Sermon preached by
Dr. John A. Huffman, Jr.
April 12, 2009
Copyright 2009, John A.
Huffman, Jr.
All rights reserved
WHAT I WOULD SAY IF THIS WAS MY LAST MESSAGE
(Easter Service)
1 Corinthians 15:16-22
Last Sunday, I presided and gave the pastoral prayer at the first service and benefitted from Jim Birchfield’s excellent sermon. I did the same at the second service and, during the offertory, left the service with the choir to go back to my study. But then I did something that I’d never done before. I stopped en route and purchased a large latté at our Standrews Coffee corner, picked up my fourth mission donut in some 31 years as your pastor and sat quietly in the plaza all by myself for about twenty minutes, while the service continued in the sanctuary simultaneous with the various children’s, youth and adult education ministries.
It was a poignant, nostalgic time, as I realized I’m now in the final-year countdown. I was now into my last Holy Week as your pastor. It would be my last Maundy Thursday, and the sermon I would preach on Saturday night and three times on Easter morning would be my last Easter message.
I sat in the plaza savoring the beauty and functionality of our new facilities. My mind went back over the sixty-plus years of our St. Andrew’s history and the hundreds of thousands of people who, in those years right up to the present, have been touched in some way by this ministry. Then I began to envision those yet to come who, in the decades ahead, will be part of this faith community. Frankly, my emotions welled up within me of deep gratitude to God that I could have some part in His ministry for the last 47 years, the majority of that time being here at St. Andrew’s.
Overlapping this sentimental time was a reality that an editor had approached me months ago to contribute a sermon to be published as a chapter along with other contemporary preachers on the theme, “What I Would Say If This Was My Last Sermon.” I agreed to make a contribution, but I told him I wouldn’t have it ready until Easter of 2009. If I was going to publish my last sermon, it wouldn’t literally be the last one I would ever preach, for I would probably not know when that would be. And it wouldn’t be my last sermon here at St. Andrew’s, whenever that is in the next few months, because that would be highly personal, designed primarily for the intimate St. Andrew’s family. Instead, it would be my last Easter sermon as the pastor of this church, because everything I ever have had to say or will ever say must be embodied in the essence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and its implications for you and me.
I’ve been thinking back over these 47 years of ministry and particularly the previous thirty Easter sermons I’ve preached here at St. Andrew’s. Just what is the essence of that message if I could only preach it one more time?
Let me share it with you in the most concise, specific way I possibly can.
Simply stated, the resurrection of Jesus Christ equips you and me to face the two biggest fears in the world—the fear of dying and the fear of living.
I’m convinced that the first of those fears is the fear of dying, and that the second of those fears is the fear of living.
Would you agree with me? Aren’t all the fears of our life captured under one or the other of these two headings? The fear of dying and/or the fear of living?
Today’s text is found at many places throughout the Bible, particularly in the New Testament. Today we take it from 1 Corinthians 15:16-22.
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ.
One of the most important facts of the Christian faith is the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. There are those who can’t quite believe that it happened in anything more than a spiritual way. Yet the Bible says that the Creator/Sustainer God broke into human history in a supernatural way. He became a human being who was fully God and fully human. He took upon himself the kind of suffering that you and I experience. This sinless One went to the cross and experienced the very pain of death. The Bible says that He took upon himself your sins and my sins. He died. He rose from the dead. Over a six-week period of time, He appeared to over five hundred people. The very existence of the Christian church bears witness to the fact that something happened to transform a broken, beaten group of losers into men and women who gave their very lives for Jesus Christ, whom they witnessed in His resurrection power. Every Sunday bears its own witness to the Living Christ. That’s why we no longer worship on the seventh day, the Sabbath. The first day is the day of resurrection. This is the Lord’s Day. Jesus himself stated, in His Revelation to John, the following, “‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades’” (Revelation 1:17-18).
More than all the factual data that we could muster in our endeavor to prove the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ is the very fact that He, right now, is in the business of changing lives. He is equipping people to die. He is equipping people to live. His words are borne out so beautifully. He stated them when He raised His close friend Lazarus from the dead:
. . . “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” (John 11:25-26)
Then, He adds this question, which penetrates so deeply, “‘Do you believe this?’”
