St. Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church – Watertown WI
Pastor Mark Gartner
Sermon For Easter Sunday -- March 31st, 2002
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Psalm 16:8-11 8 I have set the LORD always before me. |
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Because he is at my right
hand, |
Dear Christian Friends,
What makes you feel secure about your future? Is it your investment portfolio or your 401(k) plan? Maybe not after the free fall on Wall Street this past year. I recently read somewhere that after the great crash of the stock market in 1929, it took over 15 years for the value of stocks to get back to where they were before the crash. Does your healthy diet, your faithful exercise regimen make you feel secure? Then perhaps we should remember people like Jim Fixx, the famous runner and author of The Book of Running, who died of a heart attack at age 45, or Olympic record holder Florence Griffith Joyner, who died of a seizure at age 38. Does your loving family, whom you trust will take care of you in your golden years, put your heart at ease? But what if tragedy strikes, as it did for the man who watched his wife and children drown in their car, which had plunged into a lake? Maybe exciting advances in medical science give you hope. But scientists are still struggling to find that elusive cure for death, aren’t they? It is difficult-no, it is impossible-to find the kind of settled security that we all long to have in this world. And the Lord has good reason for making sure that it is so
Now that we have spent a little time ripping the flimsy rug of worldly security out from underneath your feet, God's Word replaces it with a 10-foot thick, solid granite foundation, which will unfailingly support us not just up to the moment of death but forever afterwards. It is a security based upon Jesus' resurrection from the dead. Our theme is based on that security
Theme: Our Joyful Security This Easter Day
1. Secure that God is with us
Although David wrote the words of Psalm 16, the apostle Peter revealed in his Pentecost Day sermon that David was really speaking for and about Jesus when he said, "I have set the LORD always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken." The truth that God is always with us, that he is present in every place at all times, is familiar to us all. Even a large number of non-Christians believe that God, whoever he is, is present all the time.
Unfortunately, we let that truth become a sort of religious theory we agree to, but in practice we tend to forget it. This is why we fall apart, come unglued, and quiver like gelatin when life doesn't go our way. This is why medical tests, unemployment, and the threat of crime fill us with fear. It's not as though God has abandoned us. Our worry and anxiety are self-inflicted wounds. In our weak faith we act as though we don't even have a God, much less one who is with us at all times. The fault is all our own.
For Jesus this truth was never merely a theory. God's constant presence was what enabled Jesus to sacrifice himself for our salvation. Jesus suffered in spite of all the opportunities he had to avoid the suffering. Jesus set the Lord always before him. He was always, always conscious of the fact that his heavenly Father was at his right hand. Remember how the author of Hebrews described it? "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2). No one had to tell Jesus to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane when the dread of the sufferings ahead of him weighed on his heart. He always set the Lord before him. Jesus was assured that the Father was at his right hand, and he was not shaken from his mission to sacrifice himself for our sins.
That Jesus not only died but is alive today only increases our security that God is with us. Paul tells us that Jesus was raised to life for our justification. Jesus' resurrection from the dead is like a great big banner shouting that we are no longer guilty of our sins because Jesus' payment on the cross was acceptable and successful. Do you know what that means for us? It means in part that when we set the Lord before our eyes, we aren't looking at an angry and offended giant that is getting ready to squish us. The God who is with us is the one who so loves us that he gave everything to save us from our sins and he isn't going to let our present troubles separate us from him. It also means that when we fix our eyes on Jesus, we aren't just bringing up memories of another dead hero from the past. He is the living Savior who is genuinely present with supernatural, divine power when he promises to be with us always --even to the end of the age.
2. Secure that God will raise us
So much for our security during this life. Now we see that our joyful
security this Easter Day stretches on to eternity, because we can be secure
that God will raise us. "Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue
rejoices; my body also win rest secure, because you will not abandon me to the
grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay."
Why could Jesus have such joy, even in the face of death? Why did he have a
sense of security even about the fate of his flesh-and-blood body? Because
Jesus knew that the Father would not leave his body in the grave to rot. At
least three times before his crucifixion, he told his disciples that he would
rise again on the third day. His enemies even understood that Jesus predicted
his, body would come alive again, which is why they had the tomb sealed and
guarded with soldiers. That was Peter's message when he preached about Jesus'
resurrection to the crowds on Pentecost Day. "David died and was
buried, and his tomb is here to this day. But he was a prophet and knew that
God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his
throne. Seeing what was ahead, he spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that
he was not abandoned to the grave, nor did his body see decay. God has raised
this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact" (Acts 2:29-32).
