What Are We Going To Do With The Empty Tomb?

Well, good morning to all, and a special blessing to the choir. I was truly inspired and blessed, and I want to bless you all for your time and sacrifice and putting in the effort and blessing us this way.

And what really puts life behind that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, all your work—how many hours did you put in there, just roughly? Think of that. All that would be in vain. The Bible says, "If Christ was not risen." My preaching this morning would be vain, and your faith would be vain.

You know, if we start thinking in those terms, almost everything we do would be vain. The gathering of the body this morning here would be vain.

For a message this morning, I know that it's going to be overlapping a good bit with the devotional. I want to thank you, Brandon, and overlapping with some of the thoughts and the songs that we've already heard. It's Easter day, Easter morning, and I'm going back a little bit to the story that Brother Brandon read, and I will not go to these scriptures for the sake of time.

But in four of the Gospels, if I have this right, there were the little different takes of this coming to the empty tomb early in the morning. It was these women, Mary and Mary Magdalene, I believe. They came there, and they found the same thing. And maybe in one of the Gospels, the disciples were there as well. They found the same thing. There's a thread there that is in all four Gospels. The tomb was empty. That was the fact.

No one there could deny it. It's empty. But the question that was in the minds of these women and the disciples and everyone involved was, "Why is it empty? How did it get empty?" And if you remember, there's a clear message, "Messengers from God," in every one of the Gospels, if I have it right, that says in one of the Gospels, I believe it says, there were two men that were sitting in there that were clothed in white garments, maybe. And in one of the Gospels, there was one figure there. In another Gospel, I believe it says, there was an angel from the Lord there. But in all four, there's something truth there that there was a heavenly messenger sent there by God from heaven with a message.

And the message was very clear. The message was the same. It was not confusing. And the message was that the tomb is empty because He has risen. It wasn't, "The tomb is empty because they stole Him away," or because of 100 other reasons why the tomb is empty. So the clear voice from God was the very purpose, the very reason behind the empty tomb is because the one that was put there is risen.

And that question was then to the women, and it was to the disciples, and it was to Jerusalem and all the Jews. What are we going to do with the empty tomb? And my question, the title of the message this morning is a question for us today. What are we going to do with the empty tomb? We have choices to make. We can say we can explain it away and excuse it away. But I want us to take the challenge this morning. The tomb is empty, but why? That's a question we have to face. Those folks back there were almost forced, could we say, to reckon with the empty tomb.

In some ways, we can ignore it today, but the reality still is, what are we going to do? I want to think of the principle of life and death a little bit here.

And that was brought out. I believe Brandon brought it out, and others maybe brought it out. But the Bible says, "Except a corn of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abide alone." I had firsthand experience with that. It was either two or three years ago this spring. It was when the Canadian fires were burning. Was that two years ago or three years ago this spring?

We had the smoke coming into this valley day after day, and if you remember, the weather was sort of cool, and the rains just stopped. I mean, it didn't rain for weeks, and it was in that time that I planted a big field of corn. I mean, expensive seeds went into the ground, and the ground was dry, and I just had the faith that this corn is going to grow like every other year.

Well, for three weeks, I was checking the soil on the seed, and the seed was there just as it was when I took it out of the bag. For three weeks, I could. The Bible says that it will abide alone. And when I went into that big field and all those seeds were in the ground just as they were put there three weeks ago, it even made me feel alone. You get it? Now, science says, or the farmer says, that the reason they didn't grow is because it didn't rain.

But the Bible says the real reason they didn't grow is because they didn't die. Let's hang on to that thought. There's a principle here, and I think that is a neat principle. And I'm just imagining in my mind now, when did God come up with that principle?

I don't think it was in the garden where Adam and Eve were, where everything was perfect and nothing died. I think it was somewhere after man fell into sin. And God was already proactive, and He's saying, "I'm going to put a plan in place, and I'm even going to start with nature. I'm going to put it in the seed that the man sows, that that seed has to die." And when you watch a seed in the ground that dies, it loses its identity as a seed. It doesn't even look like the seed when it's dying. It gets soft and mushy and swollen and distorted.

