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Easter 2017 – Many Were Afraid of Jesus

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Here are my notes and the recording of my Easter sermon this year. Notes get crazy at the end, but I dump them here for your ease.

Download: Easter-20170416

Jesus Arrested by an Army

The Jewish leaders were Afraid of Jesus rising from the dead.
The city would have been crowded as ever. Passover filled the city of Jerusalem beyond capacity. People would be camping out all around the outside of the city too! It was tense! Passover was a deeply spiritual holiday AND a deeply patriotic holiday all at the same time.

The city was buzzing with fear and excitement about Passover AND about Jesus. Palm Sunday had just happened. Jesus clearing out all of the the merchants in the temple had just happened. Jerusalem was a lit powder keg and nobody knew how long the fuse would burn.

The Roman guards were sent out to arrest Jesus in the garden.

John 18:4-6 Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, “Whom do you seek?” 5 They answered him, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Jesus said to them, “I am he.” Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. 6 When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they drew back and fell to the ground.

When Jesus said “I AM HE” he was quoting God speaking to Moses at the burning bush. This was like Jesus said, “I’m Jesus of Nazareth, but there is something else you should know: I am God!”

Can you imagine dozens, maybe 100 soldiers all falling down and then scrambling to get back up? Imagine their conversation as they marched in the middle of the night to arrest Jesus.

Government Officials were Afraid

When Jesus was taken before Pilate, Pilate did the classic political move and passed the responsibility to somebody else.

Luke 23:6-12 When Pilate heard Jesus was stirring up people in Galilee, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. 7 And when he learned that he belonged to Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him over to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time. 8 When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had long desired to see him, because he had heard about him, and he was hoping to see some sign done by him. 9 So he questioned him at some length, but he made no answer. 10 The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him. 11 And Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him. Then, arraying him in splendid clothing, he sent him back to Pilate. 12 And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other.

Herod is afraid to do anything, Pilate is afraid to do anything. Pilate finally gets mad at Jesus and says

John 19:10-11 So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” 11 Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.”

Jesus says it right here. “Pilate, I have authority to judge here, and you will be judged, but the one that gave me over to you will be judged worse.

That is when Pilate really becomes afraid.

They Sealed the Tomb

*Matthew 27:62-66 * 62The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate 63 and said, “Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise.’ 64 Therefore order the tomb to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away and tell the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last fraud will be worse than the first.” 65 Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers. Go, make it as secure as you can.” 66 So they went and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard.

They probably sealed it with a rope and wax or clay. This was not a super-glue seal. This was a fragile, if you break it you’re busted seal. The seal could only be broken by the authority of the one that made the seal.

The guards took their watch seriously. If a captive was released, they would be killed. If these guys weren’t in the group that fell down when Jesus identified Himself, they surely heard about it. They were there when Jesus was crucified and the sky went dark and the earthquakes happened. These guys are not going to guard this tomb like lazy bums.

Jesus rises from the dead.

When the Sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?”2 And behold, there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3 His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. 4 And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men.

Sometime between this happening and the women arriving, the guards woke up and ran off. The angel sitting on the rock went away too. John uses a greek word for the stone being rolled away that means “to pick up and discard”

3 but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. 5 And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? 6 He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.” 8 And they remembered his words,

2 So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” 3 So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. 4 Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, 7 and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. 8 Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; 9 for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. 10 Then the disciples went back to their homes.

11 But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. 12 And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. 13 They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” 14 Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ”

The Holy Spirit – Imparted as a Whole

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I just started reading “The Holy Spirit in Action” by Sheed and some of it is already blowing my mind. Some of it is just pondering the implications of God having and being a spirit. I’ll post the quote from the book, which is kind of heady and out there, then my interpretation which might be clearer or might be even more out there.

In a spirit – God, our soul – there is no division of parts as in matter. Therefore there is no dispersion of powers, but total concentration of being and of powers in one single act of being. the body has parts, each with its own function, which only it can perform. But all the things the should does are done by the whole soul, for there is no element in the soul which is not the whole of it. It knows, loves, hates, wants, chooses, refuses to choose, decides, animates a body. And one single soul does each of these things with the whole of itself.

Two things emerge from spirit’s absence of parts – it does not occupy space; it is everlasting.

Space is emptiness. A being which has parts can spread them in it! Even the minutest material thing has parts – the top is not the bottom, one end is not the other. But this is not so of the soul, not so of God: They have no parts to spread. They are not in space.

What of permanence? A being with parts can be taken apart; therefore it can always become something else by union with parts taken from some other source. But a spirit having no parts can not be taken apart; it has no parts to be taken from it. It is the whole of itself.

 What he is saying here is that a spirit isn’t something that has distinct parts like a person. I have an arm and a nose, they are distinguishable parts that do different things. They also take up different spaces. If I reach for a hammer with my nose, it can’t do what my arm can do. If I dip my arm into a barrel of dandelions, it won’t sneeze. That part isn’t affected by pollen in the same way as my nose is.

