Don’t you love life? I tell you it is my favorite stuff. I love to wake up and see the sunshine. I love to look out my front window and see a field and trees and birds and deer. I love a cup of coffee in the morning, actually I love several cups of coffee in the morning. I love to work and accomplish things. Call me weird, but to an extent I enjoy digging in the dirt and framing walls, mowing grass and chopping wood. I love hide and seek with my kids. I love jumping on the trampoline with them and seeing them laugh. I love to go on walks with my wife and watch shows with her on the couch. I love watching the cats chase a red dot from the laser pointer. I love to watch my chickens chase bugs. I love eating, especially at a table with friends and family and having conversation. I love the smells of seasons changing and of campfire and good food, rain and fresh-cut grass. This experience of life is marvelous, is it not?
I know it is a gift, it has to be. It’s unreasonable to me how some call it just a phenomenal accident of nature. I mean one in a number with 80,000 zeros after it are the best estimated odds I’ve found for the right kind of amino acids just randomly bonding together in the right way to form a single protein, which is just one minor component of a basic life form. The complexity of just the simplest life form is mind-blowing (proteins, DNA, RNA, carbohydrates, cell membrane and so forth). The chances of all of these ingredients in the right proportions just by accident coming together and being arranged in just the right way for a basic life form is virtually zero. And even if that miracle were to happen you still wouldn’t have life, you would just have dead stuff. Brilliant scientists have tried and tried and they’ve never been able to bring dead stuff to life ever. And all the more a mystery beyond scientific naturalistic explanation is the consciousness and this experience of being and self-awareness. How does the lumpy gray matter in our skulls give rise to this self-awareness we experience in consciousness. This wonderful experience of life and consciousness is no accidental product of nature, it is a gift of someone who is beyond our comprehension, who was before all things.
We call Him God. We daily owe Him thanks and praise, worship and complete obedience because He gave us this.
Now, if He gave us this once it’s not unreasonable to believe He could do it again and He could make it better and longer.
This morning I want to share with you the good news and I know it’s not new news for many of you, but I suspect that like me you never tire of hearing it because it is such good news. I need to be reminded of it often and I also need to be reminded often of why we know it’s true, because it is such good news that it can be hard to believe for many people. It’s too good to be true and yet God has given us abundant confirmation that this good news is the truth.
The God who created us is not just a higher power out there in the universe somewhere. He’s not distant or unconcerned about us or too busy for us. He is a person in whose image we’ve been created. And He is a person of the most beautiful character. He not only pays attention to us, but what blows the mind is He immensely loves you and me individually and wants us to have life that is even far greater than what we are familiar with and have it without end. This marvelous experience of life we enjoy is barely a taste of what God wants us to have. I’m talking about immortality. I’m talking about bodies that do not grow old or get sick. I’m talking about being young forever. I’m talking about no more having to say goodbye to loved ones. I’m even talking about no more weeds or thorns or thistles growing out of the ground and no more crime, no more violence, no more having to deal with dishonest people or mean people, but rather everybody loves God and loves one another. I’m talking about all that has gone wrong with this world being no more, and all that is right and good and beautiful being magnified and enhanced. The God who gave us this life so loves us that He wants us to have the highest quality life we can imagine and have it without end.
He’s made this very clear through an extraordinary man who walked the earth in the first century AD named Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee. Yeshua was His name in their Hebrew language. His name means Yahweh saves or the Lord saves.
We have several sources of information about Him.
Some of our sources are first and second century writings, outside of the Bible, written by people who were not Christians, like Flavius Josephus, Cornelius Tacitus (the ancient Roman historian), the Jewish Talmud and others. These writers were not trying to persuade anybody to become a Christian and yet they write about this extraordinary man named Jesus like they write about other people. They write of Him as a real historical person who seemed to do supernatural things. Josephus says he worked wonders. In the Jewish Talmud they said they think He practiced sorcery. But there’s no doubt He did these miraculous things. He taught people about God and claimed to be our Savior. He drew many followers after Himself and eventually he was executed by crucifixion under the orders of the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate; who was pressured to give the order by the Jewish leaders. Then not long after His death, His tomb was found empty and many were claiming to have seen Him alive from the dead. Remarkably these witnesses, when they were ordered by authorities to be quiet about it and were threatened, they would not keep quiet. When they were punished for it and let go, they would then just get right back to giving their testimony all the more. And through the extremes of persecution and to their deaths they maintained that Jesus of Nazareth is alive and He is our Lord and Savior. And even if you didn’t have a Bible you could establish from the writings of antiquity those historical facts about Jesus.
But in the Bible are our best sources, because in the Bible we have first century eyewitness accounts. I could talk for days about why I am convinced that Jesus did and said and is all that we read of Him in the Bible, but for now I’ll just give you a kind of summary of what the Bible says about Him. It tells us He was not just a man. John chapter 1 says that He was in the beginning with God and He was God and all things came into being through Him, and apart from Him has nothing come into being that’s come into being. Now, I know that can be a challenge to comprehend, that He was with God and was God. I won’t try to explain it, I’ll just leave it at that. In Philippians chapter 2, it tells us that before He became a human being in the womb of a virgin named Mary, He existed in the form of God and then He emptied Himself. He emptied Himself of His limitless power and presence and wisdom and knowledge to become a dependent weak human being just like us. He was subject to pain and hunger and thirst and fatigue and and temptation. And He grew up in poverty. II Corinthians 8:9 says, “Though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you by His poverty might become rich.”
