So back in high school, many, many moons ago, I played football. I was a football player. In fact, there's a picture of me coming up there. You can guess which one I am.
It's sort of true, though. It's sort of true. It's a little hard. Some of you are like, was this taken back in the 50s?
It feels like it was. I looked at it again. I am number 55. So one, two, three, fourth row down on almost a very right side.
Look at that mean scale I had. Look at that. It was mean, and I was angry, all this time. But when I played football, I loved playing football.
I played all four years. I played defensive linebacker and also played offensive guard. I was left guard. And you guys, you know what?
I don't want to brag. But I was pretty good. I really was. I was pretty good.
My senior year, I was invited to the North South All-Star game. We were only division three, so I know not anything huge. We were division three. But I played in North South All-Star game.
I was team captain. I led my team in defense on tackles, and actually, until I got injured, defensive touchdowns. And then offense, what I really loved, I was an offensive guard. I was in the trenches constantly.
Now, I'm bigger now than I was when I played high school football. So if you imagine me a little bit smaller, and playing offensive guard against some guys that were a lot bigger than me. And you might wondering, how in the world, Billy, how in the world did Little Billy survive playing against guys like twice his size? Well, let me tell you how I survived through prayer.
Well, I did through prayer. But really, it was because I was really good at the basics. I was really good with the basics. I was excellent with technique.
I was excellent with footwork. I was excellent with communicating. I understood the essence of the plays that were going on. Not just my part in it, but how everything worked together.
And the reason that Little Billy didn't die constantly, and I'm not kidding you. There were times I thought I was going to go. It's because I went back to the basics constantly. I would say, coach, Fred, is that something you tell your guys back to the basics, back to techniques, that type of stuff?
It's a good thing. They start veering off, or you say you could get back to basics, right? So today, we're going to get back to the basics. And today's passage, Paul, is dealing with some big issues.
One big issue in particular is about the resurrection, the bodily resurrection. Actually, Pastor Jason's going to really touch on that next week. I hope, because now I just committed him. But what Paul does, he brings the Corinthians back to the basics as he's going into some really hard stuff.
And he's doing this because he wants to refocus them. He wants to refocus their direction, going into the right direction. He wants to remind them of what they already know, and he wants to renew the faith that they say they have. So let's go ahead and jump in.
You guys got your handouts. We're going to start by just reading through the passage. It's really short. It's not 40 verses, so we should be able to get through it quick.
First Corinthians 15, 1 through 11. It's going to be up on the screen that says this. Now, I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, and which you stand, and by which you are being saved. If you hold fast to the word, I preach to you, unless you believe in vain.
For I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins and accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to see us, then to the 12th. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of them were still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God.
But by the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace toward me was not in vain on the contrary. I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preached, and so you believed.
All right, so let's go ahead and jump right in. First villain is this, first villain is this. It is the basics, the basics. First Corinthians, verse 15, verses 1 and 2 says this, now I remind you brothers of the gospel, I preached to you which you received and which you stand in by which you are being saved if you hold fast to the word I preached to you unless you believe in vain.
So Paul here is saying, hey, listen, I'm taking you back to the basics. This is the first step that I taught you, this is the key, this is the foundational step. This is what you received. And the idea here is that he's using this past tense word, you receive this, this happened, this was a gift from God that you received in the past.
Now, word received there, the Greek word is paralambano, paralambano, and it refers to an established tradition passed on personally from the original eyewitnesses of the facts involved. So what that means, what is using this word is he's saying, listen, what I told you, I got first hand, I didn't get it third hand, I didn't get it seventh hand, it wasn't passed on, I heard from the people who saw it, I talked to the people that when the good news was happening, when the people was going on, I talked to them, they told me and I'm telling you, so don't get confused, that it was passed down, it was all these different things. It came from him to you. This is the good news that Paul is taking to them personally, from the people who literally saw Jesus, what he did, who saw him raised, who saw him died, who saw him before miracles, this is wild, this is for stand-accounts self, this is amazing, I love this.
And he says it now, you presently, in which you stand. And the idea here is this is a present tense verb, he's a verb, he is saying, you guys currently say, you stand in this gospel, this is, remember the Corinthians, this was a letter to a church, a practicing church, a believer, how many together, who are saying, believe in Jesus were following Jesus, but things had gotten sort of out of whack, right? Some other things had been creeping in and distracting them from the basics, from the original stuff and the stuff that was important. They were letting things that were secondary and like intersherry come in and start to veer them to the left and to the right.