I put the same question to you. Do you believe this? Is Jesus Christ risen as far as you are concerned? Does it make a difference to you?
The Apostle Paul was overwhelmed with the significance of the resurrection. He took the position that if it is only for this life we have hope in Jesus Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. The Christian faith is not self-delusional nonsense. It is the rugged, tough stuff of being equipped both to live in this life and to die and to step into the presence of Jesus Christ, into a life that goes far beyond anything we know in this life. Our Christianity is not just a temporal, ethical system that helps us survive in this world. The fact is that Jesus Christ is risen. It makes a tremendous difference!
I. First: The resurrection of Jesus Christ equips you to die.
You and I are only equipped to live when we are prepared to die. Did you ever think that through? I know because of first-hand experience with the death of my 23-year-old daughter Suzanne back in 1991 that a terminal disease is a terrifying reality. The death of anyone we love is difficult enough. At the same time, we have come to accept the death of elderly parents or a spouse in their 70s, 80s or 90s. What troubles us is what we see as the premature death of a brother, sister, child, a grandchild, either by disease, by terrorist attack such as in the Twin Towers, or in Thursday’s death of a 20-year-old pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels who, after his first start with the team on Wednesday night with six consecutive shut-out innings, the next morning was killed in a traffic accident by a hit-and-run drunken driver.
What we forget is that all of us, right now, are suffering from a terminal disease. Take a good look at the person you love the most. That person may be sitting beside you this morning in church. That person may be far away. But the two of you hold one fact in common. You are both in the process of dying. It doesn’t matter how old you are. Granted, it will catch up with some of us sooner than with others. We play the hunches. We bet that our turn will come up later. In reality, we are all part of a frantic string of refugees clutching to our few possessions and trying to find a safe place to live.
Psychiatrists tell us that we aren’t really mature until we confront the inevitability of our own death. Our modern existence can put a smooth veneer over this reality. There are many ways in which we blind ourselves to this inevitable fact.
I remember back in 1975 sitting in a sidewalk café on the Via Veneto in Rome reading a book recently published by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross titled On Death and Dying. It’s now a classic. For many years, she studied the reactions of people confronting terminal illness. She wrote that there are five stages a person goes through when he/she confronts the reality of impending death. The fact that an increasing number of people are dying of prolonged illnesses such as cancer has stimulated intense psychological studies into the effect that the knowledge of dying has on the terminally ill person.
The first stage is denial. The average person refuses to admit that this is the end. “It can happen to others. It is not going to happen to me. Somehow I’m different. That preacher is trying to scare me. He can use that threat as a manipulative device. Certainly there are some here who will soon die, but not me. Yes, some day, but that is way off in the future.”
Somehow the stark reality of a doctor’s clinical result zeroes in. Denial is forced to give way to fact. Our society denies death. We don’t hear much talk about it, do we? In fact, we may be uncomfortable in hearing such confrontational conversation from the pulpit. Billy Graham once said that the previous generation was afraid to talk about sex. Our generation talks freely about sex. What it’s afraid to talk about is death.
The second stage is anger. Resentfully, we shake our fist in the face of life, in the face of God, in the face of all that crowds in upon us. We shout, “I don’t want to die! It’s not fair!” We need time to let the facts settle in.
Anne and I experienced our share of anger at the death of our daughter Suzanne. It just didn’t seem fair that a 23-year-old young woman who loved life so much, who took friendships so seriously, who applied herself to her studies so well, who thought deep thoughts, who had high ideals, should succumb to cancer and die on the threshold of adulthood, never having had an opportunity to experience marriage, child-raising and to make the kind of professional contribution she was well qualified to make. I will never get to attend her wedding, hold her children—my grandchildren. That makes me angry.
The third stage is bargaining. “Okay, God, I guess that I’m going to die. However, if you heal me, I promise to serve you faithfully. I’m even willing to begin tithing and have my son or daughter go into the ministry.” There are no atheists in foxholes. Many a pledge has been made to God when a person confronts the possibility of death and somehow wants to avoid it. Kübler-Ross tells of one terminally ill woman who did her bit of bargaining. She pled to live until her daughter’s wedding. She made it through. Back for a checkup, her doctor observed, “You have obtained your wish. You attended your daughter’s wedding.” To this she responded, “Doctor, I have another daughter!” And the bargaining goes on and on.
