He Has Risen

Welcome to Easter at Cross Church. We're so glad you're here. Today isn't just a tradition, and it isn't just another Sunday. Today we celebrate the moment everything changed. The stone was rolled away, death lost its grip, hope stepped out of the grave. Peter tells us, where, oh death, is your victory? Where, oh death, is your sting? But thanks be to God, he gives us the victory through Jesus Christ. The cross was not defeat, it was the doorway to triumph. The empty tomb still announces today that fear is broken, shame is silenced, and Jesus has the final word. So I hope you came ready, ready to sing, ready to celebrate, ready to declare that Jesus is alive. So, let's stand together across this room. Every story, every heart, every generation, lift your voice and praise the name. Hallelujah, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed, church. Let's sing this out together. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise the one who set me free. Death has lost its grip on me. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Jesus rose in victory. He is alive, alive in me. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise the one who set me free. Death has lost its grip on me. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Jesus rose in victory. He is alive, alive in me.

Hallelujah, hallelujah. Praise the one who set me free. Death has lost its grip on me. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Jesus rose in victory. He is alive, alive in me. Because He lives. I'm His place tomorrow. Because He lives. All fear is gone. Because I know He holds the future. And life is worth the living Because He lives. Because He lives. I'm His place tomorrow. Because He lives. All fear is gone. Because I know He holds the future. And life is worth the living Just because He lives. ♪♪ All right. Happy Easter, everybody. Welcome to the 11 a.m. service. So thrilled that you are here. If you're brand new, my name's Nick. I'm the pastor here. And thrilled that you have chosen

to spend your Easter weekend with us. I'll be in the lobby with my wife right after the service. Would love to say hey to you, get to know you a little bit. And really just so excited that you are here no matter how you got here. For all of our regular attendees, Tenders and members, glad you're here as well. And if nobody's told you so far, you look good today. You really do. You dress up nice and so honored that you're here. We're here to celebrate the greatest event that's ever taken place in the history of the world, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And I know as soon as I say that, you even hear some people be like, yes, amen. Some of you have banked your life on the fact that Jesus is alive. And there are others of you, no doubt, in a room like this who you're thinking to yourself, man, I don't know about all this. Resurrection sounds crazy. How could a dead guy get back up? Well, we're gonna talk a lot about that today. And the hope of the Christian life is this, is that God loves you. It's good news on Easter. God loves you and he loves you so much that he sent his only son, Jesus,

to come to this earth and die on the cross for you willingly. And then three days later, he would rise from the dead. So we're gonna talk about that story and the overarching resurrection story today. I think we often miss this on an Easter Sunday that I think is important for us to notice in the midst of this story about Jesus is that at this point in the story, nobody in the story is expecting a resurrection. I'm gonna say that to you again. At this point in the story, nobody is expecting a resurrection to take place. Now, expectations can get you in trouble, can they not? Some of you have experienced that in the workforce where you had expectations of a boss that they didn't meet. Or vice versa, you had that of an employee who didn't meet the criteria there. Maybe it happened within your family of a parent-child type of thing. Or it often happens in a marriage of unmet expectations or even unspoken expectations. Meredith and I got married almost 21 years ago at the ripe old age of 21 years old. All right, we knew it all. We really did. No, honestly, all we knew, we loved one another, loved Jesus, and that's about it. That's all we knew right then. And we both had some unspoken expectations

that we walked into marriage with. And the other one, we didn't really realize that about the other person. And it's stuff that caused issues in the early days of our marriage that now, 20 years later, we're laughing about. But in the moment, it seems serious, right? I'm gonna fall on the sword for y'all today for your sake, so don't judge me or Meredith. You can judge her. She's on the front row, but don't judge me, okay? When we got married, we expected our new home to kind of operate like our old home. And within that, I expected my 20-year-old wife to act like my mother. And she expected her 21-year-old husband to act like her father. Now, let me explain what that meant. One of the things that my mom did for my dad when I was growing up that I didn't know was abnormal, just was normal, is she would take his clothes out of the dryer, she would iron them at that moment, she would put them on a hanger and put them in the closet. So he could just, yes, you're laughing already. So he could just get up, go to work, put them on, not have to worry about anything. And so, I'm 21 years old, I don't know anything. And needless to say, that did not happen when we were 21, all right? Nor does it happen now, although Meredith

