Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / March 27, 2016 | Easter Sunday - The Death of Fear

Transcript

March 27, 2016 | Easter Sunday - The Death of Fear · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Christ the Lord is risen today.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: Did you read the bulletin about the little boy who had left Easter service and on his way home told his mother he'd learned a new song that morning?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: She asked him what it was, and he said, Christ the Lord has rhythm today.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love that story.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we've all got rhythm today because this is, man, this is the greatest day of the year.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is the day of exuberance for Christians.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: And after last night's Jayhawks loss, it takes a lot.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a lot to overcome the blues that some of us have.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take that as a hallelujah for the resurrection day.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: The day in which we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we do that.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: We celebrate that resurrection, not just because of the story, it's the story of Jesus, not just because it's the story of the church, but it's your story.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you've ever looked at the cross and looked at the tomb and said that there, that's what he did for me.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's my savior.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: I need him.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I believe in him.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Then it's then it's your story, too.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: And um and it's part of Josh Jones's story.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Josh uh is gonna share his story this morning.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: I asked uh Josh if he would share.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Josh, come on up, and um, and uh he did okay in the first service.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: So don't tell a totally different story than that, or else I'll feel really weird about it.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, man.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Appreciate it.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um I did not grow up in a place like this.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: So um I grew up according to, I would say, some Christian values or principles, but I did not grow up coming to a place like this on Sundays.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um we tried it for a hot minute.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: We tried it maybe from the time I was seven to nine or somewhere in there.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: But looking back, I I did not, I don't think we went to church because it had anything to do with a relationship with Christ.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think we went to church because it was what we thought good families were supposed to do.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we went to church and I got tucked into Sunday schools and and this and that, and frankly, I hated it.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I hated every minute of it.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I felt very out of place.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know what I was supposed to know at seven years old.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: I felt like a foreigner every time we went, and I hated it.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And we only went for a couple years, and then that kind of faded out.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't actually come to faith until I was 23, so there's a big gap in there that we don't have time to cover.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I didn't grow up in a place like this.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I come to faith when I'm 23 years old, and I vividly recall that time.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was newly married, and um I remember what the first year and a half or so looked like very clearly because I can remember, maybe some of you remember what it was like right out of the gates.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was lit up for Christ.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I can remember some of the very first things I did.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: I remember I remember running out to Lifeway, and I got a new study Bible, and I had them like gold leaf stamp my name on it, and I was like, yes.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then I went over and I got a leather case for it, and I zipped it up.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And every day I would I would unzip that thing and I would read it.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not a morning person, but every morning at like 5 30, we had just bought a brand new puppy, and I would grab this little basset hound and I would put her on a leash and we would go out walking just so I could pray.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And there we would go around our neighborhood, and I would be praying out loud in our neighborhood because I was so excited to be able to talk to God.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if anybody was out grabbing their newspaper or anything, it was probably a very weird experience for them because here comes that guy with the dog.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: But um, I was fired up.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember this lasting in my mind about 18 months.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of that time, it just started to kind of wane.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And for lack of a better term, I would say after that, I just started kind of playing church.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe some of you can relate to that.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I, you know, some people grew up playing playing house.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I played church for a long period of time after that.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what did that look like?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that that looked like I would show up on time every Sunday and I would dress the part and I would show up and serve, and so my wife and I, we would help with the little kids, and then eventually I would help with the youth.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And we were in Bible studies and we were in small groups, and um and I specifically remember listening to how people prayed.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I was real interested in that.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'd listened, especially churched up people, the ones that have been there a long time, I'd listen to how they prayed, and um and I can remember somebody eventually saying, Josh, you want to wrap us up in prayer?
