Easter 2026

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. Christ is risen. Hallelujah. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah. Welcome. It's good to have you here. The celebration continues this morning and hopefully the rest of your day. I don't know how many of you are wanting to get out for that Easter brunch. But tonight at five o'clock, we have a hangout at our house. We'd love to have you celebrate Easter kind of in the afterglow. Tonight, we'd love to have you join us, bring a friend, okay? But today we're going to be talking about, of course, the resurrection. But more important, also the ultimate resurrection, the ultimate feast or celebration. Now, what's the greatest celebration you've ever had? in this life, during this time? Was it maybe your wedding day? The birth of a child? Anything else? I was in Gainesville, Florida for a back-to-back-to-back event, okay, called two basketball and one football championship, and the whole town went wild, right? Wild. I mean, it was crazy. They had to grease all of the telephone poles and light poles to make sure people weren't kind of like going to kill themselves by celebrating so much. Any of you ever had that type of a celebration? Maybe not for the Gators. Yes. When the Bucks won the Super Bowl. When the Bucks won the Super Bowl in Tampa. Anyone else? You guys back here, I know the hockey championship, right, for FGCU this year in St. Louis. Man, that was a celebration. These all are great, but they're going to pale in significance to the celebration that we're going to talk about today, God's forever feast. Now, I had heard, rumor had it, there was a preacher on Easter Sunday that got up in the pulpit, and he had a very, I would say, simple and profound message. Don't expect that from me. Here it was. He got up in the pulpit and he said, Christ is risen, hallelujah. The congregation said, He is risen indeed, hallelujah. And he said, It's true. It's all true. Amen. And sat down. Like I said, don't expect that from me. But I think there is something so profound that needs to be said in such a simple way. And maybe Yaroslav Pelikan said it well, if you kind of catch what he's saying. He said, If Christ has risen, then nothing else matters. And if Christ has not risen, then nothing else matters. Do you get it? Do you get what he's trying to say? He's basically saying, This is it. Whether Christ rose from the dead or not is the only thing that really matters, and once that is decided, everything else starts to fall into place. He's not really saying that life doesn't matter, he's just saying this is of ultimate significance. It matters so much. In fact, here's another person I think that I love this quote, and it is from Hans Schwartz, he might have said it a little more profoundly. He said, Jesus was the decisive point in history. This is the claim of Christianity, by the way, that everything up until that time and everything since that time, Jesus is the fulcrum on which everything in history turns, shifts, and changes. Jesus' person, his proclamation, and his action demanded immediate decision, and this decision implied This decision implied an immediate reward. This does not mean that the future will be insignificant. No, quite the opposite. Only because of Jesus' presence will our future make any sense. Jesus and his destiny, symbolically speaking, are the lens through which the rays of all history since creation of the world are focused and projected into the future. The future is predictable solely because it receives its future directed this from Jesus Christ. Okay? Thank God for this because right now, I don't like how history's going. There's a lot of things personally in your life maybe, as well as just community wise, nationally, internationally, we're going like, wow, where is things headed? And we can say today, it's headed in the direction that Jesus intends it to go ultimately, and it will get there. So our text today, Our text today is from Isaiah chapter 25, verses 6 to 9. On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well-refined, and He will swallow up on this mountain the covering that cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever. And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, Behold, this is our God. We have waited for him that he might save us. This is the Lord. We have waited for him. Let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation. Isaiah, like every other prophet in the Old Testament, like every book from Genesis on, is always pointing forward. It wasn't just about writing history down of what happened. It's always about what is happening, what God is doing, and where God is t...