That means that wherever the Holy Spirit is, there isn’t a part of it there that is different than another part. ALL OF GOD’S SPIRIT is there. God doesn’t put a little bit customized for Dan Sullivan into Dan Sullivan. All of God’s glorious self, is put, by the power of the Holy Spirit, into Dan Sullivan. The other wild part about this is that since the Holy Spirit can’t be cut up into parts, it can’t be combined with things and changed. Everything that exists in mass can be altered somehow like Lego blocks being switched out. The Holy Spirit isn’t and can’t. Therefore, the full and holy and complete spirit of God doesn’t get changed when He enters into someone. The person is what does the changing.

One more bit then we’ll give it a rest for the day. God’s unchanging, fully full and complete spirit is in all who believe in Him (Ephesians 1:13-14). Think about the implications of that. There is no training or urging or laboring as far as getting God to do something more because He has already filled you, Christian, with all the fullness of Himself. You have a lot more access to God than you realize, so pray today that we’d realize that!

King David on letting God be God

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2 Samuel 15:24-26

And Abiathar came up, and behold, Zadok came also with all the Levites, bearing the ark of the covenant of God. And they set down the ark of God until the people had all passed out of the city. 25 Then the king said to Zadok, “Carry the ark of God back into the city. If I find favor in the eyes of the Lord, he will bring me back and let me see both it and his dwelling place. 26 But if he says, ‘I have no pleasure in you,’ behold, here I am, let him do to me what seems good to him.”

I love it how David totally surrenders to God and allows God to be God in this conflict. He doesn’t take a side, assume anything, and say something like “God wants me to blah blah blah”

He says “This may be how God changes the kingdom, so I’ll submit to him.”

The fact is, we DON’T know what God’s will is most of the time, but we are making decisions based on what we feel urged to do. There is nothing wrong with that at all. I think sometimes we justify ourselves by claiming God’s will, but the truth is that we are guessing and trusting the Lord. I think we bring a lot more glory to God by letting Him have His will and we admit that we are trying to follow it.

Humble and Powerful Army Guy

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[1] After he had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. [2] Now a centurion had a servant who was sick and at the point of death, who was highly valued by him. [3] When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent to him elders of the Jews, asking him to come and heal his servant. [4] And when they came to Jesus, they pleaded with him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy to have you do this for him, [5] for he loves our nation, and he is the one who built us our synagogue.” [6] And Jesus went with them. When he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends, saying to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof. [7] Therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed. [8] For I too am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.” [9] When Jesus heard these things, he marveled at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” [10] And when those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the servant well.

(Luke 7:1-10 ESV)

The most subtle and passive thing stuck out to me as I read this today. Everybody said the Centurion was “worth” and “deserved” the help of Jesus. If there is anyone Jesus doesn’t show a lot of mercy too, it’s the people that think they deserve stuff. He has just spent time and after this He will spend more time explaining to the Pharisees why they really aren’t as worthy as they think they are, and that the Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t really belong to those that are self-worthy!

I think Jesus already knew what He was in for with this guy, because He goes to help him and is met by servants of the Centurion (pay attention to that! The man’s servants are doing exactly what he told them to do!) that say the Centurion isn’t worthy. The only people in this story that are not calling the Centurion worthy are those that serve under him that are under orders to do so. And what message does he have for Jesus?

“This sickness will submit to your authority, you can take care of it however you want.”

Not only is the sickness under the authority of Jesus, but by asking for Jesus’ help, the Centurion is also submitting to Jesus’ authority.

When you go to the doctor and tell him your problems and ask for his help, you are submitting to his authority.

When you show up at the cell phone store and ask him to switch over your phone, completely unlocking your smartphone with your privacy code and unlocking your account with your social security number, you are submitting to that 20-year old’s authority.

The Centurion here knew power and he knew authority. He knew how it worked, and the consequences of rebellion. His response to that knowledge was “Go ask Jesus for help here, but let Him help however He judges best.”

Jesus helped, and called the humblest Centurion in Israel the greatest man of faith He had seen.

Faith and Authority from Keith Hueftle's book on Grace

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From The Trouble With Grace by Keith Hueftle

Under orders, and with confidence in the person’s authority giving the orders, you might expect to do such a bizarre, inane thing. But this is not a call to presumption. Jesus is not asking to work up a so-called “faith” – self-generated – in order to make some unlikely, self assigned miracle happen. Faith, rather, as He is talking about it, is confidence in The One Giving The Orders, and confidence in The Order Given. Not faith in “faith.” Not faith in your own untapped potential.

It has to do with totally trusting The Person giving you orders.

p. 114, You can buy the book on Kindle here.

WCAGLS Session 12: Henry Cloud: The 3Ps of Leader Burnout

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Session 12: Henry Cloud

They bring Henry Cloud in at the end to help you deal with everything you’ve learned.

How in the world do you survive when you live halfway between (you wish halfway) where you are and where you want to be?

Leaders take ownership of things. They take responsibility for things.