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Yeah, I got this, because I've been listening to how y'all do this, so I got this.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember like dropping like a sanctified or something in there because it sounded pretty good.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and I I I felt like I had it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And all the while I was really just playing church and looking back at it, what's what's kind of funny is I think I I really thought I was impressing God for a good chunk of time, and by chunk of time, like a decade of this playing church.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then simultaneously, so Sundays I'm playing church, and when I'm around church people, I'm playing church, but then I would leave and I'm kind of trying to straddle a fence because I love this new faith thing and I loved God.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I did, um, but I also didn't want to quite divorce all of my old life.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so, for instance, if I was around a group of old buddies, they might know that something was a little different about me.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't quite as quite as active as I used to be, or whatever, but they wouldn't have ever heard me talk about Jesus because these are my old buddies and you just don't do that, right?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I wouldn't have pushed that.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Or if I went to work and talking about Christ would have cost me a potential opportunity or some reputation there, that wasn't gonna happen.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or if I was going to be around neighbors or family members where it was like an ongoing relationship and talking about my faith would have made that awkward, that certainly wasn't gonna happen.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um so loved God on Sundays, nine to noon, we he and I.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: But then after that, um I would say I lived the life of a very comfortable Christian.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: So nine to noon, he's at the top of my leaderboard.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm very, very focused on him.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: By about halftime of the Chiefs game, he's a distant second.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um by Monday morning, he's probably fourth, and by Thursday, we we might have forgot each other.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's how it was in my mind.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so um that's how it went for the better part of a decade, this kind of play in church thing.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and then about six or seven years ago, something really, really wild happened, and I I will never forget it.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: I came home from work, and and just because I make it sound like I had no faith during that time, I had some faith.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and just because I didn't walk around work talking about Jesus didn't mean I didn't care about other people.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was a guy that was far from Christ, and I knew that based on our conversations.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: He came to work one day, and he just kind of starts opening up about this thing that's going on in his life, and something had to do with his marriage, and we start kind of talking, and I got the chance to just encourage him and encourage him around my faith, let him know that my faith was the source of my encouragement, and got to kind of pour into him and speak into me, and he took that really, really well.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember going home and I was so excited to tell my wife about it.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I came home and I'm like, babe, we can hold on to dinner, you gotta hear this.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is what happened today.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this guy opened up this conversation, and this is how it went.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I was so excited about it, and I can remember, like, I get kind of jacked.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm talking about it, and my hands are all moving all over the place, and I'm like, babe, this is how it went down.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned a long time ago, when you're excited, your eyebrows do a thing, and other people's eyebrows, if they're following you, their eyebrows are supposed to do the same thing.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm talking to her, and her eyebrows are kind of like this the whole time I'm talking, and and this is going on for minutes.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, what is her deal?
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because she's not excited about this.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm telling her more, and then finally I stopped because she just kept that same look, and I'm like, babe, what is the deal?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: You don't get this.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: This was a big deal.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And she's like, No, I get that.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's really cool that you guys had that talk.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, you are really interesting.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you're kind of a chameleon.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And all the laughter stopped because I knew in one word what she meant.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it it hurt really, really bad.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: When the person who knows you better than anybody on this earth looks you in your eye and tells you, you're a chameleon, you you show up one way over here and another way over here, and you just blend into whatever surroundings you're in, and you get fired up about Jesus here, but not there.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and when she said that, I can tell you the first response I had was unbelievable defensiveness.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember my jaw clenching because I was so excited about what had happened that day.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And she just called me out, and I remember just wanting to launch into her out of defensiveness, and God in his unbelievable grace, he threw his arm around me and he's like, She's right.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Come on, let's go.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember like I just shut my mouth and I got up and I walked out of the room.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't say a word.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it was it was the pivot in my faith.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And God used my wife, who knows everything about me, to say a thing to me that no one else could say, because no one else knows all of that.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but he used her to just stab through my soul what I needed to hear.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and from that was a major, major shift.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, my wife is basically asking me, Who are you?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think I know, but you just kind of waffle.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And out of that question came some questions from him, and he started asking, Who am I to you?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I to you?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Like, not in a not in a shameful or angry or um or mean way.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you've ever felt shame or guilt, if you felt those things, I have really good news that I've learned from him.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: That that doesn't come from God.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Shame and guilt are not authored by God.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: God authors conviction.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Shame comes from an enemy.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but God authors conviction and he said, Who am I to you?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Am I the God who you come running to when you're in need and then you forget about when you're not?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um who am I?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Am I the God that is like an ATM to you when you just roll up and you you want to make a withdrawal?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Am I the God that you thought you needed for salvation, but now that you have that, somehow now it's back on you to take it from there?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Who am I to you?
