Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / April 4, 2021 | True Story - Easter Message

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April 4, 2021 | True Story - Easter Message · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: How are you doing this morning?
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Easter.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Our theme this holy week is true story.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Partly because it's simply accepted today that much of what we read and hear on social media is not true story.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's fake news.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's unreliable.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's made up, it's propaganda, it's not true.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody accepts that.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so in a world of fake news, our hearts and our minds long for reliable stuff, reliable things that we can believe in, and truths that you know that we can trust.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, Connor and Alex and I have decided that we like this theme so much that we're going to continue uh we're going to continue on true story for the rest of the month of April as we uh tackle some of the others of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances uh in the gospel.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh hope if you don't have a place to attend next Sunday morning, come on back uh for the rest of April and we're gonna talk about true story.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be great.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So listen, um, here at Topeka Bible Church, one of our Easter traditions forever is hearing the personal story, the testimony, you might call it, of one of our people.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so we've been inspired over the years as we've listened to the stories of uh Desmond and Carrie and Ward and Elizabeth and Judy and Teresa and Brian and you know, Brent, Greg, Scott, all of them.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this morning, we get to sort of listen in on the story of Todd and Lori Edgerton and how God changed their life.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So watch this video.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: Todd and Lori Edgerton met several years ago when they were both working together.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Todd was married and had a child.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Lori was in a common law marriage and also had a child.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Their relationships were in trouble and they were unhappy.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted to be someplace different, wanted to be someplace else.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um I mean, there were plenty of times I just went and went in the got in the car on motorcycle and headed west.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was coming out of a um a relationship that was not working.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_02: I had a baby from that relationship, a house that was being foreclosed on, and I was working at the hospital and um was not a believer at that point.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Lori had been to church a few times with friends but hadn't been exposed to the gospel.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Todd grew up in the church.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: He'd been in choir and even taught Sunday school, but he didn't have a relationship with God.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: I never really understood the message.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'd heard the message my whole life, but I never got it.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_03: And then when I turned 18 and moved out of the house, I just let it all slide.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: As their relationships with their spouses deteriorated, Todd and Lori were drawn to one another.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: They decided to live together, but with strong ideas of how that would work.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_03: We were determined we were never getting married again, we were never having kids again, we were never buying property again, we were, you know, and we were only going to be together for as long as it made us happy.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Todd and Lori became part of a business run by people who were followers of Christ.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: They were attracted to the way these people lived their lives.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: When Todd took a look at his life, he felt something was wrong.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: At that point, I kind of turned around and took a look at my life, you know, and I thought I'd always been a good guy.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: You know, if there really was a heaven, well, God's gonna, you know, he'll probably let me in because I've been a good guy.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_03: And but then I turned around and I looked at my life and and the path of destruction that I'd left behind me.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I realized I wasn't a good guy, that I didn't know what I was doing.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: I had never made the right decision for the right reason.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Todd and Lori started attending a local Bible church.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: They joined a small group and were exposed to God's word.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: They began to build relationships and ask lots of questions about the Bible.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: They took us in, they knew where we were at, and they showed Christ to us.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I started asking my questions.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I had all those questions that you have, and and one of the elders of the church just started answering these questions, you know, in my first basic apologetics course.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and finally, when he couldn't answer the questions anymore, he just handed me a book on apologetics and said, Here, read this.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: Todd had to make a difficult decision to continue living as he had been or accept that the gospel was true and surrender his life to Christ.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_03: God brought me to that point where I had to make a decision, but I knew the truth, so I had to either deny the truth or go with it, and so I went with it.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Todd trusted Christ as his savior.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Soon Lori had a similar experience.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: I was meeting, as I had regularly, with the pastor's wife of the church that we were attending, and she had her Bible, just like she pretty much always has her Bible, and we were reading from the Bible, and she was building into my life over those months and just investing in me, and uh, it was a wonderful thing to feel loved and to truly feel the love of Christ.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: Something in me knew that this was a special thing.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: And the gospel came up, and she gave me the good news and the bad news, and it just made sense that that was where I wanted to go.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: And um so we prayed the prayer together, and God did an amazing work in my life.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: As God worked on Todd and Lori's hearts, he showed them that he had other plans for them.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: They had once decided they would never marry, never have children, and never buy property, but that wasn't what God had in mind.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: So, in short order, um, Todd and I were married.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, coming to the realization that we were living in sin and wanted to correct that in God's eyes.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: We started our family.