Sometimes stuff is hard, like firing your son because he was a jerk, and realizing your are is dad and you raised him to be a jerk.

It’s really hard to be in charge of yourself.

The CEOs that spiral out and fail are totally different than the guys that last and survive.

They hired a bunch of guys that passed the aptitude test and they hired a bunch of guys that flunked.

53% difference in sales. The guys that flunked out blew the smart guys out of the water.

The guys that spiraled downward in their thoughts were the ones that flunked the test. It wasn’t an ability test, it was an optimism test.

The number 1 factor of CEOs succeeding and not spiralling out, based on data, is if they believe it can really happen. If they can believe that they can succeed through difficulty.

At some point the circumstances around them will be out of control. “Learned helplessness”

40% are feeling stress from things they can’t control, elders, board, market conditions, a bunch of other people are feeling stress from their co-workers, the people around them.

He got kind of weird on his statistics there. I think because he didn’t have his infographic up to go off of.

When you are out of control, your brain begins to change. Your brain begins to process things around you differently than when it is not under stress.

We believe in cause and effect relationships in everything. When 2+2 doesn’t equal 4, we being interpret things differently.

P P P

You begin interpreting things Personally
– I’m not good enough
– I didn’t talk to the right donors
– I’m not the right guy

Kids do it and realize they can’t please their parents. They think it’s themselves.

Then you go Pervasive
– all of my clients hate me
– everybody thinks I’m a fool
– I’m not good at any of that stuff anywhere

As this stuff continues, it becomes Permanent
– It’ll always be like this
– I’ll never be able to do this
– This is hopeless

“Science and the Bible always agree and that’s called reality. And if they don’t you have wacky scientists or wacky Christians and there are plenty of both!”

The employees in the investment industry were all entering into “Learned Helplessnesss” They couldn’t wake up in the morning. They woke up every night in the middle of the night.
They couldn’t think through their accounts.
They couldn’t even pick up the phone and make a call.

Henry told them to log their negative thoughts.
99% of what they thought was going to happen, or what was going to be said, wasn’t said

Whenever you have a thought, dispute that sucker as soon as it comes into your head.

Thought says you are going to fail, dispute it, Bible says I am God’s workmanship created to do this work.

“If you’re a person of faith, put bible verses in there. If you aren’t a person of faith, don’t worry, God put you in this position for a purpose too!”

Suddenly you’ll see:

It’s not Personal

It’s not Pervasive

It’s not Permanent

“Your life is not a movie, it is a scene.”

Man that is good advice for guys at the mission. It is just a scene of the movie.

Log and dispute those negative thoughts together on your team.

Look at what you can control and what you can’t control.

When the investment people saw stuff they COULD control, they went after it!

Doing the things you can control change a lot. Airline stewardesses were stressed about union stuff. He told them they could smile. They took control of taking care of their passengers.

Your brain will turn into a sesspool of stress and circumstances if you let it.

Your brain runs on Oxygen and glucose and relationships.

You need people to connect. The opposite of doing bad is love.

We became ashamed in the Bible they tried to do good but they also got away from God. When you are in relationship, you forget about the judgment and you start solving problems.

When they subjected monkeys to stress and the monkey’s buddy is in the cage, the monkey’s stress level, physiologically, in their bloodstream, dropped by 50%.

Henry took investment brokers through the 3Ps at the start of the recession and people got their spouses back! Kids got their dads back!

Find a way thinking. That is what was different in CEOs that escaped being eaten by the downward spiral.

seriously.

my brain has been stuffed to the max.

My Take on Christian-Speak

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It seems like a lot of people are talking about the silly way Christians talk lately. Some of it is from some recent videos on YouTube, some of it is in trying to talk about being Missional at some recent conferences like Verge and Exponential.

The thing is, we invent new definitions for things when we are trying to talk about something and we want to differentiate it from what we think people would normally think we mean when we say something.

For instance, when I was a kid there were two kinds of cars in my life, Hot Wheels cars and the cars that human beings fit in. A Hot Wheels car was called a car, and what my mom drove was called a “car car.”

It’s the same way with things that we talk about in the church. People don’t typically get together and hang out and talk about the Bible, so when we get together with the intent to talk about the Bible, we call it a Bible Study. I’m not going into the big list here, but instead I want to turn on your radar to the funny words you might use to describe things, and why.

Why do we say weird things like, “We’re building relationships with our unchurched friends?” Do we have to justify having a friend that doesn’t go to church on Sunday by making it a pragmatic mission trip every time we are around them?

I will never forget the time I mentioned a small group to a co-worker and he asked me, “A small group of what?” And what does it say about my perception that every single chair in my house being filled = small?

No criticism or cynicism here, just thinking about the words we use and the bigger pictures and paradigms behind those words. My use of the words “car car” showed that I felt like my mom’s car was more real than the cars in my pocket. What words are we using that reveal a greater reality behind the scenes?

If you have already seen this video, after you watch it once, turn on the automatic subtitles for an entirely new experience. You’re welcome.