Stage four is depression. A gloom, a melancholy settles in over the terminally ill person. She crawls into herself. His thoughts are introspective. Reality is winning the day. It is a part of responsible coping with the reality of death. We have had our share and continue to have it.
The fifth stage is acceptance. The facts settle in. The person finally accommodates one’s self. He is going to die. There’s nothing she can do about it. Death becomes the one sure fact of life. We lived in that constant reality once the doctors declared that our daughter Suzanne had four to six weeks to live. We experienced our denial. We lashed out in anger at God and at each other. We made our vain attempts at bargaining. And we experienced depression. Suzanne was the first of us to come to acceptance. She continued to battle the cancer. She didn’t like the idea of death. She wanted to live. She settled in with the truth earlier than we did that she would die. And she wrote in her journal about it.
I must be honest to say that it is not only Christians who come to this fifth state of acceptance. Many people experience an ultimate acceptance and, in some cases, even a serenity in the face of death.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead releases you and me from having to deny the reality of death. In fact, it equips you and me to die, because God’s Word tells us some things about the future. It doesn’t tell us everything. Let’s not make the Bible say what it doesn’t say. But it does share three specific promises which will equip you and me to die.
One: God promises that there is life beyond this life.
Jesus said just before His death:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.” (John 14:1-4)
The Apostle Paul refers to Jesus as being “the first fruits of them that are dead.” His resurrection stands as evidence that life does not end with death. Christ is victor.
Two: God promises hope.
The Apostle Paul wrote these words to the Church in Thessalonica:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14)
The Christian need not be bogged down with sorrow as those who have no hope. We must be careful to state clearly that Paul is not saying that we need not sorrow. He is describing two kinds of sorrow. One is the hopelessness surrounding the death of a nonbeliever. Dying becomes such an orgy that denies the reality that the loved one has departed. A fetish is made of the remains with an expensive casket and elaborate banks of flowers with fortunes spent on that “lovely final resting place.” Tears stream at both the funeral of a believer and a nonbeliever. Yet, they are two different kinds of tears. One accompanies the moans of those who have no hope. Their confidence is not in Christ. The other tears come from those of us who remain. We sob out of hearts throbbing with pain that we will not see our loved ones for awhile. It is so final in this life. We cry for ourselves, for no longer will we have the earthly presence of our loved one who is now in the presence of Jesus Christ.
Let’s not try to protect our children from the realities of death. They confront it regularly in school, on the street, in the media and in the normal flow of family life. Although I’d heard about death, it was distant to me until, as an 8-year-old living in Boston, Massachusetts, word came that my Grandfather Oscar Bricker, my mother’s father, had died. He was a very special person to me. He was a farmer who owned a 180-acre spread in Yale, Michigan. I only got to see him once a year for a few days, but I loved him very much. A few months before his death, he had sold the farm, and he and my grandmother, Della, moved in with my Aunt Beulah, recently widowed, and my cousins, Janet and Nancy. I can’t remember whether we drove or flew—I think we drove—from Boston to Port Huron. But what I do remember is the overwhelming grief I experienced as I walked into that funeral parlor and saw the casket surrounded by my grieving relatives and their friends. Literally, I walked toward it and, when I thought no one was looking, I reached forward and brushed my fingers against his cheek and also his folded hands. That body, once so alive, pulsating with the energy of a hardworking farmer, a devout servant of Jesus Christ, and a loving family man, was dead. Those calloused but soft hands that so often reached out to me, picked me up, held me close to himself, felt like cardboard. I suddenly realized something had changed, and this life would never be the same again. Grandfather was gone. He had died at the age I am now.