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: I I truly believed that God wanted us to have a full quiver.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: And we have six kids now.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: And then we bought a house a few months after we were married.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: So I just praise God that He is the one who changes our hearts and sets us on the paths that He would have us on, because I was definitely astray.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: Since making the decision to follow Christ, Todd and Lori have shifted their focus from their own desires to how they can serve the Lord.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: They even worked in ministry for a few years at a church camp.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now the couple serves as ministry volunteers at TBC.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Their story is one that would have seemed impossible to them before they believed the true story of Jesus and the living hope he offers to all of us.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate uh Todd and Lori's vulnerability and openness.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: They're not what you would characterize as likely converts to Jesus Christ.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I decided I would share with you this morning uh one other vulnerable story of uh all the books that I'm reading this year.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is surely the most inspiring.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's entitled The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Subtitled An English Professor's Journey into the Christian Faith.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: When I read the opening sentence, I knew I would like it.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The opening sentence was when I was 28 years old, I boldly declared myself lesbian.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh she was a 28-year-old, she was getting her doctorate at the time, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield is her name, and uh she went ahead and got her doctorate, and then her career went straight up.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: She went to Syracuse University, became a professor of 19th century uh English literature, and uh this book details her startling, unexpected, unlikely conversion to faith in the risen Christ.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Dr.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Butterfield is a bona fide scholar, uh, a tenured professor of 19th century, uh, English lit, and cultural studies.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: So she teaches Freud, she teaches Marx, she teaches Darwin, and more to my liking, she teaches Jane Eyre.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: But um uh but her primary field has always been postmodern cultural studies, particularly gay and lesbian studies.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: She's been a high-profile writer of gay and lesbian articles in our country, a keynote speaker at gay pride marches.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: She described her life as happy, meaningful, and full.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Her view of Christianity and of Christians was that they were stupid, they were scary, and they were anti-intellectual, that it was a God hates fags religion.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: But as a research project, one year at the close of the 1990s, Dr.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Butterfield decided to write a book.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: She decided to research the Christian community, what Christians believe, and why they seem to hate people like her so much.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: To do this, she had to do two things she was reluctant to do.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: She had to meet and interview some Christians, and she had to read the book that she most despised, the Bible.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, where would she find Christians?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, she had just written an article for a newspaper, and it had given, it had uh, she'd been showered with hundreds of letters after this article, which was critical of promise keepers and of all Christians for their uh gender uh politics.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And she divided all the letters she got into hate mail and fan mail boxes, but there was one letter she said that she was gonna, she kept wanting to throw away because it didn't fit into either one, but she kept not throwing it away and opening it up, and it was actually from a Christian whose name was Kin.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he was thoughtful and he was kind and so forth.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so she suddenly decided one day, instead of throwing it away, that she would make a phone call.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: He had left his phone number.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So she called Kin and began to talk to him, and he he was as kind over the phone as he was in his letter.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, he and his wife, Floy, invited uh Rosaria over for dinner.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: She accepted with some trepidation, especially, she said, when she drove her car, loaded as it was with gay and lesbian and anti-Christian stickers, into their driveway and parked it.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: But to her surprise, she said they were friendly, they were open, they were humble, they were very real in their Christian faith, in their prayer, in their witness.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so she started spending more time with them.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And she said they never preached in her, they just asked her questions, and when she answered their questions, her, uh, they would ask her more questions.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, she says she started reading the book that most uh repelled her.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: She started reading the Bible.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: She said she read it the way a glutton devours food.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is, she just shoveled it in.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: She read it through from cover to cover multiple times from various translations.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And she says that as she read it, she began to read it over and over.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Something began to happen to her, which she couldn't define.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: But her friends and her lesbian partner that she was living with, with whom she owned two houses and a business, they began to notice that her reading of the Bible was changing her, and they didn't like it, and they confronted her about it.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Every Thursday, she threw a big gay and lesbian dinner party at her house for all of uh her friends and so forth.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they were confronting her at that party, and she says that one evening as she was in the kitchen and a transgender friend of hers came out and confronted her in the kitchen.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Rosario said she turned to her and said, But what if all this is true?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: What if Jesus is a real and risen Lord and a loving and judging Lord, and I am in real trouble.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: As part of her journey during that time, uh Rosario Champagne Butterfield uh stepped into the back of an evangelical Presbyterian church.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: She slipped uh into a seat far away from anyone else.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: She says she felt like a complete freak there, an outsider.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: She admits that during those years there was a war raging inside her.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: That uh for the longest time she didn't know which side would win.