New things in our life changes a lot of things.
Anyone ever had a new baby in their life?
Do you remember the changes that it meant?
What about a new home or a new school?
Or perhaps a new boyfriend or girl friend?
New things bring changes to our lives.
And Christ’s resurrection changes things, it changes our life
It changes the way God relates to us!!!
And it changes how we view God?
Some of you know a song that goes like this:
Be careful little hands what you do.
Be careful little hands what you do….
For the Father up is looking down in love…
Be careful little hands what you do
Unfortunately many people don’t view God this way.
They live and sing the song like this is
Be careful little hands what you do.
Be careful little hands what you do….
For the Father up is looking down in love…
Be careful little hands what you do
But that is not the God who comes to us at Easter…
God came to us to shower us in love.
To understand Easter.
You need to understand Jesus’ mission.
And His is mission,
His entire reason for walking this earth,
For suffering
For hanging from the cross
And for rising again is very clearly spelt out in John 3:16-17.
I invite you to listen to his mission
16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
This message changes our life.
And it changes the life of many people.
Did anyone read the story of Anna Nobilli in the newspaper this weekend.
Anna Nobilli for 18 years was an exotic dancer,
However after visiting a religious place and hearing the message that no matter who she is God loves her,
Her life changed.
She did one more exotic dance then followed Jesus and is now a nun in an order that seeks to bring God’s love to people in many different situations.
She is dancing for the Lord.
Jesus’ resurrection not only demonstrates that he wants to love you.
It confirms that He actually loves you and that as part of Him loving you he is giving you the key to eternity.
His death and resurrection means coming your way is the gift of eternal life.
That is what Easter is all about…
God saying if you trust me, to deal with sin you will have life.
God saying to you there is not one sin that can prevent you from spending eternity with me
God wants to give you that gift
And so the question is will you accept it?
If I was to toss out a bucket full of easter eggs this morning and no one picked them up then no one would benefit from them.
To enjoy their sweetness you would need to grab them.
Likewise to enjoy God’s love we need to grab hold of it.
And there lies the problem for many people….
There is a big boulder between them and God.
They find it difficult to accept God’s gift of forgiveness and new life.
Maybe at times you do to.
Maybe you have done something in the past that you know is wrong and you are not quite sure if God really forgives you.
You don’t feel good enough.
Well that’s not a new problem.
In the Luther movie, the story of Martin Luther experienced this early in his life.
He would even go to the extent of making up sins because he was sure he had committed them
In the end his advice is to stopping dwelling so much on his sins and start dwelling more and more on God’s grace
Can I say to you if that is you?
God forgives you!!
Jesus died and rose for you.
But this is not the only boulder that gets in between us and God.
There are also other things that are boulders
Things that get in the road of us having a relationship with Jesus.
Think about what are the boulders in your life?
What are the boulders that exist between you and God…
Maybe they are past hurts….
Perhaps it is the whole question, why does God allow the supposedly innocent people to suffer.
Perhaps there is something in your life that you think or you know you may have to give up to have integrity in following God.
Maybe it could be as simple as your life at present is making it very difficult to develop a relationship with God…like you’re a mother with kids and you keep coming to church but you feel you spend more time dealing with your children than God, maybe its sport or work, perhaps you have a non believing partner or is there something else that prevents you from regularly being in touch with God.
Perhaps you believe everyone should relate to and worship God in the way you do. If that is the case can I recommend to you a book called Spiritual pathways…by Gary Thomas
It could be you believe God should be acting in a certain way, and He is not…
Throughout our lives all of us will have some sort of boulders in our life that get in the way of us relating to God.
And the truth is we need God’s help for them to be removed and dealt with.
Throughout our lives we constantly need God’s to be in constant contact with Him.
When the boulders are removed we get to experience the gift of life from Jesus.
But for the boulders to be removed it requires greater strength that what we have alone.
Now this doesn’t mean we necessarily sit back and do nothing…
There are three things that you can do so that you are more open to God helping you.
The first is Pray: In Philippians 4:6 God says to us
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
Whenever we are faced with a boulder…pray about it.
Bring it before God in prayer and then listen for his answers….
The second thing is regular bible reading and study.
One of the biggest problems is we all have our own opinions on how things should be.
Some of these are not influenced at all by God
And to understand and gain God’s perspective on life,
on how God sees life now and in the future
it is a pretty good idea to listen to him.
And listening to him involves bible reading and study.
Psalm 119:105 Your word is a lamp to my feet and light to my path.
