How should we live in the light of the resurrection? This is a sermon I preached at church last Sunday (16th Jan). Although I didn’t speak much directly about covid, it fits in with the general principles of how we live that we are looking at.
Although this is available on YouTube, the sermon is audio-only so you might prefer to listen using the podcast instead. All episodes of Sacred Musings are posted on both the podcast and YouTube.
At Easter time, one of the things I often wonder is why we (and, I should say, I’m very much preaching to myself here) spend so much of the year more or less ignoring the resurrection. We talk about the cross an awful lot of the time, but often we don’t talk so much about the resurrection. I was struck by this over the last few weeks: I’m so used to thinking of Paul resolving to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2) that it’s a bit of a surprise when he talks in a very up-front way about the resurrection.
For example, in Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus in Athens, he says:
‘Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone – an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.’
I was trying to think how many evangelistic talks I’ve heard which actually talk about the resurrection as proof that God will judge the world with justice through Jesus. Not many, if truth be told. I think we so often focus on the cross that we gloss over the resurrection – but, as Paul says, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The resurrection is a vindication of Christ, it is a proof that Christ was who he says he was. The resurrection is the lynchpin of the Christian faith. And it is the proof that he is alive and one day all of us are going to meet him as judge.
“Won’t you please get to the song?”
Sorry! But I just wanted to introduce why I really like this song. I’ve been thinking about it a bit over the past few days, and what Tim Hughes does in the song is combine our sins being washed away with a song focussing on Jesus’ resurrection. In other words, I think it draws together Good Friday and Easter Sunday pretty well.
The lyrics themselves are fairly straightforward, I don’t want to analyse them – but I think I have been thinking this Easter about the profound nature of the resurrection, how it changes everything: if Jesus really did rise from the dead, everything about how we live our lives changes. This life is not all there is – there is a resurrection, hardship today is bearable because of that. Our sins really have been forgiven, our faith is not futile. And the resurrection is a challenge: all of us will one day stand before the risen Lord Jesus as judge. He is the only one who is risen from the dead, no-one else has ever defeated death.
This is what I’ve been thinking about as we’ve sung the lines, “I’ll never be the same / forever I am changed” – the resurrection means that our lives are forever changed.
Alright, this has been less about the song than about a particular thought I’ve had over Easter, but still. I haven’t done one for a while so you’ve got to take what you can get…
This is part of my ‘hymnology’ blog series.
As I mentioned a while back, I was preaching a few weeks ago at Christ Church Cockfosters. We were going through a series on the Nicene Creed, and my particular line was “On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures”, i.e. Jesus’ resurrection. I didn’t really cover the ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’ bit, but I did look at 1 Corinthians 15 to try to understand why the resurrection is vital for Christians today.
The choice is yours: you can either read the PDF version here (apologies for reference to slides and asking questions; you’ll have to imagine the slides but they’re not necessary for understanding the sermon), or you can listen to the sermon in this handy player right here:
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Well, you don’t *have* to do one of those two things. I mean, you could ignore this, but give me a break – I’m trying to promote myself here 😉
A few days ago I watched Islam: The Untold Story, which was based on Tom Holland’s book In the Shadow of the Sword. I read the book recently – following the review in the Oak Hill magazine – and really enjoyed it, so I was happy to see a TV adaptation. If you haven’t seen it – or read the book – I would recommend it: it gives an insight into the earlier years of Islam, some of which are quite striking. One message that seemed to come across is that there’s no real evidence as to who wrote the Quran. There are traditions that developed subsequently, but there are none in actual written form. It’s a similar story with Mecca: no-one knows where Mohammed was from, much of what is known about the Prophet is actually later tradition.
All this put into sharp relief the Christian story. Recently I’ve been reading Tom Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, which I’ve had for a couple of years but never found the time to actually read it until now (it’s 738 pages of quite dense prose).
To my mind, the contrasts are stark. Tom Holland hints at this in his book, but in the Bible the history is an integral part of the book: it namechecks contemporary kings, lands, peoples, towns: in short, you can quite easily test it against other forms of history. One thing which struck me about visiting the British Museum earlier this year was how much of the Old Testament is actually confirmed by archaeological evidence.
But the New Testament is perhaps even more conclusive: what Tom Wright does in The Resurrection is construct a thorough and – to my mind – sound argument for the historical veracity of the resurrection. He examines the context of thought about the resurrection in the ancient Greek world, as well as the spectrum of thought in second-temple Judaism; he examines the epistles, the gospel narratives, the resurrection narratives – in short, it seemed to me he left no stone unturned.
Essentially he argues that no earthly event could have caused what we have in the New Testament to come about, it could only have been the resurrection as it is described. (That does absolutely no justice at all to his argument; someone has put up a summarised version of the book here which might help).
I don’t want to dwell too much on the book, but it did make me consider the contrast between Christianity and Islam from a historical perspective: it seems that there are sound historical reasons for believing in the Bible. With Islam, it seems the picture is a bit more murky.