When I was a kid, I went Easter to last all year long. And I didn't want Easter to last all year long because I was like super into church or super into Jesus. I went Easter to last all year long because I like Easter candy and I was a fat kid. And every year I tried and I tried to make that Easter candy last as long as it could.
Like I said, I was a fat kid. And I could normally ration it out for like four days. And all my Easter candy was gone. And I kept waiting the rest of the year for Easter to come back again.
And the only part of Easter that would last all year long was how my mom would find like the little piece of the Easter grass all over the house from my Easter baskets. But I wanted Easter to last all year long. And foundry our vision is that Jesus is big enough. And that matters to us because the conversations that we have with people we realize how many personal things all of us deal with because our vision of Jesus is simply too small.
How many, so many of us have questions about where was God in this or I can't believe these Christians did that or what does God think about this? We have all these issues and what's going on. More often not is that we have a small view of Jesus that we need Easter to last all year long. And that's what we're gonna talk about today.
I'm excited about it. We're gonna jump into scripture, Sarah Read the beginning of John 20 this morning already. It's kind of your traditional Easter scripture. But we're gonna bump up until later in that night this morning.
And we're gonna look at what does it mean to encounter a risen Lord. So John 20, I will start in verse 19. If you have your Bible with you or you can use your phone, you have your phone, just make sure to check in on Facebook when you click over because you're tired of hearing me talk. Or you can read on the screen.
So a lot of different options there. This is what it says. That Saturday evening the disciples were meeting behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Suddenly Jesus was standing there among them.
Peace be with you, he said. And as he spoke he showed them the wounds in his hands and his side. They were filled with joy and they saw the Lord. Again, he said, peace be with you.
As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you. And he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone, sins they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.
So we have this passage that is full of a bunch of stuff that is just kind of weird. We gotta try to explain this. Well, let's think about the circumstance. The disciples have been through possibly the most chaotic three days of their life.
Starting on Thursday, they see this man they've been following for years. They place every single thing in. They see him betrayed by one of their own. They see him carted away.
They see him like shipped back and forth all over this town because someone's trying to make a decision about what to do with him. And ultimately the decision is we're gonna have to kill him because that's what we're gonna do with guys like this. And the Jewish people and the people of Jerusalem have made such a ruckus that they'd occur. Let's kill him, let's crucify him.
Let's make him a criminal of the state and show everybody what we do with criminals of the state. And so he died. Crucified a horrific and embarrassing death. One of his followers, who's a little bit secret decided to give him a tomb for him to lay in because they didn't have enough money to it to bury him.
And Sunday morning rolls around and one of his followers comes realizes he's not in there. That everything has changed. So imagine how that even adds to chaos. So here they are, they're huddled together.
They're in an upper room in the top four of the house. They're in a secret place. Scripture says they're nervous because they're afraid the Jewish leader's gonna come get them. See Jesus was, they had to get him in the ground before Sabbath, before the Holy Day and before the festival.
And so now since it's Sunday, it's the end of Sunday, the disciples know that now the Jewish leaders can now can go back out and try to find them more. So they're just chaos, chaos, chaos. And Jesus comes in. He'd been speaking specifically about the chaos.
Speaking to them in a way that they finally understand what's going on. And inside of the story, what we find is a way for us to all understand what's going on. Because it's impossible for us to encounter a risen Lord that responding and without going. When we think about what does it mean to respond to Jesus we find, this first thing that Jesus is talking about is talking about peace.
Now when we have an idea of peace, we have a couple of our own ideas. Like peace might mean that there's no drama going on. To be honest, I mean in all of our lives what peace is, no drama. Peace means freedom from war.
Peace can mean many different things. But to Jesus his followers, and he'd been talking about peace a lot, he'd been promising peace. In fact, it was his promise of peace that got him in trouble because people didn't agree with the way he was describing peace. But to a Jewish person in this time, peace, there's an everlasting rest promised by God.
It was freedom from oppression. There was freedom from occupation. So Jesus comes in and says, peace be with you. There's absolutely nothing that resembles peace going on.