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think you can win another ounce of my favor with all this thing you're doing?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or worse yet, do you think you could lose an ounce of my favor?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, who am I to you?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And man, I don't think you can have those conversations with God without it really changing your outlook.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so over the last six or seven years it has changed it radically.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And um and I've come to know that what I thought was faith um was really plain church, and it was also looking through a peephole and thinking I was seeing what God was.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he has opened up an entirely different view of him.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um I remember looking back and thinking, talking to people at work or talking to neighbors or talking to my family about God, there's too much at stake to do that.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: I know.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And God has since said, There's too much at stake.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: You were right, you just didn't understand what was at stake.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so now there's really nobody I won't talk to about my faith.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's nobody that um I won't dig into about life with because instead of it being a cost to me, it's turned into this incredible adventure with him to just dig into life with folks and and see where they are at.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and so just in closing, uh, there's been a huge shift there.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that God has shown me is that for about a decade, I was a lot more concerned about people's reaction to me than I was his love for me.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I was also far more concerned about the way people like you would receive me than I was your eternity.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I cared a lot more about that.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I cared a lot more about me than your eternity or somebody else's at work's eternity.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And um and he shifted that radically in my heart.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I I see that as an unbelievable mission and opportunity for me now.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so um he's shown me that there's really no such thing as a comfortable Christian.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um there may be comfortable Christians.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: I take that back.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's comfortable Christians, but there's not comfortable followers of Christ.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's two different things.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think on Easter we don't need to look much further than the cross to see how unbelievably uncomfortable he got for us.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we are called to be uncomfortable for him.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And um and it's been awesome the last six or seven years, not perfect, not every day is rosy, but it has been a wild adventure.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just I I just close in asking you kind of where you might be at.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're playing church, maybe you're playing safe, maybe maybe this whole thing is weird to you, and you don't even know what I'm talking about.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um but he's shown me that you will never know the fullness of Christ by playing church, or by cowering in fear, or by compartmentalizing your life, or by striving on your own, um, or by tucking Jesus in some tomb and just calling to him when you need him because he's risen and he wants to be the Lord of your life.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Josh.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: The story of his life is a great story.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: I love that story.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um listen, we make a big deal, we Christians do, of the resurrection for a variety of reasons.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: But the main one, the main reason we make such a big deal out of this morning is uh what the resurrection of Christ actually did to death and to dying.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: It sort of toppled the tyranny of death and the need to fear it.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the Bible makes a big point of that in a number of places.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you're aware of that, but one place that's often overlooked is a place I'd like to direct you to this morning.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a verse in the book of Hebrews, actually, two verses, Hebrews 2, 14 and 15.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's on the screen behind me.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: It goes like this because God's children are human beings made of flesh and blood, the Son also became flesh and blood.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, because we're humans, in order to save us, God had to come down and become human.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil who had the power of death.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, because uh the reason Jesus came was primarily to give us eternal life, to break the power of death, he had to die to enter the realm of death and fight that enemy.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Only in this way, he concludes, could he set free all those who've lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Listen, this verse is has good news and it has bad news.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the bad news is that death is a scary enemy.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fear.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's a fear that enslaves and grips the entire world.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, he says, the fear of dying.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: It grips and seizes us, and we can't get free from it.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes uh it feels like a worse enemy than others.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: For instance, Justin and Stephanie never saw death coming last week.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: They met uh in 2009 as accounting students in the School of Management at Vanderbilt University.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: They got married in 2011 and they just happened to be passing through the Brussels airport last Tuesday when death, this evil, awful, terrible thing, came to them in the form of nail, terrorist nail bombs.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And today their friends and family are in shock and mourning this beautiful, smart young couple whose lives are taken.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Death is a scary enemy of friends and family.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: And in fear, we flee death, we run away from it, but we can't escape it.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's a famous old legend said on the streets of Damascus where a businessman merchant sent uh one of his employees, a servant, down to the market, and the servant returned to him, trembling, really agitated, saying, Wow, when I was down at the market, a lot of people, and I was jostled, I was bumped, and so I turned to look at who in the crowd had done that, and I was shocked.