Things like, I don't know, maybe, hey, who'd you vote for in the last election? Oh, I don't know if I can go to church with you, because you didn't vote for so and so. Or hey, what kind of community bread you guys use? Oh, you don't use Twinkies?
Well, I can't go to church there either. Right, these are like secondary intersherry things that are really not that important. Are they important? Yes, there's important to them, but they are not foundational.
And so Paul is saying, I wanna take you back to the basics, to refocus on where you claim to be standing, which is the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it says, then this is where they are currently, they are being saved. Now this is also a present tense verb, they're being saved. Now, salvation, as I think most of us know, is not merely a past thing.
Though we often say something like, hey, when did you accept Jesus? When did you believe, when were you baptized? And we have to think that being saved happened in the past. But Paul is saying here and arguing that salvation is a present tense thing as well.
Were you saved in the past? When you said, I believe Jesus, I gave my life to him, yes, you were justified. It's a theological term, you were justified. You were made right before God.
But we are currently being saved according to Paul, in that we are being sanctified. We are being made into the image of Jesus. We are being molded and formed to walk, to talk, to think, to act, to live like Jesus. This is what's going on.
Now the question is how, how does this happen? Well, check out what Jesus says in his high priestly prayer in John 1717. He says, sanctify them in truth. You're what?
You're your word is truth. Your word is truth. In other words, the Holy Spirit uses the words of God in an ongoing present, saving, sanctifying work in believers. Through his word, he keeps us.
He holds us. He draws us near. He saves us by his word. And by trusting in the promises of God's word day by day, the power of sin is presently broken.
We walk in the freedom of holiness right now. This is amazing stuff. And so as begs the question, that I have to ask myself constantly too, are we daily in God's word? Are we cracking open the scriptures?
Even if it's just for a couple minutes. And I'm so stoked that the men's Bible study is starting up again. I mean, that was something that kept me accountable. I had to be in the word, like almost every day.
Now, there were definitely days when I was showing up, you know, like Tuesday morning and sitting, like I gotta finish this as I did not get everything. That's why it happens, right? But we're trying to be in the word constantly, every single day because it is by his word, the Holy Spirit is sanctifying us. Are we holding fast to what's going on?
So Paul has set this up and we need to ask a question then. What are the basics? If in football, right, for being a lineman, the basics, our good footwork, understanding leverage, you're right being aware of what's going on around you, communicating well, so what are the basics? We're gonna jump into those right now.
First one is this, that Christ died for our sins. Christ died for our sins. First Corinthians 15, three says this, for I delivered to you as a first importance what it also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. Now, I find, interesting, the Paul sort of undersells some stuff here.
Often when we say, oh, Christ died, we just like, well, someone died. I'm sorry, we sort of move on. But man, when you think about how Jesus died, I did a little research, a little reading, I tend to do that every once in a while, and I came across some scientific terms for things, I wanna share with you. Jesus, in the process of crucifixion and his death, suffered from hematidrosis, hematidrosis, I'm sorry, which is the sweating blood.
Now what happens when you sweat blood is that your skin becomes extremely tender, extremely fragile. It's just, it's like paper. This is before the flogging, with the flogging, right? What happened with pieces, leather straps, had pieces of bone and metal and jagged rocks, all the time, just to tie the end.
And this is what they would use to whip him with. So already his skin is super tender because of the sweating blood, because of hematidrosis. Next, he also suffered from hypovolemic shock. If there are any medical people in here and I'm mispronouncing this, please go easy on me.
Hypovolemic shock, which is low blood volume. Jesus lost so much blood. And when you lose that much blood, as I was reading about this, unless you receive a blood transfusion, you die. It leaves things like confusion.
These are things like weakness, right? Remember Jesus? He couldn't carry the cross-mean. Someone had to carry it for him?
Because he lost so much blood. He was so weak. There was nerve damage, the nails that pierced his hands. More than likely hit major nerves.
And it caused his arms to feel like they were literally on fire. Dislocations, muscle spasms, exhaustion, asphyxia, which is a fancy word saying he's slowly suffocated. And finally, acute heart failure, also known as cardiac rupture, in which the heart is working so hard that it literally bursts, it breaks. Paul's saying here, as he's talking through this, he makes this claim that Jesus died.
He's saying, hey, you may have heard that he just swooned. Oh, and somehow in the dampness of a cave, he came back to life. Come on, that's garbage. Jesus died.
And then it doesn't stop there. He died for what? For our sins. For our sins, it's so important.