But what I began to realize existentially was that, for a person of faith, his death was simply a transition into the presence of Jesus Christ for eternity. The family grieved. There were tears of sorrow. At the same time, there was that underlying sense of hope that someday we would be united with him in heaven. And there was even some laughter as the family joked in the years to come about how punctual he had always been when it came to leaving for church on Sunday morning. Grandfather Oscar, in his early horse-and-buggy decades, hooked up in front of the farmhouse and, in later days, cranked up his Model T Ford. He would call out to Della, my grandmother, who was always finishing off the last few chores before getting the family off to church. She outlived him by some 25 years. The family joke at her memorial service in the mid-70s was that his first words to her when she arrived in heaven were, “Late again, Della!”
Jesus promised that we will be with Him, united with our loved ones in heaven. We are promised new bodies. They will be recognizable. We don’t know much about our future state or existence. We do know that we will be with Jesus, reunited with our brothers and sisters in the faith. It will be a different existence than that here on earth. It will be free from the pain and sorrow we know here. Our hope is of a reunion with our Savior. We will see Him face to face and experience joy and quality of life that goes beyond anything we can imagine.
Three: God promises that you and I need not face the specter of hell.
Jesus died to set you and me free from that ominous alienation from God Almighty. We can try to blind ourselves to the facts and deny the reality of hell. But built into the human psychic is a fear of death—that moment of accountability for what we have done wrong. There are some who can dull themselves with the narcotic of disbelief and cynicism. But the same Bible that promises heaven to those who put their trust in Jesus Christ states that there is a hell, an eternal alienation and separation from God. Those who refuse God’s love, those who are unwilling to repent of sin, turning down the free gift, run the risk of standing separated forever from God who loves them and went to the cross for them. To deny the fact of hell doesn’t make hell any less of a fact. The resurrection of Jesus assures you and me a place in heaven with our savior. The sting of death is removed. The notion of punishment, the notion of condemnation, which is universal to the human existence, is cancelled out in what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. And this eternity in His presence will have purpose, as we will be kingdom-builders with Him in a new heaven and a new earth!
II. Second: The resurrection of Jesus equips you to live.
It has cataclysmic implications for your existence right now in this world.
I know some people who would rather die than live. Suicide is an increasingly talked about reality for many contemporary men and women.
The facts are that the Christian is one who is prepared both to die and to live. The Apostle Paul wrestled with this as he struggled with his own desire to die to be with Jesus and, on the other hand, to remain here to serve his Lord.
How does the resurrection of Jesus equip you and me to live?
One: God promises you meaning.
Are you aware that grief is not a word restricted to the dying process? Grief in its ultimate sense involves the loss of meaning. Bereavement is therefore a crisis of meaning. Grief is an expression of an exhausting effort to reintegrate the jumbled pieces of life’s puzzle into a picture that makes sense, as much emotional as practical. It describes what a nation goes through in times of economic, political and international crises.
It’s what we’re experiencing right now in the wake of 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the various political and social upheavals, the most recent of which is the stock market collapse and the economic meltdown.
The Economist, dated April 4-10, 2009, features on its cover these words: “Get the Rich!—Under Attack, a 14-Page Special Report on the Rise and Fall of the Wealthy.” In that special section, it describes the plight of all of us, but especially the super-wealthy who have become disillusioned with the people who look after their fortunes, the stock market collapse, the disappearance of Lehman Brothers, insolvency of banks, the devastation of the housing market. The plethora of home foreclosures is enough in itself to scare the savviest of investors. And then comes Bernard Madoff and his ponzi scheme that deceived some of the brightest and the best. Just who can you trust when you see life fortunes, that have carefully been put together over decades, decreased by close to fifty percent and, in some cases, completely evaporate.
Some of us avoid the immediate lack of meaning by reverting to the past. We become extra conservative, pretending to live in a bygone era that we are determined to resurrect into the present. I have one friend who is ultra-conservative. The other day, he was complaining, “Even nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Some of us are radicals who project into the future a new day, a new order that has meaning. Some of us Christians become preoccupied with eschatology. All we talk about is the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, avoiding His call to live in the present, occupying until He comes. The answer is not clinging to assumptions that deny the reality of change, being extra conservative or prescribing radical alternatives that deny the present. Jesus Christ offers an integration of the best of the past with the inevitable change which is producing the future. Jesus Christ wants to walk with you and me in the now.
A friend of mine describes his life before he came to Jesus Christ as one in which, “I was going around in circles, circles of emptiness, with me at the center!”