will willingly iron anything I ask her to do, okay? I just need to make that clear on her behalf, all right? On the flip side of that, let's judge her for a little bit. Y'all good with that? Her father was a fix-it-all kind of guy. Anybody like that in the room? Like, he, I'm not lying, he owned a hardware store and they also lived on a cattle ranch of about 200 acres. So he would work the cattle, you know, and then he'd go to the hardware store and back and forth. And so, and then there's me, okay? So like when the bathroom got out of date and her mom said, well, I think we need to renovate the bathroom. Her dad would renovate the bathroom himself. He'd do all the plumbing and whatever else there is to do, he would do it all, okay? When the lawnmower broke, he'd fix the lawnmower himself. And by the way, he was fixing everybody else's lawnmowers in town at the hardware store. And when a light went out, he'd go to Lowe's and he'd look at the big wall of lights and he'd know which one to pick. I go to Lowe's and I'm like, is there a helper here? It's all kinds of different lights within the lights and I don't know what I'm doing, okay? And so she married expecting me to be like her father. So when we, you know, we'd go buy a piece of furniture and we'd have to put it together

and I'd get angry within five minutes. Like, I don't know how to do this. I don't know how to do this. And so, you know, it's just, we both brought certain expectations into marriage. Me expecting her to be like my mother and her expecting me to be like her father. Y'all, I'm wearing white pants for Easter today. I can't fix anything. Just, it's not my deal, okay? Expectations can get you in trouble, can they not? Here's where that's different with the Easter story. There's not a person in the story we're about to read that is expecting Jesus to rise from the dead. If you got a Bible, Luke 24 is where we're gonna be today. And if you don't, don't worry, we'll throw all these verses on the screen for you. Let me set up just contextually what's going on in the story from, like a chapter earlier, Luke chapter 23. Jesus has just been crucified, he is now dead. And there's a righteous man by the name of Joseph of Arimathea who has asked the authorities, can I take care of the body of Jesus? They say, yeah, sure, take it. So he takes the body of Jesus, he wraps it in linen cloths, and the Bible says that he places the body of Jesus into a manger, excuse me, not a manger,

that's a different story altogether, that's Christmas. This is my sixth time to do this sermon, I apologize. I'm like, I may be conscious, I'm not sure. Places it in a tomb that had never been used, all right? And the Bible also tells us there's a group of women, three of them will be mentioned by name in our story, but then there's another group of women around these three who they're also at the crucifixion, they are at the tomb the night of Friday night when he's dead and placed in the tomb, and they go home to prepare spices and ointments to cover the body of Jesus to take care of the stench of death. And so you gotta remember that all of this story happens within the stench of death. Nobody is expecting Jesus to rise, and so the women do all the spices and ointments, and they prepare that, and then they prepare to go to the tomb on Sunday morning. Here's what happens, look at verse one. It says, but on the first day of the week, that's Sunday, at early dawn, they went to the tomb taking the spices that they had prepared, and they found, well, they find the stone rolled away from the tomb. Verse three, but when they went in, they did not find the what? The body of the Lord Jesus. The last thing these women, pause there, last thing these women were expecting

was anything out of the ordinary. You can imagine them carrying baskets of ointment and spices to the tomb that day, and they show up, and they're surprised. The stone has already been rolled away. They were gonna have to figure that out, but it's already rolled away, and they stoop in, and they find no body in the tomb, and they find no body in the tomb. You know what I'm saying? There's no body and no body in the tomb. Again, nobody's expecting a resurrection right now. They have come to prepare for the stench of death, and yet God has a way of working beyond our expectations. Anybody seen that before in your life? Some of you in a room like this, no doubt. You've walked into church today, and you're here for a myriad of reasons. I don't really care why you're here. I'm just glad you're here. Some of you were invited by somebody. Welcome to our church. Some of you, it's a family thing. Some of you, your mama said, you will be at 11 o'clock at cross church, and you're like, yes, ma'am. As long as you feed me after, I'm good. And so I don't care really why you're here, but no doubt there are people in this room who you've come to Easter,