And when I think of that, I think of our Savior that Isaiah 53 so clearly brings out, that He was wounded, and He was beaten with His stripes. We were healed. And I believe the death in the seed is already a foreshadowing of the death and the resurrection of our Savior as a remedy for the fallen man.

And that was Old Testament thought as well as new. But the principle goes farther than that. Jesus also says, "Except we die to our own human selfishness, we cannot live." That reality is clear, and it was in the Old Testament, I believe it was David that said that God does not delight in our sacrifice and burnt offerings, but He delights in a broken and a contrite heart. When I think of a broken and a contrite heart, I think of a surrendered heart, a heart that has gone through the death process to live. So let's think of some of the I just think it's neat that we think of death. Satan's whole idea of death was to destroy.

That was in the picture of his mind. But Jesus, God, came along through Jesus Christ, and He used the very weapon against us and turned it around and produced life out of it.

I have a quote here I read through my preparation here. I thought it puts it really nice. Tom Wright, I believe, was his name. Here's what he says, "Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project, not to snatch people away from earth to heaven, but to colonize earth with the life of heaven." I love that picture. So God took something that Satan had in mind to use as destructive. God turned it around, and He says, "I'm going to use death to bring forth life." And that doesn't only mean the resurrected Christ. It also means the resurrected you and me today. And He's going to bring a taste of heaven on earth if we live out the resurrected life.

In Jesus' prayer, we pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And I'm going to say the only possible way is through the resurrection of Jesus. Well, I'm going to chop this up for the sake of time, so if things don't line up quite and there's a lot of things to read between, God bless you in that.

But one of the things we want to look at is before we can produce a life, we're going to have to reckon with our two greatest enemies. And that was already talked about this morning. Our two greatest enemies, and I'm going to say the greatest enemy, is sin. And our Brother John Martin from this congregation often reminds us that what is sin, if we translate it, it's just simply selfishness.

And every angle you come from, I think that's true. Where did it begin? What is the origin of sin? It's selfishness. How does sin work itself out? It's selfishness. What does sin look like? Selfishness. And so a verse from Romans 8:2 says, "For the law of the Spirit of the life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death." So there we have two laws that are pictured by the Apostle Paul. It's the law of sin and death. And we know the law of selfishness. We'll use that interchangeably here. The law of selfishness points in one direction. All we need to do is look around, and we see all the destruction.

We see all the chaos. Could we say every war today has its roots in sin and selfishness? Could we say every broken marriage this morning has its roots in sin and selfishness? The list could go on. It's self-destructive, isn't it, if we follow our own sinful patterns? The good news this morning, there's another law that kicks in, and I want to call that the law of the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus Christ has in it a law that if when we embrace the empty tomb and we don't hang around the empty tomb, but we do, as the voice of God said, "Go and find Him. He's going before you into Galilee." And we go after that resurrected King, and we receive His Spirit when we're baptized through repentance, and we take on His Spirit, it's going to change us.

It is just going to make a new man. It's going to bake out of us a new creation that the law of the Spirit of the life in Christ Jesus will set us free. And folks, today, I know you know this, but I'm going to tell you again that if we find freedom from sin, we have found the greatest freedom there is.

The world would want to say, "Oh, you're under bondage as a Christian." Folks, today, that is a lie.

Excuse me.

We could share testimony after testimony of people that when they came face to face with Jesus Christ and their new life began, it changed them from the bondage and the clutches of sin and addictions and bitterness and hatred and unforgiveness you make the list, folks. I have seen people that get so released from that almost immediately where we take methods, and I've been there. I've tried. I've had addictions. To mention a few, I've had addictions to tobacco at one point that I just tried so hard. Now, am I saying the use of tobacco is sin? I'm saying it's an addiction that is bigger than mankind to break.

And I tried everything pretty much to think of together with some of my friends. We put money down, and we put bets behind it that I'm going to quit. You're going to quit. We'll put $100 behind it. If you break it, you owe me. We've done things like that, folks. In the end of the week, we were failures. It wasn't until the law of the life of Jesus Christ came into my life that I could say, "You know what? I have tapped into a source of power that I've never experienced before." And I'm here to point us to the law of the life of Christ in Jesus.