And their life right now. I'm sure they're trying to figure out what on earth you talking about. You see what happened to you? I can't explain why you're here right now.
But did you see what that did you? And immediately he does this. He shows them his hands. He shows them his feet and his side.
He shows them the hands where he was crucified. Where's feet were crucified. He shows the wound on his side because they had to make sure he was dead because this special holy day was coming up and nobody could be hanging on across him today. When they stabbed him with a spear to make sure he's dead and blood and water poured out.
So he came to disciple, he said, peace be with you. And he showed them, he said, this is where peace led me. It really happened. It's part of our story now.
We can't say anything against it. This is the reality we have. But then he says it again, peace be with you. It's one of the ways we respond to God is that Jesus comes to us many times in our darkest places and our deepest places.
Or just sometimes in everyday life. And there's things we don't want to confront. And things we want to deal with. And he says, this is who I am.
This is what I've done for you. Peace is here though. And know this happened. There is still an eternal rest that's promised by God that is in your life and in our life right now.
So the stuff that we bring to the table, it's all right. It's there. It's on the table. Whether it's things that we have done to ourselves or whether it's things that people have done to us that get us those places.
Jesus comes in and says, peace can overcome even this. That my presence can overcome even this. That I can rest in your life and we can provide every single thing you need to overcome this. If Jesus is bringing us this blessing of peace, this part of our responding, the next thing we have to understand is that he's also calling us to a blessing of a mission.
Did Jesus just say peace be with you? Just peace be with you. And as the Father has sent me, I'm going to send you. Our response to his blessing of peace is to be part of his mission.
He comes in and does something else really, really weird. He breathes on them. Like when I think it's my breathing on me, I think I've seen in the green mile John Coffee. And he's like, all this flies come out.
That's we, nobody, I don't want anybody to breathe on me. That's not a welcome circumstance in my life. My wife and I, many of you all, if you've ever come to my house, I'm going to go around this very much. You all know about Emma.
My wife I've been married for 10 years. Emma is her child and my dog. This is Emma. Emma weighs 11 pounds.
And she's a ball full of energy and she is sweet and she wants to lick you and she wants your attention and to sit in your lap. And everything, single thing about her is cute. Except one thing. Her breath will stop a freight train.
On a good day, her breath smells like Wednesday on Bourbon Street after Mardi Gras. I can tell where Emma is in bed at night because she's a mouth breather and I can smell her proximity. I know we have a lot of people in veterinary science that are here. I know we have vets told us everything's A-OK with her.
Docsons just have gnarly breath. Well I read this, the first thing I thought about was what Emma breathes on me and I wanted the idea of punting a small dog is humorous. That's what I thought. That's what I immediately thought about.
But there's bigger stuff. There's a lot bigger stuff than my dog's nasty breath going on. Yeah, right. Yeah.
If we look in scripture in the Old Testament, this word for breathe and the word for the Holy Spirit is the exact same word, it's ruach. And the second that Jesus huddles his disciples together and breathes on them, their minds are immediately going to the story and Genesis and the creation of man where it says, God formed Adam out of the dust and he breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, caused him to come alive and made him steward over the garden. Us having a year round view of Easter means that inside of the resurrection of Jesus, he gave us every single thing that we need to live an absolutely new life. And at the resurrection, two thousand years ago, on the day we celebrate today, the world's recreation began.
And the first step of that recreation was Jesus breathing the breath of life from the breath of God over his followers. So when we respond to God, we respond by accepting his blessing of peace, but also by accepting his blessing of mission because we, the two go hand in hand. And when I think throughout my life, when I've had a hard time understanding what it means to encounter Jesus far too often, I've not seen the duality of response. I've only wanted to go in mission or I've wanted to accept peace.
And the two go hand in hand with each other. It's part of having a large vision of who Jesus is in our life. But I know for a long time, I didn't think I was adequate enough to go do anything. Part of my story was like, I just want to go like sit in the back of church and do the back of things.
I felt like there were things I couldn't say. I felt like I wasn't good enough to just have a friend to talk about Jesus with much less lead people. The beautiful thing is, as part of resurrection, is that new life is created inside of us. And for us to respond, we have to understand both those sides of that mission are there.