and you're not really expecting anything in your life to change today. In fact, it's not even a thought. You just came in, okay, we're gonna sing some songs, and some guy's gonna get up and talk, and then we're gonna go eat. But it's often at the moment when we don't expect anything to happen that God often enters into situations like that, and he does some interesting things. Look at verse four. It says this, while these women, while they were perplexed, underline that word in your Bible about this. Behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel, and as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Can we all read that together on Easter Sunday, those seven words? One, two, three. He is not here, but has risen. It's a funny scene when you think about it. These women come prepared for one thing, and something entirely different happens. It says that they stoop to look down in the tomb, and the Bible says that they are perplexed. I had you underline that word in your Bible.

It means they are confused, or they're at a loss, is what that word means in Greek. Everybody look at me for a second. For those of us who have the Bible in hand today, or maybe you are knowledgeable about this story, we may think, okay, the women came to the tomb, and here's their response. They look in like, it's empty. He did it, he did it, he did it. He rose from the dead. Not at all. It says the woman looked in, these three women in the group of women, and here's the look, everybody look at my face. It's more like a, what? Where's Jesus? They are perplexed about what is going on in this story. Furthermore, they do not expect two men in dazzling apparel to show up. These are two angels who show up, and the Bible just indicates that they just arrive on the scene. They just appear. Anybody in the toddler stage of parenting, or maybe you've been there before, and you didn't hear your child get out of bed upstairs? You didn't hear their little feet down the hallway? Didn't hear those feet down the stairs? You didn't hear that creaky door open? You've been asking your husband to put some WD-40 on it,

but he wears white pants to Easter. You know that kind of guy? And you don't know anything other than you're dead asleep, and you feel like somebody is there, and they've come to kill you. And you open your eyes, and six inches from your face, there's two eyeballs. That's all you can see in the dark. And they say something like this. Like, I can't sleep. Or the dreaded, I just threw up in my bed. That's when I say, talk to your mother, please. I can't do a throw up. I just can't do it, right? They just appear. The Bible, Luke writes this passage in a way, and tells this story to indicate these angels just appear. It's not like the angels were in the garden hanging out, and then they saw the women, like, hey, we better go explain what's going on. Let's walk over, or fly over here. It just, they're just there. They just, like, show up on the scene. They just appear, and these women, no, they're not men. Like, there's something different about them. They know they are of the Lord, and they're freaked out. And their bodies just hit the ground. Now, I want us to look at the rollercoaster of emotions of these women. You have from Friday, a crucifixion

of the one they've left everything to follow. You have them going through Saturday and the Sabbath, where you didn't do anything, but you just stayed at home, and then Sunday, the confusion of all. And so, like, I say it this way. Here at the church, it's a normal thing for us to deal with people, and to care for people when they're dealing with really hard things. In other words, we're often having conversations with people after they received a bad diagnosis, or after a loved one has died, and we're there to kind of pick up the pieces and help them. It's, I mean, this happens every single week. I write bereavement cards, like, when people lose somebody in their family. All those that we are made aware of as a church that go through our system, I write everybody a note. So, sorry, praying for you today. It is not abnormal for me to write several of those a week. That's what's taking place within your church family, people dealing with major, major loss literally all the time. People going through rollercoasters of emotions like these women. Like, look at just the wave of emotions from these three women. They have grief at the cross, which ultimately moves to, like, confusion at the tomb of, like,

I don't have any idea what's going on here. And now there's fear of, like, they see these two freaky-looking guys in dowsing apparel, they know they're angels, and they just fall on their face, like, faces to the grass. It's just like what you and I go through. The waves of emotion, of the shock when something hits your life, and then the depths of grief, and then you're joyful as you remember a story about that person. Then you're back in depression. It's just kind of like, this is what these women are going through in this story right here. What do these two angels say to this group of women? They say these words. Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Those last seven words, greatest words that have ever been spoken in human history. Those seven words changed everything about human history. I thought it'd be an interesting little study as I was preparing for this message to think through, okay, what are other great seven-word statements in history? Like, what are things that we look back on and say, yeah, that was a big moment right there. How about this?