Sin is the Bible describes it as a master.

And it's a really tough task, master. It takes us by control. Oh, I've had people tell me, "I can quit this sin habit whenever I want to." I said, "Just try it. Just try it."

It's addicting. Sin is addicting. Selfishness is addicting. And I'll repeat, the greatest freedom we find is when we find freedom from our greatest enemy. Every conflict I've been in life, almost every conflict, whether it's in my marriage, whether it's in the church, whether it's in the community, most of the conflicts I've been involved in, I find when I walk away, the greatest enemy in that conflict is myself. And I say, "I have regrets." I say, "Why did I say that? Why did I do that? That was not helpful."

And when we operate under our own ambition, that's going to be the case. And I invite the life of the Spirit of the new life of Christ to rule in our hearts.

Oh, that new life is so unending and so great.

Let's just boil this sin problem a little closer. Here's a few definitions from the Bible. The thought of foolishness of sin is sin. Proverbs 24:9.

Number two, whatsoever is not of faith is sin. That comes home pretty close. And we can go on with sins that seem of lesser damaging.

To him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin. I quote these definitions to help us come to the place where we say sin isn't only a big problem out there. It comes pretty close home. And that is why that when it comes so close home to myself, that is why I need to learn to take the cross of Jesus Christ as a way of life daily and deny myself every day with the instrument of death if I want to walk in the Spirit of the life of Christ Jesus. I have to reckon with the sin problem daily. I wish we could deal with it once and for all.

In this life, I find it, and maybe you find it different, but I sort of find it that it just wants to be a part of my life except I take up the weapon daily. Whatever that challenge, I'll leave that with you. The second greatest enemy to humankind I can think of is death. Just plain old death. I can hardly bear watching my turkeys die. I can hardly bear watching an animal die.

When it comes to humans, we resist death, don't we? Well, the reality is we were not created to die, but we were created to live. Therefore, we reject death as much as possible. We try to avoid it. We back away from it. In fact, when I was a little boy, probably my first memories of fear was I was dreading and fearing the day my parents would die.

I just couldn't bear that thought. I resisted that. It brought me under a certain bondage. The day finally came. I was older. I was in my late 20s. I already was married and had a family started. And when my parents passed away, the death and the loss and the pain of that death was even more brutal than I imagined it would be.

So I say that to say we can't really cushion it, can we? We can't really make it go away as much as we try. And as some of you know, here the other year, our son, Jonathan and Lydia, were expecting a child, and the X-rays or the sonogram showed that this child had a thing about it that it's not going to live. If she lives, her name was Sayla, if she would live through birth, it might only be an hour or two.

So the hour she's born, we as a family gathered there in the hospital room, and she was alive. And the medical system told us it won't be long. It just can't from their experience. Well, little Sayla stayed with us for about five days.

And about the third day, third or fourth day, Jonathan, her father, finally said, "I think we're going to give up on this death. I think she's going to stay with us. She's doing fine. She looks healthy." And there was hopes of life staying with us. On the fourth night or whatever it was, the last night, wee hours of the night, Jonathan gave me a call, and he said, "Dad."

And I knew what it meant. I said, "We'll be right there." We came to their house, and they had their little bundle who had just passed away. The most difficult thing to go through is to watch your children hand over their little bundle. As the undertaker came in, two men, 3 o'clock at night, whatever time it was, and they had this little old frumpy bag, and they stuffed the little body in there. And the parents were doing this and sort of holding on and then letting go. And finally, they had to let go.

The reality of death, we can't sugarcoat it, but we're going to have to face as it's real. It's the greatest enemy, the second to the greatest enemy to the human family, I'm going to say. But there's something we're not going to stop there. We're going to talk about what Jesus had in mind or what God had in mind to do with the sting of death. Let's now turn our Bibles, and this was already referred to. We'll go to Corinthians, the book of First Corinthians.

Just maybe read a few verses there. Before I read that, I'll just simply say while we despise and we back away and we try to avoid death, the Psalm writer says in Psalm 116:15, he says, "Precious in the sight of the Lord are the death of his saints."

