Easter Sunday 2013

To listen to the sermon from Easter Sunday 2013, click here.

THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF EASTER

1 Peter 1:3 (NLT)

03-31-13 Sermon

”Now we live with a wonderful expectation because Jesus Christ rose again from the dead.”

1 Peter 1:3 (NLT)

1. GOD HAS A P______________________ FOR MY LIFE

       “God has made us what we are in Christ.  God made us to do good works, which He planned in advance for us to live our lives doing.”  Eph 2:10 (NCV)

       “I have good plans for you, not plans to hurt you.  I will give you hope and a good future.”  Jer. 29:11 (NCV)

“And we know that all that happens to us is working for our good if we love God and are fitting into His plans.”  Rom. 8:28 (LB)

II.  GOD HAS A P______________________FOR MY LIFE

“I can do everything God asks me to with the help of Christ who gives me the strength and power.”  Phil 4:13 (LB)

       “God will strengthen you with His own great power so that you will not give up when troubles come.”  Col. 1:11 (NCV)

       “God never grows faint or weary… He gives power to those who are tired and worn out; those who wait on the Lord will find new strength.  They will fly high on wings like eagles!”  Isa. 40:28-3 (NLT)

“Some people have missed the most important thing in life – they don’t know God!” 

1 Tim. 6:21 (LB)

How Will I Respond?

       “Give yourselves completely to God… to be used for His good purposes.”  Rom. 6:13 (LB)

       “We can come before God’s throne where we can receive mercy and grace to help us when we need it.”  Heb. 4:16 (NCV)

What Are Your Next Steps?

   ESTABLISH A SPIRITUAL BASE FOR YOUR LIFE

Believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for me and showed He was God by coming back to life.  1 Cor. 15:2-4

Accept God’s free forgiveness for my sins.  Rom. 3:22

Switch to God’s plan for my life.  Mark 1:15, Romans 12:2

Express my desire for Christ to be the director of my life.  Rom. 10:9

If you are willing to take these four steps, then pray this simple prayer:

“Dear God, I believe You sent Your Son, Jesus, to die for my sins so I can be forgiven.  I’m sorry for my sins, and I want to live the rest of my life the way You want me to.  Please put Your Spirit in my life to direct me.  Amen.”

THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF EASTER

1 Peter 1:3 (NLT)

03-31-13 Sermon

Easter was the greatest event that ever happened.  In fact, it’s the focal point of history.  What makes it so special?  Why is it such a big deal?  Why will over a billion people celebrate Easter this weekend around the world? 

Because it proved who Jesus was.  Jesus made some really outrageous claims when He was here on earth.  He said things like, “I’m God.  If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen God.  I’ve come to the earth in human form so you can get to know what God is like.”  Things like, “I’m the only way to heaven.  I’m the way, the truth, and the light.”  Then He said, “I’m going to prove that what I said was true by letting them crucify Me on the cross and I’ll die for your sin and three days later I’m going to raise Myself back to life.”  That’s exactly what He did on Easter.  He came back to life.  He walked around the streets of Jerusalem for a while and people said, “He’s back….” 

But the big issue is, So what?  What are the implications for me 2000 years later in Joelton, Tennessee?  Why should I care?

The Bible says there are some wonderful benefits for what happened at the cross at Easter, 2000 years ago.  1 Peter 1:3 “Now we live with a wonderful expectation because Jesus Christ rose again from the dead.”  Because Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we have a wonderful expectation.  We have a hope.  In other words, it’s good news.  Why?  Because …. 

First God has a PURPOSE for my life.  We can know God’s purpose and His plan, His reason for making us.  God has never made anything without having a purpose for it.  You see a tree, there’s a purpose for it.  You see an animal, there’s a purpose for it.  The very fact that you’re alive means that God had a purpose in creating you.  I don’t care what the circumstances are around your birth.  Your parents may not have planned you but God did.  And God knew just who would get together to form just the right genes to make you. 

The Bible says, “God has made us what we are.  In Christ, God made us to do good works which He planned in advance for us to live our lives doing.”  The Bible says that you were put on this earth for a purpose.  He made you for a reason.  Even before you were born, God designed you.  If you don’t get anything else get this today: You were made by God and you were made for God.  Until you understand that, life isn’t going to make sense. 

You can’t make sense of your life without God.  If there is no God, if you’re just a freak, random accident of nature, then your life doesn’t matter, you’re worth nothing.  Without God you have no value and if you get blown away by some drive by shooter, too bad, but it’s not going to matter any way. 