Anybody remember President John F. Kennedy? He said a famous statement one time, we choose to go to the moon. What's up, JFK? It's a great thing, right? We're going back to the moon right now. Did y'all hear the bathroom broke on the space shuttle? They got it fixed, but I'm out, I'm out. All right? Big moment right there. How many of you were in the movies or maybe you're watching it at home, and you saw Indiana Jones back in the day? Why did it have to be snakes? It's a great seven words right there, right? If you remember that scene, yeah, can do it. Maybe you were in the movie theater for this one, Forrest Gump, life is like a box of chocolates. Had it in, you never know what you're gonna get. That's right. I gotta be honest. All six services, pretty weak on that. Pretty weak, but that's okay. Life is like a box of chocolates. How about we bring up football because it's the Lord's game, amen? Amen. Have you ever heard of Vince Lombardi? Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. All the dudes in the room are like,

ugh, that's right, that's right. Okay. This is my favorite. January 31st, 1993, Dallas broadcaster by the name of Dale Hanson said, your Dallas Cowboys are world champions. Come on now, somebody. Anybody? You know, it's only six words. I just wanted to say it, all right? Just thought you should know on Easter, all right? Now, all those are significant things, right? Some of you remember, if you're of the age where you remember JFK as president, maybe you watched a black and white little clip of him saying, we choose to go to the moon. Or maybe you were sitting in a movie theater with your family or maybe it was an ex-girlfriend you were sitting with back in that day watching Forrest Gump or Indiana Jones. And you remember moments like this. Seven words or even six words that made a difference in your life. These seven words, all of those statements pale in comparison to he is not here but has risen. I want you to know that everything in your life can be different because of those seven words. Anybody walk in church today and you need some hope? Like you got something in your family that's beyond repair

or maybe it's in your career beyond repair and honestly, you're just at a point of despair, kind of disoriented in the middle of all of it. Those seven words can change your life. Anybody walk into church kind of with your head down of like, dude, if these people knew who I was, I would never be allowed in this place. Can the pastor of the church tell you this? Welcome to the club. None of us belong here. All here by grace. So if you're here today and you're very aware of the shame of your own sin or your need for forgiveness, those seven words can change your life today. Anybody uncertain about your eternal destiny? Like man, I don't know what would happen if I died today. I'm not even sure what happens in the afterlife. Those seven words can change everything about your life today. Keep on reading in the story. Look in the middle of verse six. This is now the angels speaking to the women again right here. They say, remember how he, this is Jesus right here. Remember how while he was still in Galilee, told you this, that the Son of Man must be delivered. The Son of Man is just a title for Jesus. So he's saying, do you remember when Jesus told you that he would be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise

and they remembered his words and returning from the tomb, they told all these things to the 11 and to all the rest. Now, quick Bible trivia, whether you've been in church or not, you may know this one. How many disciples were there? Yell it out. So now we got 11. Why is that? Got a guy named Judas. Judas betrayed Jesus. Now he's gone. He has taken his own life. So now there's only 11. Guy in the book of Acts named Matthias would take his place. Different sermon for a different time. But you see these angels saying, do you not remember what Jesus said to you? What are they referencing? They're referencing about five or six chapters before in Luke chapter 18 when Jesus is walking with his followers in Galilee. And here's what it says. Look at the screens. And taking the 12, he said to them, see, we are going up to Jerusalem. And everything that is written about the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered over to the Gentiles. He will be mocked and shamefully treated, spit upon. And after flogging him, they will kill him.

