The Enormity of the Effects

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of the fact that this time last year, I was having Easter by myself in a dark auditorium talking to an iPhone. And I’m so glad for the opportunity for us to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ together as a congregation. And that’s the reason for everything we’re doing here today, it’s really the reason behind everything we do on any given Sunday is the fact that Jesus Christ is alive.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about this morning. For the last three weeks, I’ve been talking to you about some of the evidence for the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just a fairy tale.

It’s not just a story. There is evidence, and by ancient standards, there is a tremendous body of evidence pointing to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we’ve talked about the historical evidence for Jesus’ existence and His death. We’ve talked about the eyewitnesses.

We’ve talked about the physical evidence of the empty tomb. We’ve talked about the eyewitness accounts of the appearances that were made by Jesus to people after he was dead and buried, and people who went to their graves, who died brutal deaths, as a matter of fact, rather than say, no, we made it all up. They said, we saw Jesus alive again, and they put their money where their mouth is.

Today, I want to talk to you about the effects of the resurrection story, and how we can see from some of these circumstantial pieces of evidence that they just build one more block in the wall of the resurrection. They’re just added evidence that points to the reality of the resurrection. And one of the things that I’ve discovered is that the bigger a change is or the bigger an effect is, the bigger a cause it usually requires.

So the bigger, the more complex something is, the more of an explanation you need. You’ve probably seen this in your own life. You may have never thought about it.

Can you tell I’m excited? I’m kind of doing that thing Porky Pig did. I can’t spit out the right words.

Even if you’ve never thought about it, if you stop and think about it, you’ve probably noticed this in your own life, the need for bigger explanations for some things than others. We’ve experienced this with water issues in our house. You know, a few weeks ago, there was a little bit of a water spot on our ceiling in our living room.

And we have a two-story, and there’s a bathroom right above where that water spot appeared. And I thought, well, that’s not good. Because by the time it appears in the ceiling, it’s already run down through other things.

And we kept watching it, and it wasn’t getting any bigger, because our two possible explanations here were the fact that Charlie and Jojo were fond of slopping water out of the bathtub. And that’s going to be an ongoing problem. Or there was a leak in the shower and I replaced the valve.

Well, it never got any bigger. So very small water spot, never grew any bigger. The explanation is a very simple one.

There was a leaky shower valve. We got it taken care of. Now, one day this last week, when I walked into the playroom upstairs and said, where did all this water come from?

And Charlie said, and I see a small bucket thing of water there and the carpet’s all wet. And I said, where did all this water come from? And Charlie says, it’s a pool.

That requires a bigger explanation than that leak. I need to hear this story. And turns out there was a bigger explanation.

Charlie decided he was going to make a pool. It’s while Charlie was here with you ladies for Bible study on Tuesday night. I was cleaning up the kitchen.

The other three kids, even Jojo, they were down in the living room reading books like they were supposed to be. She wasn’t reading. She was looking at pictures.

I should have known it was too quiet. He was upstairs making a pool. It was a bigger change than just that little water spot, and so it required a bigger explanation.

It could only be Charlie. As we conclude this brief study that we’ve done, and there’s more evidence than what I could have covered in four weeks, but as we conclude this brief study of the evidence of the resurrection, we need to look at some of the changes that took place around the time of the resurrection accounts and see what it would take to explain them. See what it would take to explain these changes that came about.

And one of my favorite examples from this whole time period is the instantaneous change in the life of Thomas. I’m going to ask you to turn with me, if you have not already, turn with me to John chapter 20 this morning. We’re going to look at this briefly, and then I’m going to throw a lot of scriptures at you like I’ve been doing the last few weeks.

For those of you who want it, there are notes out here that you can pick up if you don’t get them all copied down. But we’re going to start out here in John chapter 20 and look at the story of Thomas. John chapter 20, starting in verse 24.

If you would stand with me, if you’re able to, as we read together from God’s Word. John 20 and verse 24. It says, Now Thomas, called the twin, one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.

The other disciples therefore said to him, We have seen the Lord. So he said to them, unless I see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the print of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe. And this is why I like Thomas.

