“The Good News Lives!”

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

The 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians is very possibly Paul’s greatest dissertation on resurrection. In it, he addresses the reasons why we must believe, not only that Jesus has been raised from the dead, but why we, by faith in the Risen Lord, must also trust that we, too, will know resurrected life.

Resurrection is a one-time thing that is effective forever. It is the transition from mortal death into spiritual and eternal life. Resurrection is not by anything that we have done – not in our good works, not in our love for neighbor, not in our missional outreach, not in anything other than our true and faithful love for Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. And once received, resurrection is a certainty for all time.

There is an old saying that “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep, to gain what he cannot lose.” That saying is about resurrection – that it comes to those who give up dependence on their earthly life, which they can never keep, to gain eternal life in Christ, which they will never lose. And, in honor of today also being April Fool’s Day, the “fool” is the one who thinks he can make it work the other way around – that he can keep the temporary things of earth, and has no need of the things of heaven!

Read 1 Corinthians 15:1-2

“… hold firmly to the word”, or your faith is “in vain”. Salvation, Paul is telling us, is in our claiming and keeping the gospel message close to our hearts. And when he says “hold firmly”, he is reminding us all that a half-hearted faith, that a half-lived faith, is no faith at all. And if we don’t hold firmly? All that we believe in and trust in, will bring absolutely no benefit to us – it will be worthless.

Paul wants the Church to know that faith is not one of those things that we can take for granted. When I counsel couples regarding their upcoming wedding, I nearly always tell them that marriage requires a lot of work. And while nearly all of them agree with me, I expect that very few of them have actually believed me!
But our faith walk with Jesus is, in all actuality, a relationship that is no different - at least in the effort that it requires - than the one we call marriage. They both require commitment; they demand trust; they involve surrender to a new understanding of what “life” is all about – that it is no longer about me – it’s about “you” and “us”. Ephesians 5 tells us that we must submit to Christ and his ways, and that we are to love him intently because of all that he has given and does on our behalf. (Ephesians 5:22-33) We submit to the Lord in love, giving ourselves completely to him and his word, and in return, resurrected life will be ours!

Salvation, and the subsequent eternal life that it brings, is based in our surrender, our submission, and our total love of the Lord Jesus.

Read 1 Corinthians 15:3-8

Paul tells the Corinthians that everything he has told them had come from God first – and that is a very important distinction to make. All too often, when we are asked questions by our un-churched friends, especially questions that we don’t have a good answer for, we have the tendency to “wing it”. The last thing we want to do is to seem ignorant of the faith we are sharing with them. But the truth is that we are far better off by simply admitting that we aren’t sure of the answer, but that we will do some research and will let them know. We must never start making up answers that we think will set well with others, in the hopes that they will trust us and will start believing on their own.

But think of the consequences – they will be believing in a false faith, an untruth that is based on our lie! And that is far worse than confessing that they have asked a great question, but that we don’t have the answer right now! In the long run, this new approach will have a much better chance of making new disciples for Jesus Christ, than in creating your own answer.

And then the apostle cuts right to the chase, and reiterates the number one issue in Christianity – that Jesus, the Son of God, came, and died, was buried, and rose to live forever! In the early days of the church, there was a lot of discussion over whether Jesus was God who looked like a man, or a man who acted like God, or even if he actually died on Calvary – after all, his life among us was anything BUT a routine occurrence!
In response to these errors in thought, John writes in his gospel of the divine nature of Christ, (John 1:1-14) – that he was truly both the Son of God AND the Son of Man, and later regarding the crucifixion, about the spear that pierced the Lord’s side, and how water and blood poured out of his body (John 19:32-34). And now Paul is also affirming the fact that the Lord’s life, death and entombment were real, but were all overcome through his resurrection into new life.

And further evidence of his resurrection is in the many people who saw him post-Easter. He appeared to his closest followers, as well as to hundreds of other believers who trusted in his word, and he even appeared to the scoundrel Saul of Tarsus, with the singular purpose of calling him into ministry as one of the Christ’s most powerful apostles.

Talk about a great crowd of witnesses to the truth of the Lord’s presence and life and resurrection!

Read 1 Corinthians 15:9-11

And Paul readily confesses that all he has received, and all that he has shared, and all that he may have done in the name of Jesus Christ, has little, if anything, to do with his abilities or desires – he attributes it all to God’s grace that is working in and through him for the good of those who hear and come to believe. It doesn’t matter how hard he has had to work, or how much he has had to suffer for the gospel – none of it gives him any concern. He, and we, become who and what we are, simply by the grace of Almighty God, and for his glory.

And the grace of God doesn’t stop with Paul – it abounds in and for all who seek salvation and the resurrected life by faith in Jesus. And at the heart of all that we are called to be and do, lies the fact that faith in Christ – in all that he taught about our relationship with the Father, and in all that he did that we might know the life and glory that is so prevalent in him – we, too, can be made whole and complete and righteous and forgiven in that faith.

But without Calvary, without his blood sacrifice, without his mortal death, without his resurrection, without the sending of the Holy Spirit to sustain and enable all who believe, there is no ministry, there is no heaven, there is no hope, and there is no eternal life. Some believe that the tomb and everything that came after, is nothing more than an afterthought. They believe that the blood of Calvary is the atonement, the forgiveness for our sins, and rightly so, but that nothing else is important. The truth is though, that God leaves nothing to chance, and that includes life that is neverending.

If Jesus had remained locked within that tomb of death, or even if he had just vanished from the face of earth on that Sunday morning, where would our faith be? No relocated stone, no folded linens, no appearing to so many of the faithful, no certainty that he was even alive, no proof that life beyond this life even existed - nothing would be shown to the world to demonstrate, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Jesus could not be controlled by the hatred and disbelief and sinfulness and death that this world is known for.

And without the evidence that Jesus lived on, where would our hope be? The good news of Jesus Christ would be nothing more than a vast and vain hope, and the Lord’s mission to earth would become a senseless waste.

The resurrection of Easter is God’s punctuation mark on the life and ministry that Jesus brought to this desolate plane. Mary Magdalene met the Living Christ outside the tomb, and she couldn’t hold the news back – she had to tell all the followers. John and Peter ran to the empty tomb, and discovered the truth of Jesus, and they would soon be completed witnesses to the Living Lord. Cleopas and his friend, who were fleeing for their lives on that Easter morning, met the Living Christ on the Road to Emmaus, and their lives would never the same again! The persecutor Saul, while on the road to Damascus, the next town where he would ravage the Christian population, met the Living Lord, and was not only changed in mind and heart, but received a new name for the ministry that Christ had for him.

And each one of us, by faith in the Living Jesus, and by responding to Christ’s call on our lives, and by living a life in Christian Community, and by accepting the urging and enabling of the Holy Spirit, we, too, will be a living testimony to God’s grace at work in the lowest and least of his apostles.

And we may be the only proof of the resurrection that some will ever know.
Are any of us willing to let that opportunity pass us by?