I am convinced that Jesus Christ is the missing piece in the puzzle called life. Without Him, you can almost get it back together, but then it shatters into the confusion of a million pieces. Jesus says, “‘I am come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.’” He knows best how you can live. He ought to. He is the One who created you.
Two: God promises you authentic forgiveness.
Have you ever done anything that you shouldn’t have done? Be honest. Have you ever left undone anything that you should have done? Be honest. Some of us live with a lot of guilt. Some of us have anesthetized ourselves to guilt, pretending there is no such thing as sin.
Sometime ago, the New York Times Magazine included in its headline lead, in an article about crime, these words, “Intellectuals do not wish to be caught saying anything uncomplimentary about humankind. But wicked people exist.”
The resurrection of Jesus Christ potentially takes the wickedness out of you.
A friend of mine has a son who is allergic to bee stings. If a bee were to sting him, it would kill the boy. One day, a bee circled the two them. It landed on the boy. The father stood there petrified. Suddenly, the bee flew off of the boy and stung the father’s arm. Then the bee flew back to the boy, and nothing happened. Why? Because nothing could happen. The father had taken the sting out of the bee and rendered it harmless.
What is the sting of death? What makes death painful? Paul raised these same questions when he declared, “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” (1 Corinthians 15:56-57).
The resurrection of Jesus Christ takes the sting out of death and exposes you and me to that freeing catharsis of confession. Your guilt is removed. You have acknowledged that you are a sinner who needs this forgiveness. There is nothing you have done that cannot be forgiven. The Bible says this in 1 John 1:8-9: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Three: God promises you strength.
Jesus said you and I will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon us. Divine energy is yours. You have the strength to live. You are not alone. You are no accident. You are special to God. He wants to help you. His guidance is available. His direction is with you. Yours in not a faith of a good person who lived a perfect example and then died a martyr’s death on the cross. Your confidence is in the Risen Lord, who wills to walk with you as an intimate friend!
One of the saddest experiences of my pastoral ministry was to know a man who really lost interest in living. His wife sued for divorce. She got a restraining order so he couldn’t see his children. That broke his heart. Granted, he did drink a bit too much. He wasn’t as strong a person as she wanted him to be. Yet, knowing her, she wouldn’t let anyone around her be strong. In human terms, he had a heart of gold. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for a friend. He loved his children. How he wanted to see them. Somehow he couldn’t get a handle on life. He wasn’t experiencing the meaning, the forgiveness and the strength that could have been his. I remember the night he took a little cardboard plaque to a printer who was a mutual friend of ours. He had seen the plaque on a restaurant wall and had copied the words. Touched by how it expressed his own feelings, he asked to have several dozen copies printed up as a macabre present for his friends. It read, “For lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled.”
How stunned I was to find that was exactly the case. My friend went home that night. He went to bed as usual. He never woke up in the morning. No, it wasn’t suicide. Those of us who knew him best are convinced that tomorrow had been cancelled simply for a lack of interest.
Four: God promises you a job.
Dr. N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, who was with us recently, warns us that, in our preaching of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we should not focus simply on God’s forgiveness in this life and heaven in the life to come. Salvation by “grace” not by “works” was the important breakthrough theologically that brought about the Protestant Reformation. But we live in danger of putting so much of a concentration on God’s grace that we forget that we are saved for a purpose. We are called to a joint enterprise with God in building His Kingdom here on earth. Instead of clutching a one-way ticket to heaven, which is ours, we are privileged to be empowered by His Holy Spirit to change in positive ways the cultures in which we live. The resurrected Christ could translate us straight to heaven after we repent and receive His grace. He doesn’t. He makes us His emissaries, His ambassadors here on earth to do His work in the most creative ways possible. We don’t earn salvation by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving a glass of clean, cold water to the thirsty, visiting the prisoners, and taking care of the widow and the orphan, and telling people that Jesus loves them, inviting them to receive His salvation. This is our privilege. This is our opportunity. Everyone of us needs a job, and He’s given you the greatest job of all.