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: I saw death there.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: Death.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then death made sort of a threatening gesture at me.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is there any way, master, I could borrow your horse?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: I want to ride far away and and and and hide from him in the town of Samara, you know, where I grew up.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the master said, sure, go ahead.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Later that same day, though, the merchant was downtown.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Then the merchant himself in the marketplace, goes the Arab legend, ran into Death and he confronted him.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Death, how come, how come, how come you you scared my servant this morning?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: How come you made that threatening gesture?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And Death said, I didn't make a threatening gesture.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I was just stunned to see your servant here in Damascus, since we have an appointment tonight in the town of Samara.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: We can run from death in fear, but we can't escape it.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that scares us about this scary enemy of death is that we don't know when it's gonna come.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we assume, all of us, that especially if we're short of the life expectancy in America, which is now 79.8, about 80 years of age, we assume we have years left to go.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if you check the obituaries in the Capitol Journal from the month of March, as I have, you'll see that, yeah, the average age of people who've died this month in Topekinshawnee County is about 80.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: But there are people listed there of every single decade.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a 17-year-old who died, a 16-year-old, a 21-year-old, a 25-year-old, a 27-year-old, several in their 30s and in their 40s and in their 50s.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: Death is a scary enemy, partly because you just don't know when it will come for us.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And the fear of this scary enemy starts when you're very young.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: I have a seven-year-old fishing buddy, and I went to visit him in his first grade classroom at school a couple of days ago, and uh it was a grandparents' day or something, and all of a sudden he looks at me and he said, Papa, I didn't go to sleep last night.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: I said, What do you mean he didn't go to sleep last night?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: He says, There was a really scary fire in a house in our neighborhood, and we were all scared that it was going to spread to other houses.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was really big.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And and I said, What happened?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, lots and lots of fire trucks came, but I went to bed and I and I couldn't sleep because I thought I thought the fire might come to our house.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And and I looked at him and I thought, you know how it is with kids.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, you don't look like you didn't sleep at all last night.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm I'm sure you got some sleep, but I got the point.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: I understood the point that the fear of death around the world, of course, comes to children, but even here in America, the fear of this scary enemy starts when we're very young.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And psychologists tell us that there's a variety of ways in which people respond to the fear of death and the fear of dying.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: One way that they often talk about is the word repression.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: They say, we repress it, we push it away, we we find ways of dealing with it instead of thinking about it or preparing for it.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Some people repress it with humor.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like comedian Woody Allen, who's famous for saying, I don't want to win immortality by my work in life, I want to win immortality by not dying.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And who also says it's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Repression, and there's a similar response, the response of distraction.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: We all know people who distract themselves from real life with alcohol or with drugs or with gambling.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's a reason why casinos don't have clocks in them, they don't want time to distract you from the distraction that you're being distracted by.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's the response, of course, of despair, depression.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you've met people as I have who can't seem to get out of bed happy in the morning or excited or be ambitious or want to have children or want to do anything creative or want to accomplish anything in life, because after all, their view is it's all going to end soon.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, life is so bad, and then comes death.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: The famous French painter Gauguin, one of his most famous paintings entitled, Where Did We Come From?
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: Where Are We Going?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: was this picture of the cycle of life, which started with this beautiful young woman on the island of Tahiti.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then traced her throughout her middle age and throughout older until finally he painted her as this old, decrepit woman close to death, with a vulture circling over her head.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And as he considered his own painting after he finished painting it, Gauguin grew so despairing, so depressed that he tried to take his own life.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_01: Repression, despair, distraction.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Materialism is one of the main ways, of course, that people respond to death.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Wise people have told us that we tend to fear death to the extent of what we have to lose by it.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: You understand?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have a lot to lose by dying and little to gain by dying, then you tend to fear dying, this terrible thing which is gonna take everything that you have.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's a story of a rich tourist visiting a believer's home in Eastern Europe.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he was astonished to see that this little home just had a simple bed and a simple table and a simple chair and a simple stack of books in it.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the and the tourist, you know, said, What's going on?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: Where's your furniture?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the believer said, Well, where's yours?