But the Bible says exactly the opposite.  God thought you up before you were born.  He made you for a purpose.  You were created for a reason.  You were valuable.  God would not have sent his Son to die on the cross for junk.  But he died for you.  Not just for the whole world, but for you.  If you were the only person on the face of the earth who needed a savior, Jesus would have died for you.  You are that valuable in his sight.  You are that precious to him.

You may not have learned that when you were growing up.  Maybe you were told that you were worthless or stupid or that you would never amount to anything.  Maybe you were told that you would never be as good as a brother or sister.  Maybe you were told that you were dumb, or ugly, or clumsy, or some other negative label.  But God loves you.  He loves you just the way you are.  Nothing you have ever done or not done can change your value in his eyes. 

You were created with a God shaped hole in your heart and nothing else can fill that except a relationship with God.  We try to fill the emptiness in our heart with other things.  We try possessions: If we just get a certain amount of money, then I’ll be happy.  Or we try popularity: If I can just get enough people to like me, then I’ll be happy.  We try pleasure: If I can just travel around the world, experience different thrills, get high and do certain things, then I’d be happy and fulfilled and satisfied.  Or we try other people: I’ll just get married and this person will meet all my needs.  But there’s no person who can meet all your needs.  Only God can do that.  So many relationships break up.  You try to make other people do what only God can do in your life.  There’s that hole and when we try to fill it with anything else, it doesn’t fit.

Most of us spend our lives pretending that things are better than they really are.  We pretend that we’re more successful than we really are.  We pretend that we are happier than we really are.  If you ever want to see a bunch of unhappy people, go to a Happy Hour.  Only really down people go to Happy Hours.  They’re desperately trying to appear happy.  But they’re not happy.  We try to pretend that our marriage is more fulfilling than it really is.  Then inevitably the crisis comes along and puts a little crack in that wall of denial when we’re trying to pretend that it’s all so great, that our life is wonderful when it’s not.  These feelings bubble up – feelings of dis-satisfaction, despair, disappointment.  We don’t like those feelings and we very hurriedly try to patch over the crack in our lives.  We don’t want to admit that life just hasn’t turned out the way we wished it had.  Life without a purpose is motion without meaning.  It’s activity without direction.  Life without knowing God’s purpose is trivial, petty and pointless.  You were made to know God.  You were made to know His purpose.

Jeremiah 20:9 “God says, `I have good plans for you.  Plans not to hurt you.  I will give you a hope and a future.’”  What kind of plans does God have for your life?  Good plans.  Plans to give you a hope, a future.  Some people think God is some kind of cosmic grouch, sitting up there in the sky waiting to deal you a bummer, waiting for you to make one wrong move and splat!  But the fact is, God says, I have plans for you that are good.  God knows what will make you happy more than you do.  He has a plan for your life.

There’s only one problem.  We make our own plans.  God says, “Here!  I have this purpose  and plan for your life.”  We say, “Thank You, God, but I’m already busy.  I have my own plans.  I have my own goals, my own dreams, my own ambitions.  Thanks, but no thanks.”  We go out trying to fulfill our own plans in life, which inevitably causes all kinds of problems.  The main reason for problems in your life is you’re following your own plans rather than God’s.  It doesn’t fit.  It’s going against the grain.  Any time I try to do my plans instead of God’s plan I have insecurity, I have fear of failure, I have depression.  Sometimes, boredom, guilt, resentment.  I certainly have stress.  I’m not being what I was made to be.  If you try to use a pencil as a screwdriver, it puts stress on the pencil.  It doesn’t work.  When you’re not being what God meant for you to be, it causes all kinds of stress. 

How do I discover my purpose in life?  How do I discover why God put me on this earth?  That’s why we have the church.  There are really only three alternatives.  If you want to know your purpose in life, if you want to know why God put you on this earth, you have three alternatives:

         1.  You can consult a human expert.  (Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey, Leno or Letterman) Ask, “What do you think the purpose of life is?”  You’re not going to get a reliable answer. 

2.  An even more popular way that is in all kinds of books and novels and movies is “Look within yourself!”  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this one or not.  When I’ve had a major problem and tried to look within myself, I didn’t find the answer, I found more problems.  If the answer was in you, you would have had the problem solved a long time ago.  That one doesn’t work.  That is just New Age nonsense.  It sounds so great:  “Look within yourself!”  You don’t have the answers and you know it.