Thomas is kind of skeptical. So am I. I would probably be saying the same thing. I want him to be alive.

I want the story to be true. But I need to see some evidence before I dive off the deep end with the rest of you. So he says, I will not believe unless I see these things.

then there’s a major change of heart. He says, actually, not just saying, I’ve got to touch the wounds. But then there’s this major change of heart in verse 26.

And after eight days, his disciples were again inside and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors being shut and stood in the midst and said, peace to you. Then he said to Thomas, reach your finger here and look at my hands and reach your hand here and put it into my side.

Do not be unbelieving, but believing. And Thomas answered and said to him, my Lord and my God. You know, we have no record here that he actually did touch the wounds.

We have no record that he did any kind of examination of the wounds, but he saw Jesus. And suddenly he completely changed his tune, didn’t he? From saying, I will not believe unless I put my hand into his side, I will not believe.

And in verse 28, he says, my Lord and my God. and Jesus said to him Thomas because you have seen me you have believed blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed and you may be seated I love this example again because I think I identify with Thomas that’s why I volunteered to play Thomas in the living Lord’s Supper tonight I felt I could bring a lot to that part but I’d want to see the evidence too I would want I would want the autopsy report I would want to do a thorough examination of the wounds. I would want to see the spear and I would want to do all this fact-finding.

But all of that went out the window. When? What happened?

He saw Jesus and it changed everything. And this is not the only example of change that takes place in the wake of the resurrection stories. See, we’ve got the stories of Jesus’ death.

We’ve got the stories of Jesus’ burial. We’ve got the stories that the tomb was empty three days later. And we’ve got the stories of how Jesus began to appear to people. And these are followed up, all of these stories are followed up by massive changes that I submit to you we really can’t explain any other way.

This morning I wouldn’t have time to go through all of those changes. I want to share with you four categories of changes that took place that I think are best explained by people seeing Jesus alive. These accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were followed by extraordinary changes that require extraordinary explanations.

And I believe the resurrection, the fact that they saw Jesus alive in physical form, is the best explanation. I believe it is the extraordinary explanation for these changes. The world, folks, the world simply was not turned upside down because of a fairy tale.

To make it even simpler, the world that these 12 men, well, not counting Judas, these 11 men and some women around them and a few other young men on the periphery of it, but this small community of people who would have been the best experts in who Jesus was, and whether or not it was really him, their lives were not turned upside down because of a fairy tale. They knew what they were talking about, and their lives were changed. So let’s talk about some of these changes that took place.

There was something extraordinary that changed chickens into champions of the gospel. A little Adrian Rogers alliteration there for you. Doesn’t always work out, but it’s nice when it does.

The example of this is Peter. Peter. Those of you who are familiar with the story, what did Peter do the night before the crucifixion that he said he would never ever do?

He denied Jesus three times. He had just told Jesus, I’ll die with you. I’ll die for you.

And Jesus said, you’re going to deny me. No, I’d never do that. He denied him.

He denied him. He denied him. He was so emphatic.

Not only am I not a follower, I don’t even know the man that the Bible records that he cursed. He was that emphatic. I don’t know him.

And why would he do that? It’s not because he suddenly became a disbeliever in Jesus. It was fear.

He wanted to save his own skin. And by the way, you know, we critique Peter for that, but a lot of us would have done the same thing if we’re honest. Three times he denied even knowing Jesus in Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 18. They afterwards.

That’s before the crucifixion of Jesus. Before Jesus dies, Peter’s scared to death to even let people know that he’s associated with Jesus, that he even knows who he is. But then you go to Acts chapter 2, and you go to Acts chapter 3 and 4, and Peter became somebody who contended aggressively for the gospel.

In Acts chapter 2, the crowds that were much larger than the people gathered there for the trial of Jesus, he stands before the crowds of the entire city of Jerusalem and says, you people killed Jesus. You need to repent. You need to understand that this man that God sent to be your Savior, you took him and by your wicked hands, you crucified him and you put him to death and you thought you were having a victory, but it was all part of God’s plan and then God raised him up again.