He's not just saying that Jesus died. He's not just saying, well, Jesus died. He's saying he died for a purpose, for our sins. There is no gospel at all, unless the death of Christ can be seen to deal with sin once and for all.
Oh, death, where is your sting? Jesus took it. Jesus took the sting of death for us. What an amazing, beautiful gift.
Jesus died for our sins. Basic number two, Christ was buried. Christ was buried. We see this in 1 Corinthians 15, 4a, but we're just going to go ahead and read the whole thing.
Because he was buried. Now he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. A physical body was taken down. This wasn't some kind of spiritual death.
People physically handled the Lord's body. People physically put him on the ground. They physically prepped his body. They physically buried.
This is historical fact. If you talk to any serious scholar, this is almost universally accepted that Jesus lived, and Jesus died. If someone is telling you now that's made up, they are not serious scholar. Right here.
Now some people then they get to argue about what is miracles and that type of stuff. But you talk to any serious scholar. They will say that Jesus was a real person who lived and died. This is historical fact.
There is a few things that people turn to. They see this. Around 73 to 75 AD, there is a letter written that's called Mara Bar-Sarapians, letter to his son. It's an early non-Christian reference to the crucifixion of Jesus.
This letter includes no Christian themes, and the author is presumed to be neither Jewish nor a Christian. This is a totally separate person. Very shortly after the death of Jesus, wrote about the death of Jesus. There's also the Jewish historian Josephus, some of you may have heard have.
In the book he wrote, there are all the antiquities of the Jews. It was written about AD 93. So roughly 60 years after Jesus was crucified, he stated that Jesus was crucified by Pilate. People turn to this, the antiquities of the Jews.
As what happened is history. Also, a guy named Tacitus. He's generally considered one of the greatest Roman historians. Writing in what's called the Annals, which he wrote around 116 AD, Tacitus described the persecution of Christians by Nero and stated that Pilate ordered the execution of Jesus.
Tacitus had his hands on the history of Rome. He had access to all this type of stuff. And he writes about this. This happened, Paul is saying.
If there's any doubt in your mind, this happens. Paul here, when he says this, was simply stated in fact. That Jesus was physically buried. And then he goes on to the next point, that Christ was raised.
Christ was raised. It didn't end in burial. Every great leader ends in some type of burial. Every great leader does, but not Jesus.
Not Jesus. And with him, with his resurrection, it proved that he was more than just a good man. Was Jesus a good man? Yeah, he was like the greatest man.
Absolutely, 100%. But you know what? Good men die all the time. And they don't come back.
But Jesus did. It proves that he's more than just a good man. It proves that he was more than just a wise teacher. Was Jesus a wise teacher?
Yeah, if you don't know, the majority of Western civilization is really based upon his teaching, the kind of transformation ideas that he put forth. Guys, it's wild. We think we're like, ah, we haven't all figured out. Man, it started with him.
He was such a wise teacher. But you know what? Wise teachers die all the time. They don't come back, but Jesus did.
Jesus came back. He's more than just a wise teacher. Prove he was more than just a powerful prophet. Was Jesus a powerful prophet?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, he foretold what was coming, but he also spoke with such power and authority, unlike anyone had seen that time about scripture. But you know what? Powerful prophets died all the time and they didn't come back.
And Jesus did. Paul is saying, this is huge. Christ was raised. You guys know who Dini is?
Okay, who Dini? He's one of the greatest magicians ever, one of the brilliant men. Absolutely brilliant men. He's done things that people are still having a hard time figuring out.
I don't know if you know, but he fought tooth and nail against people that were doing sort of occultic things that were fake, fake seances and all this type of stuff. I mean, he would go in and just blow people up, baby scamming people left and right. Oh, your grandma wants to talk to you for $1,000. Oh, here you go.
And he just got in and he just blow this type of stuff up. But who Dini, before he died, told his wife, if anyone can find a way to communicate, I'll find that way and I will communicate with you. When he died on Halloween, he died on Halloween sort of a while. But his wife held a seance every year, for 10 years on Halloween, to try to give opportunity to contact her.
And you know what? After 10 years, she gave up saying 10 years is long enough to wait for any man. She actually said that. She was wild.
But here's the thing. Houdini, brilliant. He couldn't rise. He couldn't communicate.
But Jesus did. Three days. He was resurrected. Next, Christ appeared.
This should actually be like ABCD, but I didn't mess up on there. Sorry. So Christ appeared. Christ appeared.
