The Resurrection

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. It's great to have you here. Happy Easter. Welcome to Thrive, and today we celebrate as we now look at Matthew chapter 28 and the resurrection account in this one gospel. You can follow along, by the way, through the You version of the Bible app. There are notes for this message, and you can kind of get it through the method you find out on the screen right now. But let's read now Matthew chapter 28, starting at verse 1. Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb, 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. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. And for fear of him, the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who is crucified. He is not here, for he has risen as he said. Come see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, see, I have told you. So they departed quickly from the tomb and with fear and great joy and ran to his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said greetings, and they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, do not be afraid, go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me. While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, tell people his disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep. And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble. So they took the money and did as they were directed, and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. Resurrection, really? I mean, do you really believe this even happened? You know, our culture is skeptical about everything. You got to prove it. So skeptical, even if you are not skeptical yourself of miracles or the resurrection itself or what the gospel says, we have to tackle this issue, otherwise we'd be irresponsible. You might not struggle with any of this. You may have never had doubts about the veracity of the resurrection or anything else, but I dare say your relatives probably have, and if not them, your neighbors, your co-workers. So we're going to be tackling that, and it's not good enough to just say, well, the Bible says he was raised, or mom told me when I was a kid, or the preacher said. That's not going to be good enough. It just doesn't work that way. So we're going to be asking that question today, did the resurrection actually happen? But then secondly, we have to ask the question, what does it mean for us? Because it's not good enough just to look at the historical evidence for a resurrection. You can believe that and still have no impact. Recently, by the way, I just read again that today or yesterday, the Mars probe landing, this man-made vehicle that's on the face of Mars, the helicopter just launched today and is going to be flying around a little on Mars in that thin atmosphere and land again. It's pretty cool stuff, right? Historical facts. But tell me, the fact that we have actually had these automated machines from Earth reach Mars, has that really changed your life in any way? Probably not too much. Maybe for the scientists involved. They're excited and ecstatic, but for the rest of us, eh, no difference. So it's possible to even say, yeah, I guess Jesus rose from the dead in some way, metaphorically, or probably something happened. Probably most Americans still have that feel to it, even though now the percentage of those who are actually connected to Christian fellowship is reduced and reduced and reduced a little more. But it's still not making an impact in their lives. It's just another historical fact. So we've got to ask these two questions. Did it really happen? And what does it mean for us? We're going to start with the first, though. Did it really happen? Now, you know, we have a campus ministry at FGCU, and happy Easter, all students, who are probably home with their families right n...