So we have Peter who formerly was somebody who was afraid of his own shadow when it came to Jesus. He’s now willing to stand there and bring a very unpopular message to the entire city of Jerusalem and basically lay out all their sins for them and how wrong they’ve been. He challenged the entire city.

Now, we don’t just change like that without a good reason, right? By a certain age, personality-wise, most of us are pretty well who we’re going to be. And just within the course of about 40 some odd days, we see Peter going from this man who cowers at the very mention of the name of Jesus to a roaring lion challenging the entire city and calling them to repent over their sin.

What happened? What was it that made the change? Jesus appeared to Peter alive.

It’s recorded in several places. Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20, John 21, Acts 1, 1 Corinthians 15. Jesus appeared to Peter.

Peter was convinced that he had seen Jesus alive. And it wasn’t just, you know, I’ve been convinced I’ve seen things that didn’t really fit. Maybe I was wrong.

This was something that he was so convinced of that it changed his entire life. It changed him. It took something extraordinary to change chickens into champions of the gospel because Peter was not the only one who did this.

And by the way, Acts 3 and Acts 4, Peter gets arrested. Peter gets threatened. He gets beaten.

And they tell him, we’ll let you go if you’ll stop preaching Jesus. He said, you can let me go, but I’m not going to stop preaching Jesus. The man became fearless.

It requires an extraordinary explanation to explain such an extraordinary change. And I believe that explanation is the fact that he saw Jesus alive again. But it also took something extraordinary to transform doubters into disciples.

Now again, this is not the only example, but it’s a good one. There’s a man named James, who was the half-brother of Jesus. We say half-brother because Mary was his mother, Joseph was his father, as opposed to Jesus, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

So we have James, who was the half-brother of Jesus, and before Jesus’ death, he thought Jesus was crazy. Now, I knew that his family didn’t all believe in him, but in the last year, I’ve discovered it’s right there in the Gospels that his brothers thought he was nuts. I mean, those of you who have siblings, think about your siblings.

If they suddenly said, I am the perfect son of God, are you going to buy that? Now, they should have because there was prophecy about it, and Jesus lived a sinless life. He actually was perfect as opposed to many people’s siblings who just think they’re perfect.

Jesus actually was perfect, but still his brothers thought he was crazy. There’s a record of them showing up because they thought he was out of his mind. And so they come to try to take him home, and that’s the pretext for when Jesus says, my mother and my brothers are those here who do the will of God.

Because somebody said, your brothers are out there to see you. They were there to take him home. James was not a believer in Jesus Christ. He wasn’t.

He was a skeptic. He did not believe in his brother. He thought his brother was crazy and tried to put a stop to his ministry.

Mark chapter 3 tells us that and John chapter 7. But then later on, James accepted Jesus as the Messiah and became the first leader of the church in Jerusalem. And that’s recorded in Acts chapter 12, Acts chapter 15, Acts chapter 21, Galatians chapter 1, Galatians chapter 2, and James chapter 1.

Again, I know that’s like drinking from a fire hose trying to get all those scriptures. Pick up a piece of paper on your way out today. But it’s recorded in there several times.

This man who did not believe that his brother was who he said he was, thought his brother was out of his mind, suddenly becomes one of the firmest believers that his brother is who he claimed to be all along and becomes a leader of the church. Let me ask you this, what would it take to convince you that your sibling was the Son of God? It would take some pretty powerful evidence, wouldn’t it?

Wouldn’t it? Y’all awake? Are you just in shock at the prospect?

You don’t even know how to respond to that. So what happened? What made the difference?

1 Corinthians 15. 7 says that Jesus appeared to James. What caused the extraordinary change in the life of James was the extraordinary explanation of the risen Jesus appearing to him after he’d seen him crucified and buried.

Something extraordinary also updated their understanding of the Old Testament. It was enough to make them walk away from things that had always been bedrock to who they are, to make them cross lines that would have been unimaginable. Hebrews chapter 10 talks about how they stopped making animal sacrifices, stopped offering animals.

Now think about it this way, that was part of their covenant with God. That was part of what they thought was going to lead to the forgiveness of their sins and their ability to have a relationship with God, their forgiveness, their eternal life with Him. That’s what they were, up until then, that’s what they were depending on were those sacrifices.