Bishop Wright reminds us that, as we come to faith in Jesus Christ, we have a big job to do. In his book titled Surprised by Hope, he tells us that we have three specific tasks as we build the Kingdom of God here on earth. We are to see beyond our own vested selfish interests. With the interests of others, we must engage ourselves in justice for all people, not just for ourselves. He describes the tremendous social reforms brought about by the eighteenth century Quaker John Woolman and the British Parliamentarian William Wilberforce. We need more similar stories today. He goes on to call us to more thoughtful care of our environment, giving attention to beauty, as we are stewards of God’s creation. And we must dedicate ourselves to evangelism, sharing the Good News of what God has done for us through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is not something to selfishly hold on to and not share. He puts it in these words:
The mission of the church must therefore reflect, and be shaped by, the future hope as the New Testament presents it. I believe that if we take these three areas—justice, beauty, and evangelism—in terms of the anticipation of God’s eventual setting to rights of the whole world, we will find that they dovetail together and in fact that they are all part of the same larger whole, which is the message of hope and new life that comes with the good news of Jesus’s resurrection.
Frankly, I dread that chapter of life that is called “retirement.” I’ve been gainfully employed since age 9. As the clock moves toward my retirement, I find myself resisting that reality. I know it’s time for St. Andrew’s to have a new pastor. I know it’s time for me to move into a new era of my life. But I’ll tell you, I don’t want to spend the rest of it just playing golf and walking the dogs. I was getting sort of depressed about this whole thing when I received an email the other day. It was from a theological seminary inviting me to come for five days next year and be an adjunct professor, teaching a component on “Expository Preaching and Practical Issues in Parish Ministry” for mid-career pastors working on their doctorate of ministry degrees. I was stunned at the impact that email and subsequent phone conversation had on my whole attitude of life. Here I was, imagining being gainfully employed in purposeful work between age 9 and 70, dreading the day when suddenly it would end. As a young pastor in Key Biscayne, Florida, I often played golf with a number of hardworking executives from the northeast who would vacation in Florida. They would sit around after golf dreaming about the day that they could retire in Florida, playing golf every day, enjoying warm weather, the sunshine and the beach. Then, I observed as several of them did retire, move to Florida, play golf every day, bored to tears, spending their time drinking too much at the nineteenth hole and wistfully reminiscing about “the good old days at the office up north.” Two or three of them died within two or three years of receiving their gold watches.
Persons I’ve seen that I admire the most are the ones who never expect to retire in the classical terms of retirement. Oh yes, there are stages to life, but one knows they were created to be a child of God, always participant in building the Kingdom of God, both in this life and the life to come. I could give you story after story of men and women here, part of St. Andrew’s, who have discovered the job God has for them in building His Kingdom. These are men and women of all ages, all stages of life, all economic backgrounds, who see the tremendous privilege of teaching Sunday school, tutoring a child at Shalimar, doing special projects around the church, helping a neighbor in need, working with the mentally ill, giving of professional time and energy at no charge to someone who can’t afford it, and the list goes on. I could put names and faces to each of these and many more categories. You get the message, don’t you?
My friends, this is my final Easter message as your pastor at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. If you have received Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, I affirm you in the way that He has equipped you to face the two biggest fears in the world—the fear of dying and the fear of living. If you’ve wandered away from Him once knowing His provision, I invite you to come back to Him, reestablishing your relationship with Him that will reaffirm His provision. And if you’re on the outside looking in, you just happened to come to church on Easter Sunday as a guest of someone, because of the uncertainties in this time of economic meltdown, or some dramatic crisis in your life or some sense of spiritual malaise, I invite you, right now, to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior and your Lord. I invite you to now open your heart to Him, admitting you’re not perfect, asking His forgiveness for your sins, welcoming Him into your life. I invite you, right now, to celebrate this Easter by raising your hand where you are in a public acknowledgment that you today, Easter 2009, are receiving Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord.
Today, Easter 2009, can be the most important day of your life if today you say “Yes” to God’s invitation!
Last night at the Saturday evening service, a man came up to me at the door and said, “This is my 25th anniversary of receiving Jesus Christ as Savior in response to an invitation you gave on Easter 1984. I’ve been walking with Him ever since!”
What a joy to know that because of His resurrection you and I can face the two biggest fears in the world—the fear of dying and the fear of living!