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: One side was telling her uh constantly that the Christian story was false and that it was mean and it was on the wrong side of history, and that she was perfect just as she was, and that she herself was on the leading edge of the future.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And inside her, the other side was telling her that the Christian story was the true story, and until she herself stepped into that story, she was lost, and everybody she loved, including her partner, was lost.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And she fought this idea with all of her might because she said she didn't want to be lost, and she did not want an eternity of darkness and pain rather than happiness and light.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem was, she said the second side seemed irresistible, it wouldn't stop.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I could not resist, she writes.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: The promises of God, it was as though I was standing on a seashore, she says, and the promises of God kept rushing onto the shore of my heart like waves.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I felt the call of Jesus Christ.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And eventually she trusted Christ for salvation.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very fascinating story.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: She said, You know, some of you, and when you came to Christ like Joy and Light and Bell, she said for her that moment of conversion felt like a combination of an alien abduction by God and a train wreck in her life.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: But whatever.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Butterfield's conversion to Christ, to faith in the risen Lord, is certainly an unlikely and for me an inspiring testimony of conversion.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Your story may not be your story, in fact, but probably isn't your story, but there are other unlikely converts here today.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know there are.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I know some of you.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: And and online uh watching.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you did not imagine yourself sitting in a church just five or ten years ago.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: You could not have imagined yourself watching a church service online, much less identifying yourself as Christians.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: But as Butterfield herself puts it in her book, none of us is too tough a case for heaven.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: All of us, in the end, she says, are simply trophies of grace.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now in the Bible and in life, down through history, we find thousands of other, many other unlikely converts.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Take Thomas, for example.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: His story is given us by the Apostle John in chapter 20.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's often called doubting Thomas because he doubted.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, and he was an unlikely convert because he, Thomas, found the resurrection, this story of today, the resurrection of a dead Christ, of a dead friend, impossible to believe.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, he'd followed Jesus around for three years as one of the twelve disciples, but like most of the other disciples who were with him huddled away in the darkness behind locked doors, scared that they might be the next to be killed, when the women came back from the tomb on Sunday morning raving that Jesus had risen from the dead, Thomas thought it was, quote, unquote, Bible nonsense.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thought it was fake news.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: He told his buddies, unless I see the nail marks in his hands, and actually put my finger into the nail mark in each hand and my hand into his side, I'm not gonna believe it.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas didn't realize that Jesus being God listens in on every conversation.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: So a day or two later, Jesus comes to the walls, shows up, says, Hi guys, then turns to Thomas, says, Hey Thomas, I heard what you said the other day.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Here are the nail marks.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to put your fingers into the holes right here and put your hand into my side.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas, red-faced, gets his proof and gasps out, My Lord and my God.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, in the very next verses, the writer, John, tells us that he says, these things, everything I've written to you in this book, stories of Jesus, his life, what he said, his miracles, his crucifixion, his death, his burial, his resurrection, which I told you about in this chapter, the story of doubting Thomas the unlikely convert, all of these I have written to you so that you too, you doubters, you unlikely converts, you reluctant readers, all of you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you get to have eternal life in his name.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the whole purpose of my book, John says.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, John uh Thomas's journey to faith was different, of course, quite different than Marsha than uh Rosario Butterfield's uh uh journey to faith, but they have one thing, maybe the most important thing, in common.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is it started in the same place with a need for evidence, with a need for proof.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: Was it a true story or was it fake news?
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, just for five minutes, really quickly, I want us to review the evidence that Thomas, that Dr.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Butterfield, that thousands of people have needed and come to over the years.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna give you the four main pieces of evidence.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna ask you to memorize them.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: I've come up with uh with an acronym or whatever it's called, uh, you know, uh to help you remember these four pieces of evidence.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And these are pieces of evidence that all scholars agree on, almost all scholars, New Testament scholars, agree on, including those who do not believe that the Bible is inspired.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Don't believe that the New Testament documents come from God at all.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: They just believe they're first century documents.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: But they agree on these four pieces of evidence, and these four pieces of evidence you can remember if you remember the word best, B-E-S-T, because the best explanation for these B E S T four pieces of evidence is that Christ really did rise from the dead, that he is our risen Savior.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: The B stands for burial.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Burial.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: To quote William Lane Craig, my college buddy, Christianity's foremost apologist, from his many debates on university campuses in America and in Europe, to quote him, the first fact that scholars agree on is that after his crucifixion, Jesus was buried in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this fact is important because if he was buried, that puts to rest the famous swoon theory that Jesus did not really die at his scourging and crucifixion.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: He just passed out, swooned, and then got up and walked away.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also important because it means, contrary to the claims of Jesus' seminar scholar John Dominic Crosson, the radical uh critic who came and spoke at uh Washburn to some to many of us a few years ago, that his claim that somehow uh nobody knew where Jesus was buried so his disciples could steal his body.