And suddenly, the thing that they have been raised for generations to put their trust in and to say, this is what’s going to get me to heaven. This is my only hope. This is what it’s going to take.

I have to do this. They took that and they just stopped because Jesus was the sacrificial lamb that they believed took away all their sins. Now, anybody can get themselves killed.

And I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way toward Jesus, but anybody could get themselves killed. All of us are going to die at some point if the Lord tarries His return. The fact that Jesus died in and of itself doesn’t prove anything.

Something had to seal the deal in their mind. Something had to convince them that His death had that meaning. And it was the fact that they saw Him alive again.

So they abandoned the animal sacrifices. They stopped observing the Sabbath on Saturday. Now they would still go to the synagogue and they would preach Jesus.

But they transitioned to Sunday as their day of worship. I know we say we can worship God anywhere, anytime, any place. You know, it’s not that big of a deal to us.

But remember the Sabbath to keep it holy was one of the Ten Commandments. It’s the fourth commandment. They were supposed to set Saturday from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.

They were supposed to set that aside as a time for worship. They were supposed to set that aside as the time. It was a command of God.

You must do this now. And yet they moved to Sunday. Now that is not, as some groups will tell us, a decision that was made hundreds of years later by the Romans.

They started doing that in the book of Acts. And the difference was because they believed that Jesus Christ, according to the book of Hebrews, is our Sabbath rest. That this idea of taking a day and resting in God was merely a picture of the rest we have in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ. And they began meeting and worshiping on Sundays because they were commemorating the day that He rose again from the dead. So I know for us, okay, we’re just going to switch something to a different day.

may not sound like anything that earth-shaking, but for thousands of years they had been worshiping on this day because they believed it was a command of God, and yet just on a dime they switched. If we think long and hard enough about it, we all have lines that we won’t cross. We all have things that we believe that are just foundational to who we are, and we’re not changing.

There are certain things I believe, and that’s just the way it is. More than once I’ve exchanged words with members of Congress or their staff because of votes that were taken. You don’t understand they had to vote for that bill because that’s how they got highway funding.

You voted for taxpayer funding of abortion. That’s a line I’m not going to cross. You’re not going to convince me that that’s okay.

And I’m not bringing that to you this morning to talk politics. I’m saying that for me is a line that I can’t imagine something that would get me to cross that line and say that that’s okay. For me, as bedrock a principle as that is, that I think I would die before I would ever say that that’s all right, for them, their belief in these principles was even deeper.

And they just changed. Think of your core convictions, what they are, and what would it take to get you to change that? Would take something pretty extraordinary, right?

And yet they did. They changed. and they abandoned their search for a political Messiah.

You know, they were looking for somebody who was going to come, as God had promised them a Messiah throughout the Old Testament. They were looking for somebody that was going to come in and drive the Romans out and restore a golden age to the kingdom of Israel. That’s what they were looking for.

And yet this group of people, even though they’d been doing it for thousands of years, looking for that person, they completely abandoned the idea of a political Messiah for somebody who was crucified by the Romans, and they quit looking for a Messiah at all. Because it took something pretty extraordinary to convince them that they had found the Messiah. And by the way, he didn’t fit the description they were looking for, but they were convinced it was him nonetheless.

And that extraordinary explanation is that they had seen Jesus alive. What happened that would get them to change all these views that they had held dear, all these things that they believed were what God had told them. It was the fact that they had seen Jesus alive.

And they realized that He had actually fulfilled the law for them. And then the last thing this morning is that something extraordinary made them memorialize His death. You see, they began regularly partaking in a meal meant to symbolize the brutal way that He died.

Tonight, if you’re here for the living Lord’s Supper, you’ll see this scene where Jesus talks about the body and the blood. as we partake of bread in the Lord’s Supper. It’s a reminder of the body that was broken for us on the cross, the body of Jesus.

As we drink from the cup, it’s a reminder of the blood that He shed for us for our salvation. 1 Corinthians describes it in these terms. So they began to celebrate this memorial of His death. Not just, you know, we’ll go out and eat occasionally on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death or something, and we’ll celebrate his memory.