This is what Easter is all about. This is what we have come to celebrate this morning. The immortality of Jesus is not merely the immortality that movie-star wanna-bes hope to achieve: to live on in people's memories forever. History books include the names of men, like Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, who have had some of the greatest impact upon our society today. I suppose we can say those men live on through their life-changing ideas and through the influence they have had on the way that people think and act.
But that is not what we mean when we say that Jesus lives. Jesus may rule the world, but he doesn't rule it from the grave. Jesus does more than change people's lives. Jesus is alive. Jesus' real human body did not stay in the grave. Jesus' real human body is full of life once again, no less than yours or mine-in fact, infinitely more than yours or mine.
Because Jesus is alive, we are secure in our faith that God will raise us too. We can make the words of the psalm our very own confession: "You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see decay." Now we all have been to enough funerals to know that this does not mean that Christians will never die. In fact, on those occasions when we make our way to a cemetery, we notice that it may seem like an abandoned and forsaken place. Unless it's Memorial Day weekend, cemeteries can be rather vacant of any living bodies, except for the occasional groundskeeper or burial service. Row after row of silent stones mark the places where bodies seem to have been abandoned to the grave, where saints of the past have surrendered to the forces of decomposition and decay.
But Jesus promises us, "Because I live, you also will live"
(John 14:19). When God made man, he created him from the dust of the
ground. Even if our bodies have decayed to the point that they are nothing more
than piles of dust, even if wild animals have consumed our bodies and dragged
their parts in several directions, even if our ashes have been scattered to the
winds or the seas, these present no challenge to the one who made us and has
risen from death to life himself. In whatever form he finds them, "By
the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, [he] will
transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body'
(Philippians 3:21).
3. Secure that God will bless us
What lies beyond that promise? The psalmist gives us a little teasing taste
in our closing verse. He reassures that God will bless us. "You have
made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand"
The path of life isn’t some road we travel by our own power to get to heaven, as though Jesus came to show us all the turns we must take but then left us to make the journey alone. The path of life is all Jesus' saving work, which has been set before us this morning. The path of life is Jesus' death for our sins and his resurrection, which promise us life. Jesus does not merely show us the way. He tells us that he is "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6). He is a miraculous path, or way, and takes us up in his own arms and transports us to our heavenly destination himself. This is why we can be secure in our faith that God will bless us.
In heaven, just like Jesus, we will find joy in God's presence and eternal pleasures at his right hand. Does that description of heaven sound a little vague to you and me? If the psalmist seems a little short on the details, let's at least appreciate the blessedness of the place he has made clear. Look at the quality of those blessings. Our direct communion with God and our immediate experience of his love will at one and the same time lift our hearts and delight our senses.
Take note of the quantity of those blessings. While we may sometimes find earthly life tolerable, wouldn't you agree that joy tends to be in short supply and that pleasure is a rare diversion? But in the psalm David promises that we will be filled with joy and pleasures. Those blessings aren’t just an occasional experience of our heavenly existence. They are characteristics of it.
Finally, there is the duration of what God has prepared for us. He promises that these pleasures are eternal. On earth is always a bittersweet end to the times we have enjoyed. We must leave the gathering of friends, finish the game, put down the book, turn off the music. In heaven the blessings God has prepared are so secure that they will go on and on and never end.
Linus, the Peanuts cartoon character, has long been the poster boy for insecurity, with his security blanket tagging along with him wherever he goes. A blanket may seem like a silly object to find security in, being nothing more than a flimsy piece of cloth, but as we grow up, our adult sources offer little more. It's funny how God once wrapped the only true and lasting source of security in flimsy pieces of cloth, pieces of cloth that were later wrapped around nothing because they were lying in the tomb that Jesus had left. That empty tomb and that living body are our joyful security this Easter Day, for they make us secure in our faith that God is with us, that God will raise us, and that God will bless us. Amen.