But once we understand that, the next part of the puzzle is that we have to go. Because part of encountering a risen Lord is responding and going. Romans 8 tells us something that's just amazing. I found this a few weeks ago and it's just been sitting inside of my mind.
I've been saving it for this morning. But thinking about it so much. And Romans 8 verse 10 says, In Christ lives within you. So even though your body will die because of sin, the spirit gives you life because you've been made right with God.
In the spirit of God who rose Jesus from the dead lives in you. And as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by the same spirit living within you. Think about that. Whenever we don't feel adequate, whenever we feel like it's impossible, that the same spirit that rose Jesus from the dead, the most impossible thing in this world.
I mean, if you want to get something done, you tell me it can't be done. I will find somewhere to redneck that solution really quick. But the most impossible thing in the world arise from the dead. The same spirit that calls Jesus to rise from the dead now resides inside of us.
And that's part of the resurrection message. We have to understand that. We have to put that into our heart and our mind. The next thing that does is if we can put that back up.
It says he will give life to your mortal bodies by the same spirit living within you. Now just that and that alone is pretty good, right? But if we pull this apart, because there's some weird, just some funny things going on in this language. If we want to read that just absolutely a way too formal of a way, there's a specific form that sees in scripture just to translate that word of life.
It's not seen anywhere else. It's a verb form that speaks about future anticipation that is absolute to where it says he will begin a new life, even in your mortal body, by the same spirit living within you. That what happens is when we understand this resurrection spirit, that the life that God originally designed for us, that God wanted for us to have, the person he wanted us to become, the things he wanted us to do, the abilities he wanted us to have, and the freedom that he designed for this life is accessible to us, even though we are still constrained by this mortal body, even though we're still constrained by a world that has overcome with sin. That the resurrection creates the absolute new form of life inside of our own hearts for us.
It's amazing, isn't it? That's beautiful. If we want to make Easter last all year long, if we want to have a big vision of who Jesus is in our life, if we really want to encounter a risen Lord by responding and by going, we realize that this is a package deal. I've been sitting on this for the last couple of weeks and trying to figure out, like, how does this wrap up?
How can we step outside of this room with this message of the resurrection power? This is what I realized. While it's impossible for us to encounter a risen Lord without coming and going, that the answer is in the process. Because what happens is we seek to encounter a risen Lord and we understand what we're responding and going does.
So it draws us deeper into who he is. And to his love for us and his desire for us and in his mission for this world. It's a package deal. But in a way that we encounter him in that way, the way we understand what it means to respond and to go to, what it means to accept a message of peace and a mission, he gives us.
We then begin to encounter him in a deeper way. And that will launch us into a greater understanding of what does it mean to respond and what does it mean to go. And that will put us even into a deeper encounter to Jesus. And the cycle just starts and it gets bigger and it gets bigger and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger until the whole world is overcome by people who are encountering Jesus in the full sense of what he has for us.
But the resurrection message that I probably wanted to hear my entire life was, that you have the power to do every single thing you think I should let you do. That I want to overcome every single thing that you worry about. That I want to overcome your background and your history and the things that have been done to you and the things that you have done to yourself. And in that process you're going to see a bigger vision of who I am.
That's the message he has for us because everyone of us comes to Jesus in a different place. But it is our for us. It's to grow and to expand in resurrection power. Friends that's what it looks like to have Easter all year long.
Not to have a thousand Reese's peanut butter eggs, but for Easter to last all year long. It's by responding and by going and seeking a deeper encounter every single day. And I promise you this, that no matter where you are, you might be alright with this whole existence of Jesus thing, you might not be necessarily down with the idea of church that much, or down with him being Lord over your life. But I promise you, if you begin responding, if you begin going, you're going to be understanding who he is.
And you're going to find the things you've been looking for. Or you're going to be like me, you didn't think you needed anything at all. You're going to find the stuff that was so deep down inside. You weren't even aware that it was there.
It was impossible for us to encounter the risen world that was responding.