In other words the scriptures reveal what God is on about and where we are going.
Eugene Peterson the editor of the Message Bible once said
Following Jesus doesn't get us where we want to go.
It gets us to where Jesus goes, where we meet him in Resurrection surprise: "My Lord and my God!"As we read and study the scriptures we begin to see how God sees life to be.
If you are not already part of a small group…Join one…
put a note in my pigeon hole that you want to be contacted about bible study…
The third thing we can do to be more open to God helping us is to constantly seek counsel for our situation and the boulders in your path.
Now did you notice not all the boulders that exist between us and God are necessarily sins.
But they can create problems unless they are dealt with.
In Proverbs 15 verse 22 God reminds us
22 Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed.
The reality is God works through His church.
He works through other Christians, our staff, leaders and each other.
When you see a boulder in your life between you and God seek help.
Take the initiative to talk to myself, our staff or other Christians.
Leaders there is also something we need to be aware of when it comes to boulders in the lives of people.
We have a special responsibility to help people with their boulders.
In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus says
“Let the children come to me…do not hinder them for such belongs the kingdom of God.”
And this was said the to the leaders around Jesus at the time and it is said to us.
If you are a leader in this congregation one of your callings is to allow God to use you to be part of His team in removing the unscriptural obstacles that are getting in people’s roads of having a relationship with God.
You are called to be obstacle removers not obstacle enforcers or encouragers.
Leaders look for opportunities to remove obstacles in the path of people experiencing a relationship with God.
Did you notice something in the Gospel reading this morning
when the women got to the tomb and the boulder was removed
But it wasn’t as they expected.
They were expecting a dead Jesus.
A Jesus they could preserve with their spices.
But He as not there and they were told he had risen.
Now you think they would be excited but they panicked
Listen again to what happened
Reading from Mark 16:4
4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.
6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’”
At times we love confining God to our understanding.
We expect God to be exactly where we want him.
to how we understand things…
The truth is there are many mysteries about God.
Some which we will never explain on this earth.
There are many things we can never understand.
The woman thought Jesus was going to be dead .
They wanted to preserve him in beautiful spices.
But instead he did what the prophets had said he would do.
He did what he said he would do.
Before he died Jesus mentioned on numerous occasions that he would die and then rise again three days later…
Listen to what he said in Mark 8 verse 31
31 He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.
However the women were not expecting this.
So they panicked.
And there is also a hint in the reading that the disciples had probably given up on Jesus.
In verse 7 it says that Jesus had gone on ahead of them to Galilee.
Now do you know how far Galilee was from the tomb
It wasn’t just the next suburb from where the tomb was.
It was around 109 km away…
Now that is roughly the distance between here and Mt Gambier…
And why was he going to Galilee?
Well that is where around half the disciples were from.
And following Jesus death they had returned home.
In other parts of scripture we know that some of them returned to their previous occupations as fishermen.
They had given up on Jesus.
But Jesus still goes after them
Goes after them to shower them with His love.
And when anyone deserts God.
Jesus will still comes after us.
Not to punish us but to love us…
To put his mission back in our lives….to save us.
That is part of my story…
I was baptised, went to Sunday School, confirmation then slowly drifted from the church.
I didn’t see what God could offer me.
I had given up on him.
But God through his church and family persisted…
Constantly dropping His love into my life.
Now finally the interesting thing about this morning’s reading is that the women didn’t do what they were told.
They were told to tell others that Jesus was risen but they didn’t.
But that didn’t stop Jesus.
It didn’t stop the Good News of Jesus resurrection getting out….
How do you think we know about it?
Because others did.
As we heard in Acts other people shared the message that Jesus died and rose from the dead
and as a result that everyone who believes in him has forgiveness for their sins.
Come on lets be part of His church that continues sharing this message.
Have the courage to talk to bring God’s love into your conversations.
Some of you will be eating today with people who are not too sure of this message,
or even sure what Easter is about.
Why not say today we are celebrating that God forgives us and loves us no matter who we are or what we have done…
Today we are celebrating that God forgives us and loves us no matter who we are or what we have done….
To finish off I would like to share with you a story I came across about a Muslim who became a Christian in Africa.
“Some of his friends asked him,
‘Why have you become a Christian?’
He answered, ‘Well, it’s like this. Suppose you were going down the road and suddenly the road forked in two directions,
and you didn’t know which way to go,
and there at the fork in the road were two men, one dead and one alive—which one would you ask which way to go?’“
Come follow Jesus the living God…
He is offering you life now and in eternity. AMEN
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