And on the third day, he will what? He will rise. Can we pause there before we go on? Why is nobody expecting a resurrection? Why is nobody getting this? Pretty clear, right? Reading it from our vantage point. Verse 34 tells us why. But they understood none of these things. And it sounds like even God got involved and maybe put a veil over their eyes. This saying was hidden from them and they did not grasp what was said. So imagine you're in Galilee. You're one of the 12 disciples. You're one of kind of the outer circle of Jesus. And he gathers everybody together and he's like, hey, Son of Man, me, we're about to go to Jerusalem and I'm gonna be killed, but I'm gonna rise again. We read that very clearly now in the moment they're going, hey, what's he talking about? Oh, what's he talking about? That they're gonna kill who? And what's gonna rise? Who's gonna rise? Just right over their head. And so now the angels are reminding these women, do you remember what Jesus had said? And it's like you see the light bulb go off in the women's head and they're going,

that's what he meant. I remember what, I didn't know. And the angels are connecting the dots to the story right here. Look at how the passage ends. Verse 10, now it was, underline these women's names. It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles. It's just another word for disciples. But these words seem to them an idle tale. Underline that in your Bible. And they did not believe them. But then there's this guy named Peter. Peter rose and ran to the tomb. Stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves and he went home marveling, underline that word, at what had happened. Have you ever read this story before or heard this story before and thought, man, who are these women? Like what a privilege that God gave them that the very first people to ever hear about the resurrection were three women and then they're kind of the group that was around them. Like who were these people? Can I just identify the three that we pointed out right there? Number one, there's a woman by the name of Mary Magdalene.

Anybody know her story? She's, she does. Mary Magdalene was delivered from demon possession. Anybody feel like you have a past? Mary Magdalene had a past. She knew what real brokenness was like and yet Jesus had changed everything about her life. How about this woman by the name of Joanna? Joanna was married to a high-ranking official for Herod Antipas, which means that Herod Antipas appointed her husband as a Roman-appointed ruler for that area of the land. So she's more like high society. People know who her family is, make sense? And then we just know about a mother named Mary, the mother of James. She's just a mother, one of the disciples. We don't know anything else about her other than what is mentioned right there. Now, do not miss this in the overall resurrection account. I want you to look at the reach of Jesus. He reached people in deep brokenness like Mary Magdalene. Can I make it personal? Anybody broken today? Some of you are like, dude, I don't need a pastor to tell me that I'm a sinner. I know that. Or I don't need a pastor to tell me that I'm broken. Like, look at us. Look at me, look at my family.

Like, look at what we're walking through. We are broken. Maybe you're more like Joanna. You left a nice home today, you woke up in a nice home, drove away from a nice home in a nice neighborhood in a nice car to church today. You have everything that the world has told you that you should have to be happy. And you have it all, and you're not happy. You need an experience like Joanna. Maybe you're like Mary, the mother of James, and you feel like, this is how I kind of feel like, I'm just a common person. Nothing like super special about me. I'm just a husband to Meredith. I'm just a dad of four kids. I'm just a pastor, just kind of common. Jesus meets common people like me and you. And so do not miss the overarching picture here. Here's what we learn. The salvation that Jesus offers, it is for all people. The gospel is for rich and poor, young and old, king and beggar, everybody in between. The gospel is for all people. Jesus reaches all people. These three women, all different backgrounds, but ultimately all have one story. Their life was changed by Jesus. Do you realize that that's the church, by the way? Like if I were to bring you, every single person up here

on stage today, and I were to put a microphone in your face and say, hey, where are you from? Where are you from all over the world in this room right here? And you say, well, tell me about the home you grew up in. Some of you would have really, really nice, you know, put together families. Some of you would have really broken families. Some of you would be kind of in the middle, a little dysfunction, but we'd come from all kinds of different backgrounds and all kinds of different works and careers. And yet, did you realize that in the church, we really are all here together because of one story. We've all been changed by Jesus. So while there's a lot that we do not have in common, we have the main thing in common. And if you're here today and that's never happened in your life, you also can be changed by Jesus, and you also are welcome into this family. known as our church. You may have wondered, well, how did the disciples, the faithful men of God, how did they respond to the news of the resurrection? The Bible tells us here that they listened to the report of the women. So you can imagine these women running in the room, they're like, you're never gonna believe, he's not there. And so the disciples are sitting there like, huh. And Luke writes that they heard the news of the resurrection