3.  There’s only one place you can look and that’s to look to God.  Look to your creator, your maker.  Read the Owner’s manual of life.  That’s a whole lot more reliable.

You will discover who you are when you finally discover Whose you are.  You were made by God and for God.  Until you understand that, life will never make sense. 

Finding your purpose in Christ, finding yourself in Christ, that’s important but that’s not all.  You not only need to make it in life a purpose to live for you need  GOD’S POWER to live on.  God has a power for your life.  The reason you need a power to live on is because life is tough.  Nobody just coasts through life.  Nobody has it easy all throughout life.  There are bumps in the road.  You don’t put your life on auto pilot and kind of cruise through it.  It takes energy, effort, stamina.  It takes power.  You need a power to live on and a purpose to live for.

There are two kinds of power you need in life.  You need power to control things and energy to get through things.  Your personal power probably peeked the first month of your life.  At that point, the entire world revolved around you and you weren’t even fully aware of it.  But anytime you made just a little whimper in the first month of your life, all these big adults rallied to attention.  You were fed, you were burped, you were changed, you were cuddled, rocked.  You were given attention.  And in your little infant mind you figured out, “This works!  When I cry I get attention.”  That’s called power.

As you grew up, two things changed.  Two very awful things happened.  One, the world got harder and two, people stopped paying attention to your whimpering.  Part of growing up is realizing how much of your life is really out of your control.

When you are young you think you can control everything.  I was kind of like that great theologian, Leonardo DiCaprio, in the movie Titanic “I am the king of the world!”  But the older you get the more you realize how much is out of your control.  In fact, most of your life is out of your control.  You cannot control much of anything.  But with our human nature, we try to do it anyway.  We try to control the uncontrollable all on our own power and how do you know when you’re doing that?  You’re tired all the time.  You get fatigued.  You get emotional fatigue.  You get physical fatigue.  You even get spiritual fatigue.                  

It’s interesting in our culture, since we like to control things in America, the terminology that we come up with for this chronic power shortage in our lives, this personal energy crisis.  We say, “I’m worn out… I’m played out …  I’m stressed out…. I’m burned out… I’m run down…. I’m used up…. I’m bushed… exhausted… frazzled… bone weary… dead tired… I’m on my last leg… I’m at the end of my rope… I’m about to come unglued… I’m ready to throw in the towel…”

Regardless of the phrase you use, it represents a power shortage.  Why did God make life so tough?  So we’d depend on Him.  So we’d learn to trust Him.  Jesus has all the power you need.  Jesus demonstrated that He was God by showing His power while He was here on earth.  He healed the sick (power over illness).  He calmed storms (power over nature).  He came back to life (that’s ultimately power over death).  The good news is He says, “I will offer you the same kind of power if you’ll get in relationship with Me.” 

What kind of power does Jesus Christ offer you?  He offers you the power to change your life, the power to change the unchangeable, those things you’d like to change about yourself but you can’t.  You’ve tried but you can’t.  Habits, hang ups, hurts that just keep messing up your life. 

He gives you the power to let go of guilt, to let go of grief.  The power to let go of grudges that keep you stuck in the past and keep you from getting on with your life. 

He gives you the power to forgive yourself and forgive others.  He gives you the power to start over when you’ve really made a mess of your life and you feel like you’ve failed. 

He gives you the power to keep going and you’re discouraged and you think, “I can’t take another step!”  He gives you the power to become what you were always meant to be in the first place.  That kind of power is available.

Look at these promises.  The Bible says this: 

“I can do everything God asks me to do with the help of Christ who gives me strength and power.” 

         “God will strengthen you with His own great power so that you will not give up when troubles come.”  In other words He not only gives you starting power, He gives you staying power. 

“God never grows faint or weary.  He gives power to those who are tired and worn out, those who wait on the Lord will find new strength.  They will fly high on wings like eagles!”

If you’re tired, you just need to get plugged into the power source.  Of course you’re tired.  You’ve been trying to handle life all on your own power.  No wonder!  How do you get that power?  By developing a relationship with Jesus Christ. 

One of the great themes of the Bible is this: God made you to love you.  You were made as an object of His love.  God made you to have a relationship with you.  That’s hard to see.  It’s mind boggling that the creator of the universe would want to have a relationship with me.  But He does.  That’s why He sent Jesus Christ so I could see what He was like and get to know Him and relate to Him.        