This is found in verses five through eight. And that he appeared to see this. End of the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time.
Most of them were still alive. Some were falling asleep. Then he appeared to James. Then to all the apostles.
Last of all, as one untimely born, he appeared also to me. Why would Paul include this? Why would Paul include this? Any ideas?
Any thoughts? What? Proof. Proof.
What's that? Confirmation. Yeah. He's literally saying to people, listen.
You don't believe me? Ask somebody else. Investigate it. I'm daring you.
I'm challenging you. I've said this before. I'm literally giving you names. I'm giving you 500 plus people that you can go talk to and figure out if this is true.
Don't believe me. Ask someone else for the receipts. I don't know if you know this. This past week was Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27th.
You can still find lots of people that can attest to what they went through in the concentration camps during the time of Germany. In fact, when I was younger this was the wildest thing to me. When I was younger, when I was younger, parents went to gas station and there was this German couple that came in and their RV was broken down with my dad, I was like, yeah, just pull it in. I'll work on it.
You guys stayed here. They were super awesome. They wouldn't jack me in. They knew I lovedgooke.
I gave me buttermilk. Not the same thing by the way. Found out the hard way. I took my first big jug of it, not the same thing.
Right, but I was this little guy and they would tell me, you know, in this sort of, you know, somewhat broken English, like with the particular accent, but they were telling me about the stories of Germany and how they escaped. And you know, I'm an idiot kid, I don't even know what's going on. I just know this old people are showing me some attention. And they're like, I think about that now.
I talk to witnesses of what happened. They got out of there. Paul is saying, you can talk to these people. You can go talk to Cephas, right?
You can go talk to Peter. You can go talk to the 12. You can talk to 500. You can talk to James, who is a brother of Jesus.
James, who in the gospels, if you remember, was like, hey, Jesus, you're crazy. Come home, you need your medication, whatever, right? And now, something crazy happened that James, all of a sudden, believes his brother is God incarnate. Anyone have a sibling in here?
What would it take? What would it take? If you talk to my sister, she's like, maybe the devil incarnate. You might be, right?
But what would it take? James saw his head brother alive. It changed everything. Multiple revelations like this, especially defended by a persecuted sect, which at the time, Christianity was still a persecuted sect.
They're virtually unparalleled. You don't see this, right? And the reason is because by definition, the word resurrection meant a new body, a physical body. And Christians would not have been persecuted for claiming that they saw a mere spirit.
So the idea here, most people at that time believed in ghosts and spirits. And so if the Christians went around and were like, I just saw Jesus, he was a ghost. He would be like, yeah, that's rad, man. Sweet, let's go check him out.
You know? But you go up to me and say, hey, listen, the guy that was killed, he was alive. He had some food, he was eating it, he was making a fire. They'd be like, no, no, no, no, that doesn't happen.
And yet, this is what the Christians are claiming. They're making a claim that no one else made, that Jesus physically rose from the dead, that he ate food, that he built a fire, that you could touch the scars. So what's stopping you from believing? What's holding you back from trusting him?
Paula ends reminding us of this next villain, and what I'd like to say is that the gospel saves. The gospel saves. You see this in 1 Corinthians 15, 9, 3, 11, the gospel saves for I in the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called in apostle because I persecute the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am.
And his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them. Though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. And whether then it was I or they, so we preach.
And so you believe, I love this, because this is really interesting to me. Paul is really revealing to us, to his readers, how he feels about himself. He feels that he's pretty unworthy. This is a call back, I think, to 1 Corinthians 2, 3, which says, and I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling.
So he's already mentioned this in reminding them, right? That this is not how an apostle was supposed to be. In fact, people were doubting his apostleship because he was not acting like an apostle would be. But he's just like, I'm not worthy, guys.
I'm so unworthy. It's not a snatcher that I have but by the grace of God. Later, Paul would write for his by grace that you've been saved. Paul would consider himself the chief of sinners.
Paul's arguing here and he's saying here that if there's any good accomplishment, it's only because of God's grace in him. His good works could never outweigh his bad works. He realized that. He needed God's grace.
He needed God. He needed Jesus. He needed the gospel to change him from Saul to Paul and praise God that he did. And he ends reminding the Corinthians of this, that it's not a preacher that saved you.
It's not a Paulus. It's not Paul. It's not Cephas that saved you. It's what we preached, because we all preached the same thing.