and they believed that it was an, listen to me, an idle tale, an idle tale. It's an interesting word used in the Greek language there. This Greek word is also used in like ancient medical writings in the Greek to describe people who were out of their minds. So you know what, you wanna know what this passage means? The disciples, the guys that you and I look up to heard the news of the resurrection from the women, here was their response. Man, these women are crazy. They are crazy, they are out of their minds talking about Jesus, got up. And there's one out of the 11, guy by the name of Peter who's like, I mean, I'm not content just to hear about this, but Peter leaves the home where they're at and he runs to the tomb and he looks in and he sees an empty tomb with the linen cloths laid out in the tomb. And the Bible says that he went home marveling at what happened. That word there in the original language means to be amazed or astonished. So everybody look at my face real quick, okay. So here's the women who had not heard about the resurrection yet, they show up, there's an empty tomb, and here's their face. What? Where is he?

This is Peter, he's been told about the resurrection, he's gone to see for himself, and here's Peter. He looks in and he marvels and he's like, he's alive, he did it. I mean, what a powerful picture here it is of these people. You may hear them say, well, good job, Nick, on the Easter story, props to God for putting it in the Bible. But I don't know what this has to do with my life today. Here's what I say, I think it has everything to do in the world with your life today. You see, built within this story are two choices that you have to make one or the other. Like, you cannot be in the middle. In fact, the world will try to give you a third option of, well, you can just admire Jesus. Like, well, you know, he gave to the poor and he helped people and he fed some people, and yeah, I think he's a good guy, a good prophet, maybe. Yeah, I'm in, I'm not against Jesus. Almost like a show of neutrality. Here's what I tell you, there is no neutrality option in the Bible related to Jesus. He is God or he is not God, that's the options. And these two options lead us to these two choices, and every person in this room is going to make one of these two choices, or already has made one of these two choices. First choice is you can choose to not believe. You don't have to believe.

As I said, this is my sixth time to give this message right here. All weekend long, I have looked in faces like I'm looking at right now, and there's no doubt, there's been many who have looked at me this weekend, you have heard the message of Jesus, and this is your response, that's not for me. Or, that's an idle tale, you're crazy. This church is crazy, all y'all crazy. I think it's important for you to understand that of the 10 disciples who initially did not believe, they all eventually believed. Let me say that again. Out of the 10 disciples who initially did not believe, all of them eventually believed. You say, well, what got them over the hump? Why did they believe? May have been that Jesus just walked through the wall into the room and said, here's the holes in my hand, here's the holes in my feet. Anybody wanna touch? And he did that for the disciples and many others over the next 40 days, and then they saw this guy ascend into heaven. That'll change your life right there. You see, nobody will suffer for a lie. You won't be tortured for a lie, nor will you. They give your life for a lie. You may lie for a little bit. We've all been kids before,

and we've lied to our parents about something, and we had to stack another lie to get out of that lie, then we stack another, then we forgot what we lied about in the first place, right? So you'll lie for a moment until it really starts costing you something, then you don't do that. Chuck Colson, anybody ever heard his name? Chuck Colson was famous for being in the Richard Nixon administration back in the 1960s. You'll see a picture right there. Colson was famously arrested for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal. He was like all in the mix of it. And so he goes to prison, and while in prison, somebody gives him a copy of a book called Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. He reads this book, and in a prison cell, ends up believing in Christ, and he's saved. God drastically changes his life, and everything's different from that point forward. And it goes on, once he gets out of prison, he starts a prison ministry that literally ministers to prisons and prisoners all over the country. Pretty remarkable life. He says something to this effect. He said,