Now, why something that we hate so much and that is so much an enemy to us, why can God say in his sight it's a precious thing? And I believe it's, as Brandon said, if I have this thought right, it's a vehicle from maybe one this life to the next. It's a doorway we could think of. And then Hosea, this is an Old Testament prophecy with the people there and giving a good hope to them. Hosea 13:14 says, "I will ransom them from the power of the grave. I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues." It's like God is speaking to death, and he says, "I'm going to fight against you."

What's that all about? I think that's a foreshadowing. I think it's a pointing forward. I don't know in my terminology. I just want to I just want to call this part the revised version of death. The revised version. God, the devil, had in mind to use death as destruction. Remember, Jesus said in John 10, I believe he said that the hireling has not come but to kill, steal, and to destroy.

And Jesus just goes and turns that around, and he says, "In my sight, death is a precious thing." Let's wrap our minds around that. First Corinthians 15.

First Corinthians 15 on the subject here.

Verse 15. No, I'm not. Somehow I'm not in the right order.

Verse 51. First Corinthians 15:51, "Behold, I will show you a mystery." Paul describes and talks on this subject of death. "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment and the twinkling of an eye at the last trump. For the trump shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. And we shall be changed, for this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, 'Death is swallowed up in victory.' O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law."

That's the revised version. We don't know there's something about death that we don't know about that God does.

And the story is told of a family that was riding in a car one day, and there was a bee in the car. And I don't know if you ever had that, but when I'm driving and I see I notice a bee in the car, I can hardly drive. It's so distracting. So the children were so distracted by this bee. And the father used this as an object lesson. I think that's a good lesson.

He caught the bee, and they pulled the stinger out and left the bee loose again. And he said, "This is how it is. The Bible says that somehow God in his own way has pulled out the stinger of death. The bee is still real. The bee is very intimidating as she flies around in the car.

But you know what? That bee can't hurt me anymore."

And then our scripture here says that the sting of death is sin. So if we properly apply the instrument of the cross to our life and we deal with our greatest enemy called sin, then we have conquered through the power of Jesus Christ. As we bring our sin and we confess our bitterness and our anger and our unforgiveness, and we keep bringing it to Jesus and dying to self, you know what? The stinger is pulled out of death. And we don't need to fear death. We can face it confidently along with the presence of Jesus Christ. We've been set free.

The Spirit-filled life. And we're going to close here very quickly. Romans 8:11, "But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you."

We have I think this is where a lot of Christians stop. We believe in the death of Jesus Christ, and we believe in the resurrection. But what good is it if that's all we have, and we do not allow that resurrected life to penetrate? It's like a sailboat that looks really nice. It's put out there on the ocean, and it's sitting there.

If there's no wind, if there's no spirit, if there's no drive, if there's no passion in our life, then Christ died in vain, and you remain in your sins is what the Bible says.

The newness of life. Romans 6, we could go there, but we're not. But in Romans 6, it talks there about as Christ was raised from the dead, so we, you, should also walk in the newness of life. And it's talking about making the connection there with the risen Lord. When we walk in newness of life, the resurrection life, it helps us daily to make choices and decisions that become a way of life. That is where we get our cues then. It is where we go and we hear the voice of God speaking. We apply the Holy Spirit as we ask for it. He said, "I will give it to you. I will be your guide and your direction, our direction, our choices," and so on.

Romans 8, Romans 6, Romans is very clear on this changed new life. In Romans 8, we could turn to that. Again, for the sake of time, I'll just refer to Romans chapter 8 where it talks about that Spirit that raised up Christ, the power of the Spirit that raised up Christ. And if we continue to read there on into verse 14, in verse 13 through 17, it speaks about the Spirit-controlled life and how we are used to use our instruments of that to defy sin and so on and the patterns of sin in our life. He made all the provisions and so on. I'll just close with the part in Romans where he says we become part of the family of God.

If we apply the Spirit of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in our life, he says you become the sons of God. And that is so powerful. And then he goes on to say that that Spirit of the resurrection also has the ability to cry out to God as Abba Father.

And that is a pattern that we must learn as God's people whenever we're faced with troubles, how to bring all our requests, all of our complaints, all of our problems to God as a father, as a child would say, "Oh, I just fell, and I just hurt. I got cut in my finger. Oh, Daddy or Mama, can you help me?" It's that picture.

