Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / April 5th, 2015 | Easter Sunday

Transcript

April 5th, 2015 | Easter Sunday · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Greg, come on up.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Happy Easter.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: How are you doing?
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite traditions about Easter at Speak Bible Church is that uh uh we always have somebody uh tell their story.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: And today I've invited Dr.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Greg Nelson to do that.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Greg, tell us about is Deborah here, tell us about your family.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Deborah's here.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: My whole family's in the fourth row over there.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: No way.
• 0:27
  unknown: Yep.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: How cool is that?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Vincent.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: So uh tell us what you do for a living.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm a physician here in town.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We moved to Topeka from Dodge City about eight years ago.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: I left my internal medicine practice, came here to become a medical director for Midland care, kind of the homegrown hospice here in town.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so now I do a lot of hospice care, make rounds at the hospice house, see patients in their home.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Anybody ever been to Midland hospitals?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm planning to die there.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: I love that place.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Me too.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Free, you know, free coffee, free donuts, free cookies, hot cookies.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um listen, a lot of people who know you may not know your background.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know that your dad is in the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about your dad.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, my dad's Dev Nelson.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you might remember him if you're old enough.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: He was the voice of the Wildcat, so we knew the Wildcat.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So uh so my so my sister Janilee and I got to grow up eating supper at night, watching our dad on WIBW because he was a sports guy doing the sports, and that was pretty cool.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: You don't look like you were built yourself to be a sports star.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, I I mentioned before I I really wanted to be Johnny Unidas, but this is what I got.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: So so you went science, you went a different way, right?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh all through school I I I loved science.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um I had Christian friends.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I I kind of knew that there probably was a God, but you know, s my Christian friends just seemed kind of silly, and I think that they just needed to take a lot more physics and math and and chemistry, and then they'd really understand uh how the world works and the universe, yeah.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's cool.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: And and then you moved on into you went to K-State.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I went to K-State naturally, and uh engineering, still science engineering major took a lot more um physics, took a lot more math, and um met my wife uh working in a restaurant in Manhattan and got married, started a family.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Now, even though you weren't more of a you weren't more you weren't so much of a spiritual religious church type person, she actually uh had gone to, she's actually sort of came from a church.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: She went to Grace Baptist, right?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she did, and that's where we got married.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, science had pretty much pushed God and religion out of my life at that time, but got to get married in a church.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we got married in a church, Grace Baptist Church in Manhattan, a wonderful little church, and um now.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: But you didn't state your doctor now, so you didn't actually stay in physics and engineering.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: What happened?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, something happened to me.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I I realized about the time I was a senior in college that I I probably wasn't gonna be a very good engineer, and I'd changed my thinking from you know wanting to just kind of be in a lab all day by myself, not around anybody, to actually kind of liking people a little bit.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, no way.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't want to wind up like my engineering friends, and so I started thinking about medicine and started taking pre-med classes and wound up uh at KU Medical Center in medical school.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: K-State and KU.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a good place.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good place to.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh you're subspecially internal medicine.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Internal medicine.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I, you know, finished medical school, did my residency there, and got a job out in Dodge City, Kansas.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm still okay.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm trying to figure out your spiritual journey.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: You came from there, and here you are today standing on stage on Easter, talking about your Easter faith.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: Dodge City isn't known as the Jerusalem holy place of the world, so what happened down there?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we made friends naturally and got invited to church.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: We started attending the first Presbyterian church in Dodge City.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: It was a church full of really nice people, and we just sort of fit in and found our middle pew, you know, and um you know, worshiped just like everybody did, we thought, and sang songs and went to Sunday school and opened our Bibles occasionally and just kind of blended in.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed like I was just as nice a person as they were, so it just all kind of worked out for quite a few years.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's cool.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what changed?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, you know, I matured a little bit, and naturally, when you're in church and you're you're hearing good preaching, you start thinking about things, but nothing really transformed me.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I I didn't really want to change.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was pretty happy with the way I was, yeah.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: But then a couple things happened to me.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: My sister Janilee, who's a wonderful woman of God, and teaches at uh the nursing school at Johnson County Community College, invited me on a mission trip, 1999.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I was uh I don't know, 43 or something like that.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: But so I put my stethoscope on and I grab all my medical knowledge and I'm gonna go down there to to Mexico and and take care of impoverished people and save the world, you know, that kind of thing.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: But as it turned out, I met uh Dr.