Happy Easter- He has Risen! - Audio
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Good morning. He is risen. Amen. I'm Tommy Lee Pastor here because we're super glad you're here with us on Easter Sunday. And as on a resurrection theme, a new life theme, this is the first week that Carrie Todd, who just led worship with us, is kind of officially here as our new worship leader. Worship leader and youth, youth, youth, your director. So thank you, Carrie. Super pumped that she's here and just the spirit she brings, and you're a student's here in good hands. I just told her about five or six minutes into her message a couple weeks to go to the high school. I was like, hire this woman. Finally, she is amazing. If you missed our Good Friday service, that's what this is. You can check it out at cuspab.org on our YouTube page. And what we did was we were talking about weight, talking about the weight of sin stones. And what we did, we had a little interactive kind of moment where what we did is we thought about sins. We thought about the things that we've done wrong. We thought about the relationships that are messed up, all that stuff, the stuff that we're afraid of, angry about. And we put those things in the cross. We did that because Jesus bore the weight of our sin. The weight of our sin is actually what killed him. We talked about how the way that you died during crucifixion is actually from suffocation. The weight of your own body. And in Jesus' case, with the darkening of the skies, the sin of the world weighed him down. And that's what killed him. And it got me thinking about stones. It got me thinking about the rocks. And in a lot of cases, stones are stuff that weigh us down. But in most of our cases, stones are what we think of as the things in our way, obstacles. And while Jesus was able, in his death, to bury the sin of the world that didn't change the fact that there still seemed to be barriers in between human beings and God, human beings, and our destiny. The biggest stone, maybe for us, certainly for the women who visited his tomb was the one that was plugging the door. And so today we're going to talk about that stone being moved. I invite you to turn if you'd like. In your Bibles, we'll also have it on the screens to Mark 16 in the Common English Bible. And I'm going to read the whole section that we're going to talk about, and then we'll zero in on a few things. But it says this, "When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices so that they could go and anoint Jesus' dead body. Very early on, the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they came to the tomb. They were saying to each other, "Who's going to roll the stone away from the entrance for us?" When they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, and it was a very large one. Going into the tomb, they saw a young man in a white robe seated on the right side, and they were startled. But he said to them, "Don't be alarmed. You're looking for Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified one. He has been raised. He's not here. Look, here's the place where they laid him. Go tell his disciples, especially Peter, that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You'll see him there just as he told you." The rock. There was a famous book. Actually, the last printing of this book was in 2006. It came out in 1930. The name of the book was "Who moved the stone?" It was by the sky of Frank Morrison. He was an ad agent, an American ad agent. His whole life, he just thought that faith and religion were stupid, Christianity especially. Like many others, he decided he was going to write about how crazy your resurrection is, how silly it is. He decided to write a book. He wrote the book "Who moved the stone?" As you may have guessed, while he was trying to figure out who moved the stone, he actually came to faith. He quit his day job and became sort of an apologist for the rest of his life. He lived until the 1950s. His book was a bestseller. One of the things that people noticed about it is that he went to these sources, he went and he looked, he researched. He found out a little bit about ancient burial practices, especially Jewish ones. He found out that in the ancient world, the stones that they put in front of the caves, especially the type of cave that Jesus was in, the grave, the tomb, they would weigh somewhere between two and four thousand pounds, one to two tons. And they were very, very difficult to move. And one of the things that got him confused, got him thinking, was he was wondering, "Okay, we've got to have some kind of explanation for this because everybody knew that the tomb was empty." It would have been very, very easy in the ancient world to disprove the fact that Jesus wasn't there,
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org