Though He was like us in human nature and He was tempted in all things as we are (Hebrews 4:15), unlike us, He lived a completely righteous sinless life. He showed us how we’re supposed to live. He showed us how we are supposed to believe in and worship and love the God who made us with all our hearts. And how we’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves and be completely honest and keep our promises. And how we’re to be generous and self-controlled and have the courage to do the right thing even when it’s unpopular. In the way He lived He also showed us the glorious character and personality of God. One time one of His disciples, Philip, said, “Jesus, show us the Father.” And Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” (John 14:9). When we read in the biblical accounts of how Jesus interacted with people, how approachable He was, how compassionate and patient and unselfish He was, and what made Him rejoice and what made Him angry, we’re seeing exactly what God is like. That’s the character of the One who made us.
For the last three years of his 33 years on earth, Jesus went about the land of Israel teaching and, by the power of God’s Spirit upon Him, healing all who were oppressed by the devil with various diseases and handicaps. With these miracles He proved that God the Father was with Him and His teaching is truly the Word of God. During this time He also trained disciples to carry on His ministry after Him.
When He’d ministered like this enough, to the shock and horror of those who followed Him, He allowed His enemies to have their way with Him. He could have called legions of angels to deliver Him at any time. But like a lamb before it’s shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth to defend Himself. They tortured and mocked Him all night. At 9 o’clock in the morning they nailed Him to a cross. We’re told that in the midst of it Jesus prayed the most amazing thing. He prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” He hung there and suffered for six more hours and then finally died at 3 p.m. A soldier thrust a spear into His side to make sure He was dead. But this was no unfortunate tragedy as many thought, this was planned in the mind of God all along and even prophesied about in the ancient scriptures that were written long before Jesus was born. This was the ultimate expression of God’s amazing love for us people whom He’s made. Jesus was offering Himself in our place and for us. He was taking the penalty that we have earned by our sins. He who knew no sin, he who had done nothing wrong, had all of our sins willingly transferred to Himself. He bore the punishment for us. He paid our debt so that anyone who truly repents, who takes Him as their Lord can stand before God, guiltless, with no sin, clean righteous acceptable and can receive the life God wants us to enjoy forever.
On the third day after His death God put His stamp of approval on Jesus by raising Him from the dead. Over the course of 40 days He appeared to many alive (Acts 1:3). He allowed them to touch Him and visit with Him and they had meals together so they could know for certain He was alive. Before He ascended to heaven, He told those witnesses that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Him (Matthew 28:18). In other words, He has been made Lord and King of all creation, even over the highest of the angels and He is the judge of all. It is to Him that every one of us will answer and He will decide ultimately what happens to every one of us. That is the most important fact for every one of us to realize. What happens to you is up to Jesus. Your future is in Jesus’s hands. If you are right with Jesus, you’re good. If you’re not right with Jesus, you better get right with Jesus because He is Lord of lords and King of kings; He’s our ultimate judge.
He also told those disciples that one day He was going to come back. He’s going to come back, not in the same weak body He had, but He’s going to come back glorious and with the angels. He will judge the world and set the world right. And to those who would not take Him as their Lord, to those who would not turn from their sin, who would not trust Him, He will deal vengeance according to what each deserves, according to what they’ve done and they will be destroyed. And all of the beings that we cannot see that have been in rebellion against God, (Satan, fallen angels and demons) will also be justly dealt with. And all that Satan and evil has done to this world will be undone. This world will undergo a major demolition and renovation. There will be a new heavens and a new earth the Scriptures say. And those who believe in Him, those who trust in Him enough to turn from going their own way to make Him Lord and master of their life, they will stand before Jesus in new immortal glorious bodies, with all of their sin considered paid in full by the blood of Jesus. The Lord will reward each of them according to their labor for Him in the world and they will enjoy life without end in the new creation.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that whoever [which includes me and includes you, whoever] believes in Him [whoever trusts Him enough to listen to Him, learn from Him, follow Him, let Him change them, let Him guide their life] will not perish, but will have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
I know that it is such good news that it’s hard to believe. But if God can give us this life, it’s not unreasonable to believe He can do it again, and He can make it better and He can make it longer.
I want to add one more quick thing for anyone who has recently come to faith in Jesus. The first thing He commands you to do in following Him, what we read He had His apostles command new believers to do, is be baptized, be immersed in water, in His name. It is a symbolic act in which you are expressing your desire to be clean of your sins, and to kill and bury your old self and rise a new person who lives for Jesus.
I want to end with just a command and a promise that Jesus spoke to His disciples after He rose from the dead before He ascended to heaven. It’s in Mark 16:15-16, Jesus said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel [The word gospel means the good news and it’s what I’ve just shared with you] to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
If you believe this good news truly from your heart and you’ve responded in baptism then rejoice, because the goodness you experience here is barely a taste of what God has in store for you. If you’re resisting believing this because you don’t like some of the changes Jesus calls you to make in your life, let me assure you that you do not lose anything when you give everything over to Jesus. You are putting everything into the hands of someone smarter, someone more capable, who loves you, who will manage your life better than you ever could, and I’m here to tell you that He will give you joy and peace and good feelings about how you’re living and excitement and spiritual family and other blessings that far outweigh whatever momentary pleasures you had to leave behind to follow Him. Trust Him. Obey Him. He is good. He loves you. He made you. He died for you. Let Him save you.
-James Williams