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Carmen Rodriguez down there, who's a also a wonderful woman of faith, and um found out that they didn't need me, but I needed them a lot.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I got to see how their simple faith worked and how they just loved the people down there, and that's what was really required.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so a few more mission trips like that, and then something really cool happened at church that I have to tell you about.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: I we lost our pastor.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: He went on to another congregation, and so we were pastorless, and I got this call one night from a woman in our congregation saying, Greg, we're putting together a pastor search committee, and um we want to know if you would be willing to serve on that.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, oh no, here we go.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a I've gotta, you know, I I've gotta come come forth and tell her, you know, that I'm really not a Christian.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I said that, you know, I know I've been coming here for ten years, uh I'm not a Christian, and I think you should know that.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: And there was this pause at the other end of the line, and then she says, Well, that's okay.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Oh, cool, that's okay.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'll be I'll be on the pastor search committee.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And although I had no business being there, it turned out to be a wonderful thing for me because it forced us as a committee to really look at our church and our community and what we needed to be for that and what we needed in a pastor and really what it meant to follow Christ.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I had that going on, and these mission experiences, and a lot of self-examination, as you might think, and realized that all these years of you know trying to be nice and just as good as that guy, it didn't count for anything.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't count for anything.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I really needed Christ if I was really going to live.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so there was one Wednesday afternoon when I was not on the golf course, Deborah was teaching fourth grade, my kids weren't at home, and I was just compelled to get on my knees and have a conversation with God.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And um ask him to forgive me for 46 years that uh I wasn't following him, and ask for Christ to come into my heart and um to work through me.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: How and and um I mean that had to change a little bit eventually, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, because I mean you know, just just tell what's been the most dramatic change in your life before after.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, um after after that day, it wasn't like I got hit by a bolt of lightning or suddenly my skin glowed or something like that.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing really happened for about a week.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then little things started to happen.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those things was somebody recommended I read this little book that was actually a little book.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: It took about two hours to read called The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce Wilkers Wilkinson.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I tell you, that little book and the stories in it really changed my life.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: What it's about is about a prayer that's buried in 2 Chronicles that this guy Jabez says, Lord, bless me and expand my territory.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Keep your hand upon me, protect me from evil that I may not cause harm.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, that's just a that's really cool.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna pray that prayer on the way to work every day.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I did for, I don't know, at least a year.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's pretty scary.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the bravest thing I ever did was to say that prayer and know that God was gonna show up and things were gonna start happening, and they really did.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing that happened was for the first time in my life, I realized I could really worship.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't worship, it was impossible to worship until that day.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And whereas before I would wake up on a Sunday morning and see a beautiful day and think, oh gosh, wish we didn't have to go to church.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now I was it was like the middle of the week, and I was thinking, oh man, Sunday's five days away.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: What am I going to do for five days until I get to go to church and worship again?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it really transformed me in that way.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was cool, it was really cool.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, back then, um before I would you know sing a song washed by the blood of the lamb, and I knew kind of conceptually what that meant, but didn't really understand it.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I would sing Amazing Grace and think, oh what a wow, what a great song.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: But after, you know, I'd I'd sing Amazing Grace, or I'd try to, and I I couldn't get through it.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'd just get choked up, I couldn't get through it.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who can sing, I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see and can't well up with tears and think, wow, boy, that's me.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, God.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then your life hasn't started yet, and I strongly recommend you do something about it.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's it.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: You may have seen it on the screen before the service if you're in here, but there's gonna be another story uh next Sunday, next Sunday evening, 6 30.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a fan of Carrie Livgren, the rock group Kansas, Carry on My Wayward Son, Dust in the Wind.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh uh documentary, award-winning documentary, has just come out, it was just on television for the first time.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's now on the radio stuff, it's now on the music stores.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And uh we're gonna show that, and Carrie will be uh with us uh next Sunday night, 6.30 to 8 to answer questions and so forth.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope you'll uh join us there.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um last night I I I went over and I saw Beauty and the Beast over at uh at Care Piral musical.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: I love fairy tales, don't you?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm what you don't love fairy tales, you guys, you guys are fuddy duddies.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know that even in this scientific age, all of the biggest hit movies seem to be fairy tales like you know, Lion King and uh uh not Elsa, uh Frozen, sorry, Elsa, uh The Lion and Cinderella and The Hobbit and Star Wars.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's they're still big.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And even in a day when you hear so much bad news and there's so much war, those stories always end well, right?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my title this morning, and it's gonna be a short message, is the best and truest fairy tale.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I'm gonna argue with you for just a few minutes that Easter is the best and the truest fairy tale of all, because it tells us something really magical about the monster death and about our best, you know, our friends and loved ones who have died and about the future.