WHY WE NEED JESUS!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Sunday after Easter is often called Low Sunday, often the attendance is low that day, but it is so good to look out and see a full church. So thank you for honoring Jesus today by being at worship. It is just good to be with you today. This morning I want to, I guess, revisit, if you will, the Resurrection, the Easter story, some similar ground we have gone over but a little bit different perspective. When we find the disciples after Jesus has been crucified; we find a group of people totally demoralized. So look at it from the perspective of what happens to people, including us, who are without Jesus.
From John, Chapter 20, verses 19-29, the Word of God:
19On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 20After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
21Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” 22And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.”
24Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. 25So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”
26A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” 27Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
28Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
29Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Would you pray with me?
Lord God, thank you again for this day. We thank you for family, a baptism; we thank you for missionaries going for training, if you will, and for children being supported. Most of all we thank you for Jesus our Savior who you have sent to save us, but not just to save, but to send. Be with us now as we worship, as we hear your word, may it strike out hearts, touch our minds that we may walk out of here just a little bit different. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
So why do we need Jesus? Pretty basic stuff, but we need to be reminded because the world is forever drawing us away. So let us think about this one more time. Why do we need Jesus? Well we need Jesus to have courage. We need Jesus to have courage. Notice what was going on with the disciples. They were together in a room, with locked doors, not because they were very happy. They were there because they were afraid. They were demoralized. Their savior, they thought, had been killed. They had no hope whatsoever. They were discouraged, I like that word, and encouraged, they had their courage, their hope, taken away from them.
One of the things they do to us in the Army is they train us incessantly and one of the things you have to do to get promoted is to go to different courses. You have to take them, but they are good courses. Even a chaplain has to go and get trained in how to fight wars. You know I learned something in one of my courses that it isn’t just about, in war, going out and trying to kill people and break things. To win a war isn’t just about that; in fact, most commanders are trying not to do that because the way you win, the best way to win, is to take away the enemy’s will to fight. What does that mean? It means you show them such power and such strength that they go: Oh, can’t do it. In the first Gulf War we saw that very quickly. The war only lasted one hundred hours. It is because the Iraqi army saw what we could do. I remember a good friend of mine who was the lieutenant commander of a little platoon of men, about ten, and they were behind the lines, so to speak; and before they knew it they were surrounded by a hundred Iraqis. They had all put their weapons down going, “We surrender. We surrender. Please take us. Please take us.” That happened again and again and again, because they lost their will to fight. They had been discouraged.
In one sense that is good but in many ways to be discouraged, particularly for Christians, is not good; in fact, the enemy, our enemy, our spiritual enemy, is about that every day for you and for me to take away our hope, like the disciples. They had been devastated by the death of the Savior, the one they loved, the person who they had all the hope in the world. This is the person who was the Messiah who was going do everything and take it all over and win; and suddenly he was dead. They didn’t know what to do. They were together because misery loves company. They were discouraged. What they found out, of course, was that Jesus was alive and, as we will talk about in just a minute, they were overjoyed and things had changed forever for them.
It is easy for us to be discouraged. Loss of a job, some loss in the family, just dealing with things in your work or your family, a word said that is kind of mean, or whatever it is, it is easy to be discouraged. It is easy to now be discouraged in church. Right now we are going through a cultural thing that many, many churches – there are some growing churches out there – but many churches are having struggles, and it is easy to be discouraged. We have a group right now, a future planning group, and they are dealing with some hard things, like what to do in the face of challenges that we have as a church. It is easy to be discouraged; but if we allow ourselves and we allow them to be discouraged in a way that is not appropriate, it is the devil after us. We need to continue to look up and Jesus is in charge. You know what is good about this group? There are hundreds of churches all over this country that are dying or will die or have died, we have seen some in our own community. But we are looking at it, and you are different that way. And that is good, that’s good. Don’t be discouraged. Jesus is still raised. He is still in charge. He is still in charge.
Why do we need Jesus? Well, to have real peace, to have real peace. You know, if you read the bible, something that is mentioned twice, pay attention. If you see it three times, you really should pay attention because this is life changing material. Jesus says to his disciples, “Peace be with you.” Peace be with you. You know, peace has become a huge subject in our culture right now. It has been true for a long, long, long time and why not; because the twentieth century has seen probably more war and more killing and more death than any century before us and partly just because we have the technology to kill more. I am not trying to be down, it is just what has happened. So peace is a big subject, and it should be. It should be. Now, what do we do about it? Well there is a strain out there which says if we just get rid of the weapons, we will have peace; but you know what? That is too simple. Life is too messy for that. In order to have real peace you have to get involved. You can’t just say, “Why don’t we just get rid of a few weapons. We are doing fine.” It is kind of like our families, you know, if we just ignore it, it will go away. No, we have to get involved. Peace has to be won. Something has to be done with it.