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the wealthy tourist said, What do you mean, where's mine?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I don't I don't live here, I'm just passing through.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Same here, said the believer.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Just passing through.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: But that's how we respond to this scary enemy of death.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: We respond by accumulating things or gathering things so that we can push it away.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Materialism, depression, repression, distraction in various ways.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're all running to Samara from the fear of death.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's the bad news, is that death is this scary enemy that lords it over us and keeps the world in a terror, in a kind of a bondage of fear.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the good news is that Jesus, says the verse, became one of us, intentionally became flesh and blood, and entered the realm of death so that he could battle this terrible tyrant to defeat death and set us free from the fear of death.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: This is called, it's what Christians call the gospel, this good news that by taking our death upon himself, entering death, conquering death, rising from the dead on Easter morning, Jesus defeated death and he delivers us from the necessity of fearing it.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like the story, we all know the story of David and Goliath, of how the Philistines, you know, were, were, you know, had the Israelites in bondage, and the Israelites are cowering in their tents from the Philistine giant whose name is Goliath, and then along comes David, you know, and throws a stone and he kills the giant.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Same is the picture of Jesus who comes along, and the devil's weapon is the giant death, and the Jesus comes along and he flings the stone and he kills the giant and he sets us free from cringing at the power of death.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the New Testament's just filled with this stuff.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: After the resurrection, every sermon, every letter in the New Testament has got statements, something like, Death, where's your victory?
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: Ha ha ha.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Jesus has won the victory, Jesus has delivered us from the fear of death.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the second part of the good news is not just that Jesus came to conquer death and deliver us from the fear of this.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: The second part of the good news is the simple response that it takes for you and I to access that freedom, that liberty from death.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the response is simply, in one word, the word the New Testament uses is the word faith, F-A-I-T-H, faith or belief.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, there's faith and then there's faith, right?
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and there's some kinds of faith.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: We all have faith in stuff, in this or in that.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: And some kinds of faith are better than others, like my faith that uh I had great faith that the Hawks were gonna come back last night and win at the end.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: I had faith when I got up this morning that my car would run instead of that the battery was dead.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Again, misplaced faith.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: So some faith is reliable, other faith is not so reliable.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: The power of your faith, the the effectiveness of your faith depends on the object in which it is placed.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: And if you will put your faith in the one who came from heaven, became human, entered death to conquer death, rose again to deliver us not only from the tyranny of death, but even the fear of death, then your faith, then your faith works.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: Your faith is in the right place.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: I used to have a buddy here in Topeka, he's passed away now, but he ran a, he ran a, I've told you the story before, he ran a very successful bar, a large bar on 4th Street.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now gone, building does something else, but he's quite successful, had a lot of money before I knew him.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_01: And Mel said, you know, my life was going great, had a bunch of money, friends, and so forth, until the day I got robbed.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And a burglar came in, and the way he described it, he was on the floor next to his safe.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: The burglar had the shotgun in his mouth, and he said, When the shotgun hit the back of my throat, and I knew I was going to die, a thought hit me.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the thought was this: that the faith I had was good enough to live with, but it sure wasn't good enough to die with.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, to TBC, and shortly after that, that he put his faith in someone who had conquered death, and suddenly he had a savior who was not just good for life, but good for death.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what you need, and that's what I need, and that's what Easter is all about.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because not all faith will set you free from death and the fear of death, but faith in Jesus, in the one who hung on the cross, looking at him and saying, That there, that was for me, he's my savior, I need him, I believe in him, then.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's the faith that gives you access to victory over death and frees you from the fear of death.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then the resurrection becomes part of your story too.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: Pray with me.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: Father, thank you so much for what Jesus did for us and how he gives us not just eternal life, but he calms our fears of death by reminding us that in him we have victory over death.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: We need not fear death, it need not govern our lives, we need not run away from it and try to flee it, try to substitute other things for it.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: This morning I pray for pray for folks who haven't, you are not quite sure they've accessed that victory yet.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I ask Heavenly Father, they will look at the cross, they'll look at the tomb, and they will say, that, that, that there, that happened, that happened for me.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: He's my savior.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I believe in him.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.