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus, after he rose from the dead, remember he showed his hands and the hole in his side to Thomas, doubting Thomas to sort of prove, you know, that he was the Jesus before, to prove the Easter miracle.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, he said at that time, blessed are all those who have not seen and yet have believed, which includes every one of us here, right?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm guessing most of you here believe in the Easter miracle.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you're like me, you're a little skeptical of most things, of the news and so forth.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: You'd like to, you know, you're not quite sure.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: But but you do believe in the resurrection.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so you're you're included in the group of people, almost all Christians who've ever lived, you know, who are blessed because they've not seen and yet have believed.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: But here's my question.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: If you ever ask yourself, honestly, truly, why is it that I believe this story?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why do I believe the resurrection story?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's an important question.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's important because, as you know, Paul says in the book of Corinthians, he says, if if this thing didn't happen, then Christianity is rubbish.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Christianity crumbles.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've weighed the arguments in favor of the resurrection, and honestly, they are impressive.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well-known story, British journalist Frank Morrison set out to prove that the resurrection was a myth, and evidence convinced him otherwise.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: And last year I was here on Easter morning and I presented to you what I thought were the best for sort of legal evidentiary, apologetic arguments for the resurrection.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And they start with the letters B, E, A, T, as in, the resurrection is the heartbeat of the Christian faith, the burial, that is actually buried, right?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: E, that the tomb was found empty.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: You could have proved it differently, but it's found empty.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: The appearances made all these appearances to all these people.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got T, the transformation of the disciples.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm coming this year with a confession to you.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: That while I still think those arguments are strong, my confession is my personal conviction that God bashed in the door of death and pulled Jesus out, crushed death, and brought life out of death, actually rests on two really more personal and emotional reasons.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought I would in a few minutes share those with you today.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Those two reasons are reason number one, because of something about me.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Reason number two, because of something about God.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing about me, the something about me that makes me be really open to this, is to be honest, I want it to be true.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: I want the fairy tale.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I want my friends back.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: I confess that a big reason I think I cling to the Easter story is that, like you, I think that God's put something in me that hates death.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, that's why the pharaohs built those pyramids and filled them with jewelry and chariots and so forth.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's why it's why we Americans, when the doctor tells us we're going to die before we expect it to, we actually get angry because there's something in us that reacts against death and hates it.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: And in the past approximately five years, I've lost four really beloved people in my life.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: My dad and my mom and my closest brother, and a really close personal friend here in Topeka.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I want Easter to be true, frankly, because I want my friends back.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: I want to see them again.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's and I by the way, I think this idea of getting your friends back, of conquering death and bringing life, is really kind of a fairy tale.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a true fairy tale.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I like fairy tales.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, fairy tales begin with once upon a time, and they end with it ended happily ever after.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: And in the middle you have this, you have this desperate scene.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's no way out, you know, and you're gonna and all of a sudden magic happens.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's always a magic in fairy tales, and magic turns the desperation into like this miracle so that things end happily ever after.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sort of like, if I could just throw this in, I am I'm sorry if you're a Kentucky fan, but sort of like last night.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they were fitting a uh a college basketball team to be the greatest team of all time.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Undefeated, if you don't know, if you don't care about a basketball, this only takes 30 seconds.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're a Kentucky fan, I'm so sorry.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: But but I was so happy with four minutes to go, Kentucky's up by four.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody, nobody in the press box, nobody in America expects that somehow Wisconsin, who are they, Wisconsin is going to upset Kentucky.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And yet somehow a miracle happens, magic happens, joy happens.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but anyway, that's I I digress.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a great illustration.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: But but you know, it's not exactly a fairy tale.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: But what we've loved and we've listened to fairy tales ever since we were little.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: My four-year-old grandson Asher went to see earlier this week, went to see Beauty and the Beast.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was scared he wouldn't sit at the two and a half hour production, but his mother told me afterwards that when this odd bookworm called Belle transformed into beauty, and when she was dancing with the beast, wearing this gorgeous gold dress, a four-year-old Asher tugged on her arm.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: She leaned down and he whispered, I want to dance with that girl.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Little Asher, he wants the fairy tale.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and so do I.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So do I.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: My favorite two fairy tales are probably the Narnia Tales and Lord of the Rings.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you know the writer, the guy who would write the Narnia Tales was an atheist named C.S.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis at the time, and he looked down on the gospel stories, the resurrection, all those stories, you know, and he didn't think much of them.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Then his friend, he had a friend named Tolkien who was writing The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien said, you know, you need we need to have a talk, took him out for a long walk and said, You don't understand, you love fairy tales, you teach fairy tales.