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: No, this is a famous tomb, Joseph of Arimathea, known by both Jews and Christians in Jerusalem alike, and therefore the disciples could never have claimed the resurrection of Jesus Christ in the face of a tomb that still contained his corpse, which leads to E, B-E-S-T.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: E stands for, of course, empty tomb.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: William Lane Craig again.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: The second fact almost all scholars agree on is that on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion, Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: The skeptics have never been able to explain the fact that when the women arrived, the tomb was empty.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or that when Peter and John arrived, the tomb was empty, or that when the when the guards spoke to the authorities, they said the tomb was empty when we woke up.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the religious leaders in Jerusalem who most wanted to discount Christianity could never come up with a body.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if the early church had made up this story, if they'd made up this story, they would have never had women as the primary witnesses to the resurrection of Christ.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: Burial, empty tomb.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: The S stands for startling appearances.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Startling appearances.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: William Lane Craig again.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: The third fact all scholars agree on is that on multiple occasions and under a variety of circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: The New Testament records at least twelve startling, unexpected appearances of Jesus after his resurrection.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Paul lists about half of them in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: He appeared sometimes to individuals like Mary, like Peter, sometimes to small groups like two people on the road to Emmaus, sometimes to larger groups, like all of the disciples.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: Once he appeared to 500 People at once.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You could say that some of them, you could discount some of them as wish fulfillment, you know, but you can't get rid of all of them, which is why this is universally agreed upon by all scholars.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: So the burial, death and burial, his empty tomb, the startling appearances, and the T is transformation.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: The fourth fact that all scholars agree on is that the original disciples, huddling behind closed doors, did not expect Jesus to rise from the dead and initially did not believe it, but only came to believe it later and then were radically transformed into evangelists who took this message of the resurrection around the world and went to their deaths willingly continuing to claim that yes, Jesus rose from the dead.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: You take the disciple Peter, for example, who the night of Jesus' death was so frightened by a maid that he denied, at a bonfire, that he denied being a Jesus follower, but then was transformed into this lion of a disciple, an evangelist, who finally, when he was going to be crucified, perhaps in Rome, asked to be crucified upside down, claiming he was not worthy to be crucified the same way as his risen Savior, Jesus Christ.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or as Rodney Stark, the uh historian down at Baylor University, says in one of his famous books recently.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thousands upon thousands of Jerusalemites who were Jews suffered social persecution because they converted nearly one-third of the city of Jerusalem converted to the belief that Jesus was a risen Savior.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: B, E, S, T, say it with me.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: B stands for burial, E stands for empty tomb, S for startling appearances, and T for transformations.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: The best explanation of these four facts, on which almost all scholars agree, is that the resurrection of Christ is not fake news, but it is a true story, and in fact, as Dr.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Craig says, the best attested fact of ancient history.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And because it is a true story, it's a life-changing story.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: A life-changing story for doubting Thomas, a like uh life-changing story for unlikely convert Rosario Champagne Butterfield.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: A life-changing story for the Edgertons and for you and for me, all of those people for whom John wrote his story, his gospel, so that you and I might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that because we believe, we get to have eternal life in his name.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: So now it comes down to you.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you on your spiritual journey?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are you an unlikely convert, a reluctant reader, a doubter?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: None of us is too tough a case for heaven.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: She's right.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: All of us are simply objects of grace, none of us so bad that we can't receive grace, nor so good that we don't need grace.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: All of us simply trophies of his grace.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Suffer this bad pun.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Did you hear about the guy who stayed up all night wondering where the sun had gone?
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, it dawned on him.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: Told you it was awful, but it fits.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because I want to say, if you're in the dark right now at all, about whether the resurrection of Jesus is a true story or fake news, I'd love to have it dawn on you today, this morning.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: That it's really a true story, the Easter story, and that your story can change when you let the Easter story become part of your story.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Step into that story this morning and make it yours.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: Pray something like this: Lord Jesus, I believe in you.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: I believe that you died on the cross for my sins and rose to give me eternal life.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let Easter dawn in my heart.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, let's bow our heads and I'll pray those words, and you feel free to pray those words in your heart to God.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's bow our heads.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to tell God that you're an unlikely convert, but you'd like to let Easter dawn in your heart, say something like this to Him right now, Lord Jesus, I believe in you.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: As the one who died for me and rose to give me life.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Let the resurrection story become part of my story.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Let Easter dawn in my heart.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, now I pray for those people who are unlikely converts, reluctant, but who want hope.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: And we're coming to realize that your Son Jesus Christ is our hope, perhaps our only hope.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Today we celebrate that morning when his buried body began to breathe, the Lamb came to life, the lion roared, that he became not only our only hope, but our living hope.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: We celebrate this morning the resurrection.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not only his, but the resurrection in the lives of those who turn to you.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: In his name we pray.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.