And he goes on to say that we become not only heirs of God but joint heirs with Jesus Christ. We become part of the family. And you know what family does? Family sticks up. When family relationships are right, they stick up for each other.

We went through that when my parents passed away, 15 of us in our family. It really drew us together. We had a little family auction there, and it was family only. And we just all the workings out of the detail and evenly distributed of the few possessions my parents had was evenly distributed. It wasn't that one was more important than the other and got a little more of the inheritance, none of that. It was evenly. That's the picture that Paul brings out in Romans. Whatever belongs to God, he says, becomes part of Jesus. And he says, "You're his brothers, joint heirs together."

And I'll just maybe close with a story that I began here a number of months ago, and some of the young fellows from here said, "You didn't finish your story." We're really interested in hearing that story. I said sometime in a message, I'll bring it in. But the story goes back. When I was 17 years old, I worked at a livestock market, and my job was on the little scale shandy to when we sold calves, baby calves, my job was on the scales to push them off the scales into the auction ring. So the scales was balanced with my weight.

So here, for some reason, later in the day, somebody brought a late bull into the docks and said, "Hey, here's a bull you need to sell." The auction staff said, "Well, the manager said we're going to have to sell them now. Well, we're selling calves, and all the pens are full of calves, and the scales here were geared for calves." And he said, "Well, bring them in right now." So they brought the bull in through the calf pens, and he's jumping around in there. And my scale master told me, "Harvey, you're going to stay on the scales because we have it balanced. If we take you off, then we have to rebalance it twice to put you back on again."

And I'm like, "What? I'm going to stay on these scales with a big bull?" "Yep," he said, "you'll be fine." He didn't give it much thought. "You're just going to stand over there in the side, and you stay perfectly still.

There's no getting away. The gate to exit is here, and the entrance is here. And I'm back here in a corner with no exit and no gates and nothing to climb out of. It's just a little solid room with steel all around us."

And the bull turns around, and I'm there still as a mouse. And he looks at me, and he stares at me. And I'm there just the scale master said, "Don't move."

Do you ever try that? I must have blinked my eyeball. And all of a sudden, that bull put it fast forward right toward me.

And here's what I remember doing. I screamed, first of all. And then I jumped, and then I grabbed.

And whatever happened in that time, the bull ran smack into the wall, and I wasn't touched. So he backs up. I fall down. And the bull looks at me, and he repeats this. And we do this three times.

The ringmaster's trying to get his attention. They're hollering. They're all worked up. They thought, "I was going to die, and so did I. I should have." After the third jump and scream, they got enough of attention, distracted the bull, and got him out the exit gate.

And I was shaken. There was silence in the auction. The ringmaster, the scale master, they were hush. There was a reverence there. I should have been dead. I later went into that little room, and I'm like, "Whenever I jumped and I grabbed, what held me up? I saw nothing."

And you know what I decided? My big brother, my family member, was looking out for me that day. It wasn't my time to die, okay? That was in a physical sense. But there's a covenant that God made with his spiritual body. Now, some of us are going to die with bulls, reality.

But the covenant God made with his people in a spiritual sense that when we scream and when we jump and when we grab in a spiritual sense with all our sins and with all our problems, he said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." That's what he did for me that day physically. He still had a purpose for me in this life. And I want to leave that as an encouragement today, folks. Let's learn how to scream and to jump and to grab whenever we're faced with darkness and pain and fear. Let's learn how to do that in a spiritual sense.

His covenant says, "I will be there." God bless you. Are there any thoughts before we pray?

Let's pray. We can stand and then have a song and be dismissed and find our way to the basement. Dear God, we thank you for the power of your word. And I just pray that the power of the resurrection today would be a part of my life, first of all, and all of us here.

And Lord, help us to learn in our daily battles and struggles of life that through the resurrection, we can make bold claims. Lord, we pray you dismiss us from this service with your blessing and meet all of our needs as we gather for fellowship. I pray you would bless that. Bless the food. Thank you for it. Thank you for all the hands and the work and effort went into that. Bless those involved in that as well. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.