You know, we don’t commemorate, though, the way he died. It’s just kind of, it was normal, it was heart failure, but you know, we don’t do anything to commemorate the heart failure. That would be kind of morbid, right?

But they adopted this meal, this ritual, as a reminder of the way he died. And 1 Corinthians chapter 1, and all throughout, really, the New Testament, it talks about the cross, they placed this great emphasis on the cross, which was his method of execution. Practices like these would be morbid and sad under almost any circumstance.

What made the difference? What made it something that they would celebrate? What made the difference was their conviction that he was alive because they had seen him alive and their conviction that because he lived again, his death was an ingredient in his greatest triumph.

Because his death and his burial and his resurrection all went together as the culmination of God’s plans for our salvation and the ultimate proof that he is who he said he was all along. That he is the son of God and the savior of mankind. If it were not for the resurrection, the whole idea of the Lord’s Supper, the whole idea of having a cross, it would be morbid, it would be horrifying.

But we know that those things set the stage for the triumph that was to come in his resurrection. And we believe that that was not the end. And for those who knew him best and those who were there to see it happen, they knew.

They knew because they’d seen it with their own eyes that he was alive again and that that death was not the end. And so there are these, these are not all the changes that took place, as I told you already, but these are where I took some of the changes that I was seeing and I put them together in categories. These are four big categories of changes that are so extraordinary, so spectacular that we can’t just explain them away that, oh, they heard a story that Jesus was alive and they totally changed their entire lives.

They changed their religion. They changed their politics. They changed all of it because they heard a story.

Think of what it would take to change, to completely transform your personality, your religion, your politics, your way of interacting with the world, all the things you hold dear to just completely transform those all at once, it would take something pretty big, wouldn’t it? Same for them. They were real people.

And what it took to change that for them was the fact that they had seen Jesus alive. And because He was alive again, it changed everything. These changes and others like them were only possible because the people who were in the best position to know were convinced that Jesus had come back from the dead.

Changes like these in their lives could only be made by a risen Savior. Not a dead symbol, but a risen Savior, Jesus Christ. And folks, the good news is that He was alive then, He’s still alive now, and He still changes lives today. And a lot of times we’ll think, I just need to, I know something in my life needs to change.

Maybe I just need to try harder. Maybe I just need to do more religious things. Maybe I need to go to church.

Maybe you’re here for the first time in a long time because you thought it’s Easter, I’ll go, it’ll give me a little boost and I’ll get things back together. You know, we think we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do that, but what we’re talking about is total transformation of our lives. If we’re talking about getting in a right relationship with God or if we’re talking about a closer walk with Him, we’re talking about doing things that please Him and just being better, what we’re talking about is a total transformation that we cannot accomplish on our own, but Jesus Christ still changes lives because He lives.

And so if you’re looking for an extraordinary change in your life, if you realize that your relationship with God is not what it ought to be, or you realize you don’t have a relationship with God, then I would challenge you to consider the explanation that these people gave for how they were radically changed. And each and every one of them offered the same explanation for how they were totally transformed. It was because Jesus Christ died for them, and then He was alive.

And this morning, if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, this transformation is as simple as understanding that we’ve all sinned. You’ve sinned. I’ve sinned.

We all have. We’ve all disobeyed God. We’ve all disappointed Him.

We all fall short of His standards, and our sin separates us from Him because He’s completely holy. Sin is completely foreign to who He is. And so that sin puts a gulf of separation between us and Him.

And there’s no way that you or I can change ourselves. There’s no way you or I could make ourselves perfect, could make ourselves holy, could bring ourselves into a right relationship with God. We have to acknowledge that we’ve sinned.

We have to believe that Jesus Christ suffered, bled, and died on the cross to take all the punishment that we deserved and to pay all the penalty that we owed and then believe that He rose again to prove it and to give us victory over sin and death and to bring us eternal life. And this morning, if you’ve never trusted Him, as I said, it is that simple. Admitting your sin, acknowledging Jesus as the Savior who died for you to pay for it all in full, believing that He rose again and then asking God for that forgiveness.

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