lord!  And thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Happy Easter.  Let’s pray.