That is what God did. God didn’t just declare peace. He won it. That is the whole point of the Gospel. Jesus is God in the flesh who came to earth and died a violent death because he was paying the penalty for you and for me. God just didn’t say, “Poof, it’s all over. I love everybody. I declare peace.” Actually in the Bible it talks about our sin as being rebellion, war, in a sense, against God. God came and did something about it. He got involved in the mess of life. He became a messy human being. Here is a perfect creature, not a creature, a being, who became one of us. Amazing! He got involved in the mess. So there is peace. Paul says, “Therefore since we are justified by faith we have peace with God.” Hallelujah! Peace with God.
That is one aspect of the peace that Paul is talking about. Another aspect of the peace is that God is in charge. Death doesn’t matter anymore. Now I am not saying that death doesn’t hurt. We have people who are hurting today, but in a sense it doesn’t matter, in the real sense.
You know, I am not complaining, but I often hear, you know, just in casual conversation people say: How are you doing? Well I am on the right side of the grass. Or, something bad happens and they say: It beats the alternative. The theological part of me goes, I don’t understand. Because in some sense where would you rather be, with God with no pain and suffering and living forever, or here. Now I am not giving you an excuse to do anything. There is a real sense in which we can live peacefully, despite circumstances, and that is what the word means. Shalom means a calmness in the face of any circumstance, particularly, life. It takes courage to have life and we can have peace in this life, despite it all, despite what happens.
Which leads to the third part which goes together is the peace in our hearts, which comes because we have that Holy Spirit that Jesus was talking about. To have real peace is because of Jesus and what he has done for us.
If you don’t have Jesus, you don’t have joy. Now I am not saying that you don’t have joy occasionally. I don’t know, I have tried to contain myself and not mention that Duke won the basketball tournament, but…O.K., I know. Duke is like the Yankees. People hate them or people love them. But it is alright; they did win, anyway. Now, actually, it leads into the illustration, we are so obsessed with sports right now, and why is that? Well, we want to have joy. You know, our team won. It is like, alright, alright, cool. We feel the euphoria. Our team won, Hooray! You know, I love these announcers: The game of the century! Every year: The game of the century! The match of the century! The golf thing of the century! Whatever it is. And until next year, it is all over with. That’s O.K. We just want to have joy. Now it is manufactured, but God is the source of joy. You know, God gets a bad rap. We think God is just up there to keep us from doing things. The only reason there is joy in the world is because of God, because God is a Being that is joyful. He is joyful. If you want to have joy, you have to get connected with God.
They didn’t have any joy but when they saw the Lord, they danced, if you will; that is what’s going on there, really. They were overjoyed, they could hardly speak. He was dead. Now he is alive. Something I learned in Afghanistan, I have told you before that I used to sit and watch the sun go down and that kind of thing. It was sort of my ritual. As I was sitting there one day watching a really pretty sunset, sometimes we think of joy as we do of love, that it is something that just happens to us; but biblical love is a verb. And so is joy. “Rejoice in the Lord always.” We have a responsibility. We have an obligation to be joyful. Yes, an obligation. It is a verb. It does happen to us but we are to go out and seek it and to do it in the Lord.
Without Jesus there is no purpose, with Jesus we have a definite purpose. You know, life is full of times when you just wonder what is going on, what’s the purpose of all this? That is true particularly in the military. You know, I like the military, I admit. What was cool about being in a place like Afghanistan, everybody was pulling together to do the same thing and it was very simple. You did your job. A very clear definition and in some ways it is a lot simpler than here. When you come back here you have fifty million things to deal with and there you have about ten and you just have to do them well. So there is a definite purpose to it. But it has a lot of down moments too. In the military my sense of humor takes over and that is how you sort of survive. We have all heard of GWOT, right? Global War on Terror. When I was being trained to go to Afghanistan, we would go to this training and we were just wondering what in the world are we doing here? Most of it was pretty good. But we came up with a new acronym. It is called CWOT. Complete Waste of Time for training. But you know in life, in the Christian life, we have a purpose. See what it is up there, verse 21: “I am sending you.” We are sent people. “Go therefore and make disciples.” We are called to be in the world not of it. Now there are people who are called to go and go to monasteries and go pray and that sort of thing. I have nothing against that. Ninety-nine percent of us are called to go out and do and make a difference in a little way. You know, just you and me, a little slice of our world we don’t make that big of difference, but together, we do. But we can make a difference. We can make a difference in that little child’s life. We can make a difference in our church by simply inviting a friend to church. We can make a difference by being willing to say that I follow Jesus even when it is very uncomfortable. We can make a difference, and we are called to do that. That is part of our job.
Dwight L Moody was walking down the street of Chicago one time and he walked up to this guy and, a typical Dwight L Moody said, “Friend, do you know Jesus? And the guy got really mad and said “It’s none of your business.” And he said, “It is my business. The world is our business, my friend.” My friends the world is our business because we have been sent. That’s our purpose. The Big Guy has sent us.