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: You think that fairy tales are the sort of the heart of reality, you know, that that's the way things work.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Don't you realize, haven't you ever considered that the gospel story story of Jesus starting the miracle of Christmas and then the miracle of Easter, this is the greatest fairy story of all?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: That you have this absolutely desperate, lost, terrible situation where the hero dies and all is dark, and then and then you have this magic, this God magic, this good magic, and then comes Easter, and C.S.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis saw it.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And to his credit, his heart changed and he believed.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: So what I'm saying is, I confess that one reason I believe in the Easter miracles, I want it to be true.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I want the fairy tale.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: I I want my friends back.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: And the other reason is it's something about God.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: I I've come to know God.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Not great, but I've come to know him over the years well enough to really know that when he says, I am love, God is loved, that he really means that.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: He really does love, he really does love his people.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: He really, really honestly loves us and he cares for us, and he sees that we love our friends and that we hate to see our friends go, and that we'll keep them alive till the very last nanosecond in order to keep them around, and we really don't, and then we keep them alive in our hearts after they pass on because we really desperately want them not to go away and want to see them again.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I know God allows tragedies.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying he doesn't.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying God doesn't allow people to die young and terrible accidents to happen, and sicknesses and cancer and so forth.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: I know, I know he does, but I also know, knowing that God is a God of love and reading his word, I know that God doesn't like that either.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: God hates the world as it is, and he absolutely hates the monster death.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And he will not, his love will not let death win.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: His love will not let death win.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: And even now, starting in Easter, but even now, I mean, this is the way this, you know, remember when Jesus, someone would say, Jesus, you know, she died or something.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Remember what Jesus would say?
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: She's not dead, she's I mean, it's just Jesus could not even allow death anything.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I'm not gonna even concede anything to death.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna give death anything.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: And there's been a couple of times in my years of ministry where I've sort of felt like I'm in this this fairy tale that sort of illustrates the story.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: I get a phone call, it's an odd hour.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I get up, put on my clothes, and I drive down to the hospital or to hospice.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I uh family's called and said, It's time.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: We're waiting for death.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I go in the room, and the family's already there, and and the grief hangs like humidity in the room.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a peaceful place.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's the woman, she's too young to die, but she's fought the good fight of radiation, chemotherapy, blood transfusions, but the cancer is too strong.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: And even though she's only 50 years old or whatever, she doesn't have long to live.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: And her daughter's over in the corner weeping, and her son's standing at the window looking out at the gray sunrise.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Her husband's at the bed and he's holding onto her hand, shaking his head.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's as though death's coming.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And the heart monitor is sort of counting down the time.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Beep.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: Beep beep beep.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: Pretty soon it's gonna happen, and all of a sudden it does happen.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: The husband puts his ear close to feel whether or not she's breathing, suddenly stands up, begins to caress her hand, and he begins to call her name, and the daughter comes, she grabs the other hand, and then we make a circle around the bed.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Nurse comes in and joins the circle, and we pray, and I can hear death coming down the hallway.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: I just feel death coming down the hallway.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: We begin to pray, and death begins pounding on the door.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: We begin to sing, the husband starts a little song, Amazing Grace or something, and we sing the song, and death's scrabbling at the door, determined to get in, like an animal wants to come and take her away, wants to come and steal that woman, wants to, because death is this is this tyrant, is this monster that thinks that he owns us.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And we pray and we sing, and death gets more and more frantic, and then it happens.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Her heart stops struggling.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Her heart stops, we stop singing.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Death finally breaks in the door and comes up to the bed ready to grab her, but you know what?
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Death gets nothing, nothing at all, because God's love will not let death win.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: And she has already gone to a place of life.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's the fairy tale.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's the true fairy tale.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's the truest and best fairy tale of all.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the miracle of Easter.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I know they're not legal reasons, I know they're not maybe reasons that convince you, they're personal reasons, but I think that's it's because of the way God's made me and you, because of who I am and because of the love of God, the way God is.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: God will not let death win.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: We will see our friends again.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: You can have that same Easter faith that I had.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: You simply place your trust in the Savior, who is the hero of the fairy tale that we call the Easter story.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: Believe in him.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Our Father, we thank you for designing such a system so that uh your hatred of death would win out.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that death would not win.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Such an assurance of how much you love us, how much you want us to be your children.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: I ask for these dear folks today that each one of them would participate, partake, this wonderful fairy tale of Easter.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: In Jesus' name.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.