he said, Watergate proved the resurrection to me. I saw 12 men who couldn't keep a lie even for a few weeks. He goes on, and he wrote this. He said, I'm here to tell you the resurrection of Jesus is true. It is a fact. But you have the choice today to don't believe that. To not believe in what the word of God has said today. Obviously, I'm gonna push you towards a second decision, and here's what that decision is. I'm gonna ask you to believe and be saved today. To believe and be saved. When the Bible talks about belief, or it talks about faith, it's not just like belief or faith in a vague God, or like a higher power, or ever heard anybody say, well, I got the man upstairs. It's not that. The Bible talks about this in two ways, that it's really like two sides of the same coin. So, like if I had a quarter up here today, and I'd show you George Washington on one side, and that big eagle thing on the backside, you know? It's one coin, but it's two different sides. It's like salvation. The Bible describes it like this. Because of that sin nature, like I got, can I give you some bad news before you dismiss on Easter? It's a little blunt.

I give free hugs after the service. I'll be right out there. So, I'll hug anybody who wants it after this, all right? You're a sinner. I'm a sinner. We're all born into sin, and so we're not inherently good, we're inherently bad. And so, what that means is this. I don't naturally gravitate towards God and the things of God, but I naturally gravitate away from God. You say, I don't know that I believe you. Anybody ever had to teach you to do the wrong thing? You're pretty good at it on your own, right? I'm pretty good at it on my own. And so, we have this sin nature, and so we just naturally kind of end up in a life like this, where we're just, everybody look up here. We're just walking in the path of life. If it feels good, I do it. If I want it, I go for it. If my heart leads me towards it, then I will embrace it. And so, I'm just living this life here, and it's a life of sin. You say, I don't know if I'm even doing that. You don't even realize it, because it's so natural for every one of us. So, you don't know that you're walking away from God. You're just living apart from God,

and you're walking in sin, doing whatever feels right in the moment, and I just want to be honest with you. Nobody else may at times be honest with you. I'm gonna be honest with you today. The end of this path is pain. The end of this path is brokenness and regret, and ultimately, it is the judgment of God in a real place called hell. And so, you're just walking the path here, and the Bible says that the first side of this coin is a word called repentance. It means this, that man, I'm walking this way, and I hear the gospel. What that means is God loves you, sent Jesus to die for you, Jesus has risen from the grave for you, will you receive him? That's what the gospel is. You hear this gospel, and you're like, oh, man, that sounds pretty good. I don't want to do this anymore. The word repentance is the word metanoia. It literally means a change of mind. I don't wanna do this anymore. Anybody there? I'm tired of this. I'm sick of this. Everything that the world has told me would fulfill me has left me empty and I'm just, I'm done with this.

And in that moment you say, I'm turning away, I'm changing my mind about the way that I'm living and I'm not just turning to from something, I'm turning to someone, that's Jesus. And here's what you're saying. I'm not good enough to save myself. I could never earn my way to heaven. I'm trusting Christ and what he's done for me on the cross and his resurrection to save me. So it's repentance and faith in Jesus. How is a person saved? Repent from a life of sin, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. That's what it is. Now, it's time for lunch. Anybody hungry? I'm hungry, I didn't eat anything all day today. Let's say we all went to the Rogers downtown area or we went to downtown Bentonville in the square and we all just had lunch together and anybody in the community, we just kind of welcomed them to the tables as well. If we started asking around, we said, hey, what does it take for a person to go to heaven? You realize that right here in Northern Arkansas you'd hear all kinds of different answers. You'd hear people say, well, there's no heaven, there's no hell. You'd hear people say, well, I think you gotta be a good person and I'm a pretty good person.

Some people you'd hear start to compare themselves, I mean, I'm not perfect, but I'm definitely not him. I mean, he's my neighbor, I know what he does at 10 o'clock at night. Other people would try to grasp for like religious things. Well, man, I was raised in church, or man, I came to Cross Church Easter 2026, April 5th, I was there, I was there. And you realize that all of those are wrong answers? They're wrong answers. A lot of church people are gonna be in hell. A lot of people who believe in God will be in hell. I'm not asking if you've been in church at any point in your life, I'm not asking if you're a good or moral person. I'm asking, have you ever heard the message of Jesus? Repented of a life of sin, put your faith in Christ. That is what saves a person. He is not here, but has risen. That can change your life even in this moment right here.