We preached to you the gospel. We preached to you the basics that Christ died for your sins, that he was buried, that he was raised, and that he was revealed. This, not us, not the faith of your parents, not your good works, not whatever it is that we think will take us and crush us over that threshold. It is nothing but the grace of God, the gospel of Jesus Christ, because it is a gospel that saves.
So what? So what does all this mean for us? I have a couple of things. First is this.
God planned this. God planned this. You guys noticed it? A couple spots in there, it says, in accordance with the scriptures.
That means in line with what scriptures said. This is meaning it's completely lined up. The scriptures were written hundreds, and even some up to 1,000 years prior to what happened to Jesus. See, the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus were not after thoughts in God's plan of redemption.
It wasn't that. It got to a point, and God is like, oh, man, I did not see that coming. Okay, pivot, pivot. Right?
No, it's not going on. God's plan of redemption. He says, rather, those events were carefully laid out in prophecies in the Old Testament. I've got to slide up here for you to see.
These are prophecies that are found in the New Testament, which is a direct link from what the authors said. There's a lot more out there, guys. This is very short. So in terms of the suffering and death of Jesus, they quoted from Psalm 22, 1, Psalm 22, 18, Psalm 69, 4.
They also quoted from Isaiah 53, from Zechariah 11, 13, 12, 10, and 13, 7. And then for the resurrection of Jesus, they quoted from Psalm 16 and Jonah. Now, one of the things that's not in there is it's not found in New Testament, is the idea of Christ being raised on the third day. But if you look at Hosea 6, 2, you will see a reference to the Christ rising on the third day.
Guys, God planned this. It's not a surprise. There was purpose in Christ's suffering. And so I think that begs the question for us.
Can there be purpose in our suffering? As we are struggling through things. As we're facing things that seem insurmountable. As we're praying, God, take this away.
Do you think that God has purpose in that? I think He does. I know He does. And we can trust Him in that.
Speaking of our next feeling is this. We can trust this. We can trust this. The life, as I said before, the life, the death of Jesus is widely accepted historical fact.
We understand that the resurrection can maybe be the hard thing to swallow. But here, Paul is inviting people to investigate. He's saying, guys, this happened. This happened historically.
Now, first Corinthians was written around 50, somewhere between 50 and probably 53 AD. If I remember, seriously, correctly. That's just 20 years after this all went down. About 20 years ago, Joni and I were married.
We're going to celebrate our 20th anniversary coming up. But you guys, if you ask me, I remember with vivid detail, so many things about my wedding day. It was such an important day for me. I remember, I remember my best man, when he was asked for the ring pulling out this big flask and handing it.
And the pastor's like, what are you doing? And it was like this whole kerfuffle. I remember when the doors opened, I saw Joni for the first time. I remember the people that were there.
They were cheering for us. They were praying for us. I remember washing each other's feet in the ceremony. I mean, guys, this seems like it was yesterday.
And not to miss a bad saying this, but it's just a marriage. A man rose from the dead. You're talking about an important moment in your life when you saw that. Every detail.
And Paul is saying, go, talk to these people. Talk to them. I will give you the names. You can check the receipts.
Go and talk to them. You can trust in the historicity of this. And because you can trust in the historicity of this, brings us to our last one. We can have hope in this.
We can have hope in this. As I talk about this last point, I'm going to invite the worship team to go ahead and come up, grab communion, and make their way up. But guys, we can have hope in this. In verse 3, we spent some time on.
Paul reminds us that Christ died for our sins. Christ died for our sins. This brings freedom. Jesus became the substitutionary atonement, meaning that he died on the cross as a substitute in the place of us sinners.
And the reason he did that was to pay the penalty for our sins. For every lie that you and I have told. For every test you and I cheated on. For every fudge you and I made in our taxes.
Every time we knew what we were supposed to do, but we didn't do it. Jesus died for our sins to satisfy divine justice. You see, every wrong needs to be made right. Every injustice needs to be paid for.
This is the law of creation. This is why it is buried in each one of our hearts. Why when we look around and we see things that are wrong? It hurts us.
We get offended. We get upset. When we see injustice, we get mad. Tim Keller is credited as saying this.
And I think I've quoted him before. He says, but every wrong will be paid for. Either in the fires of hell or on the cross of Christ. This is why we're celebrating communion today.
Because on that cross, Jesus offers us freedom. Because on that cross, he says, I'll take what you did. I'll put it on me. I'll take the punishment.
I'll take the wrath. And you know what I will put on you, my righteousness. And when God the Father looks and sees you, he'll see me. What a beautiful gift.
The risen Jesus gives hope to all who would accept it.