Without Jesus we have no faith. We have no faith. I read a cute story this week about a little boy growing up in a community where his father served as a minister. He was outside playing, doing what little boys always do – climbing trees, swinging on the swing set, jumping around, rolling around getting dirty. He came into dinner and sat down and his mother looked at him and said, “Young man, let me see your hands.” There was the rubbing of the hands before he showed them, of course. His mother looked at them and said, “How many times do I have to tell you that you must wash your hands before you eat? When your hands are dirty they have germs all over them and you can get sick. After we say the blessing, I want you to march back to the bathroom and wash your hands.” Everyone at the table bowed their heads, they said the prayer, and the little boy got up and headed for the kitchen. He stopped and turned and looked at his mother and said, “Jesus and germs, Jesus and germs, that’s all I ever hear around here and I haven’t seen one of them yet!”
I like Thomas, I really do. We call Thomas doubting Thomas and sort of disparage him but he was a pretty normal guy. In my opinion he had a little bit of a half empty view of life. But he was right there. You know, there was a time when Jesus said let’s go to Jerusalem and everybody was trying to kill him. Thomas didn’t say: let’s not go, he said: Let’s go. We are going to die with him; but let’s go. That’s the kind of guy he was. He went. But, he had doubts, a very modern question he asks, “Unless I see the nail prints I am not going to believe.” Unless I see it, I am not going to believe. We all have doubts, don’t we? Every one of us, we all have questions; and, oh by the way, questions are O.K. You don’t learn a thing in life if you don’t ask questions and that is just true.
I remember shortly after I became a Christian I went to a meeting with youth and there was a pastor at that time about my age, many years ago, and he was giving a speech and I went up and asked him a question. Now I just wanted to see what he had to say. It was a question I had and he literally blew me off. He just sort of dismissed me and it was O.K. because I was already a believer, but he shouldn’t have done that. We need to be patient with questions. Now of course, we don’t want to stay there, we don’t want to stay in our doubts; but we need to help each other when we have doubts and be patient with one another because we all go through times when things just don’t seem to be working very well and we have those doubts or we have those questions out there. What about this and what about that? We are being asked that somebody got up from the grave, a dead person, got up; and there is lots of evidence to this. There is not scientific evidence where you can reproduce it in a laboratory, but if you were to take the evidence that we have in a courtroom it would do very well.
You know, last week I told you about my airborne experience about how they spent two weeks basically, what my view is, giving us evidence that we are going to be able to do this and survive. They gave us the evidence through training, through talking, through practice; but you know what, the day came when I had to jump. That is what faith is. It is not just believing the evidence, it is not believing in God, it is not just believing in Jesus, it is me taking action on the evidence. The day came we had to jump. When we jumped, we had to trust in the evidence. Yes, absolutely, but we had to jump. That is what faith is. It is trusting. It is trusting. We have that ability to trust because of Jesus. Doubts are O.K. Questions are O.K. We don’t want to stay there, that’s true. We need to help each other through it. But as Jesus says, “Stop doubting and believe. …..blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” and that is all the people who came after. That’s us. You don’t have to see to believe. There are lots of things we don’t see that are there. There is lots of evidence but you do have to take the step.
Last but not least, and it is not in the scripture that we read; but the last verse that John writes says, “31But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” You may have life in his name. You know I have told you many times that I really love the scientific stuff and I particularly like the space stuff. I have often said to Cyndi that if they ever had a preacher in space program with the shuttle, I would be the first in line. And I would go. Of course, I would probably kill myself, but I would go. So I really liked it when they went to Mars with these little robots running around and they are looking for things. You know what they are looking for? They are looking for life, mainly. You know why they are looking for life?…because they want to prove the theory of evolution. You know that? That is what they are doing. That’s O.K. with me. I don’t care if they find life or not because as a Christian, you know what I believe? I believe that if there is life there, God put it there and wherever God touches a place, life is just everywhere. You can’t go anywhere on this planet or dig up even a spade full of dirt without finding just a proliferation of stuff. Little creatures you never thought of. It is amazing, because God does that. God has quite an imagination. If he wanted life on Mars, he would put it there. It’s O.K. But that’s the thing about God, he is full of life. God is a living being. Sometimes when we think of spiritual things, we think of ghostly, undead, or whatever. No, God is life! And to have life, not just biological life, but have spiritual life and mental life is to be connected and to believe and to trust – to jump out of the airplane. It is to trust him with your life. It is to surrender your life. That is what life is about. We said it before, but again and again and again that is the message. God is in charge of your life and my life, whatever happens; and death has lost its sting. It doesn’t matter any more. It hurts, but it doesn’t matter. And we are sent and called while we are here to be his.
Let’s pray.
Lord God, thank you for Jesus, again, one more time. May we in our own lives identify areas where we just need to turn things over to you. Thank you that we can have doubts and that we can have questions. We pray that you would answer them over time and I would pray that we would help each other in our faith. Now go with us and keep us as we have celebrated this Resurrection. Thank you for it as a central piece of our faith, in Jesus’ name. Amen.