How do you get to know God?  Not through religion.  Not through rituals.  Not through regulations.  Not through rules.  You get to know God through a relationship.  A relationship with Jesus Christ.  That’s what Easter is all about.

The Bible says, “Some people have missed the most important thing in life.  They don’t know God!”  Do you know God?   I’m not talking about knowing about God.  You may have learned about God as a little kid in Sunday School.  You learned about God.  But do you really know Him?  You see, I know about Michael Jordan, but I don’t know him.  I don’t have a relationship with him.  God wants you to know Him.  When you get to know Christ, you will have His purpose to live for.  You will have His power to live on. 

Everybody in the whole world knows that one of the most expensive and the most successful films of all time wasTitanic.  The estimates are that they spent 300 million to make the movie and it’s already grossed 1.3 billion in profits before it is re-released in 3D..  If you’ve seen the movie, you know that it’s a story of the difference between classes, the distinction between the rich and the poor.  A big deal is made about this in the movie – those who are on the first class deck and those who are down in steerage.  It highlights the differences between the famous and the not so famous, the young and the old, the educated and the non-educated.  On the Titanic there were a number of different distinctions.  There were immigrants and there were non-immigrants.  There were rich and there were poor.  But you know what?  When the Titanic did sink, in newspapers all around the world, they printed two columns side by side and those were the only distinctions that mattered.  It said, “Those known to be saved” and “Those known to be lost.” 

And those are the eternal categories.  Saved and lost.  James Cameron says, “The Titanic is a metaphor of the inevitability of death.  We’re all on the Titanic.” 

I don’t know if you’ve checked recently, but the mortality rate in America is 100%.  We’re all going to die at sometime, just different times.  When someone tells me, “She’s terminal.”  “He’s terminal.” I say, “We’re all terminal.”

Only a fool would go all through life totally unprepared for something you know is going to happen.  One day you’re going to stand before God.  You life is going to end.  He’s going to say, “Did you get to know My Son, Jesus Christ?  Did you follow the purpose that I put you on earth for?  Did you accept Him as your savior?”  The only categories that are going to matter at that time are, Were you saved by Christ?  Or, Were you lost without Christ? 

One day when you stand before God, it’s not going to matter whether you’re rich or poor, educated or uneducated, famous or not so famous.  The bottom line, the reason why Easter is so important is: You were made by God and for God.  God wants to have a relationship with you.  He loves you.  He’s seen every day of your life and He still cares about you.  He came to earth in the human form of Jesus so you could get to know what He is like.  God wants you to learn to love Him like He loves you.  And God wants you to learn to trust Him.

In order to do that, you’ve got to get to know Him.  You don’t trust people you don’t know, so you’re certainly not going to trust a God you don’t know.  How do you get to know Jesus Christ?  By opening up your life and saying, “Jesus Christ, I want to get to know You.”  It’s that simple!  God made it so simple nobody could say it was too hard to understand. 

In a crowd this size, I can guarantee you that many problems are represented here today.  But I also know that God has a purpose for your life that is greater than the problem you’re going through right now.  And God has a power for your life that will help you through the problems you’re going through right now. 

You’re not here by accident.  Long before you were born, God knew you would be here in 2013 at Easter in Forest Grove church so He could get your attention long enough to say to you, “You matter to me.  I love you.”  Jesus Christ says to you today, “I see everything you’re going through.  I know it all.  I see the ache in your heart.  I see the pressure in your mind.  I care about it.  And I can help you.”  God has a purpose for your life that is greater than the problem you’re going through right now.  And God has a power for your life that will help you through the problems you’re going through right now.  If you’ll just open up and let Him come in.  Ask Him.  Say, “God, I need Your help.  Jesus Christ, I want to get to know You.  I want to put my faith in You.”

Why don’t you do that this Easter?

Prayer:

      As we close, I want to pray an Easter prayer.  You might pray it along yourself.  You don’t have to say it aloud.  He already knows the very thoughts going across your mind right now.  Just pray--“Dear God, I want the rest of my life to be the best of my life.  I want to make my life count.  I want to get to know You and Your purpose for my life.  I want to follow Your plan, not mine.  Would You please forgive me for going my own way?  I want to get to know You and Your Son, Jesus Christ.  Jesus, I don’t understand it all but I thank You for dying for me and I realize I need You in my life.  Please help me to understand it more.  From this day forward, I want to follow You as best I know how.  Please come into my life and help me to become the person You mean for me to be.  In Your name I pray, Amen.”