Running on Sunday (Easter Sunday)

Jesus, my Saviour, Jesus, my Lord. Matthew 27 and commencing to read at verse 57. As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus.

Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus' body and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Jesus took the body, wrapped it in a linen cloth, clean linen cloth, placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there across from the tomb. And then to chapter 28, verse 1. And his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

The angel said to the women, do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here. He has risen, just as he said.

Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, he has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, now I have told you.

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. Greetings, he said.

They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee and there they will see me.

May God bless the reading of his word. He is Lord. He is risen from the dead.

And he is Lord. He shall come. He is my Lord.

He is my Lord. He is risen from the dead. Luke chapter 23, starting at verse 50.

Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the council, a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea and he was waiting for the kingdom of God. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus' body.

Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth, and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid. It was preparation day and the Sabbath was about to begin. The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it.

Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment. On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.

They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright, the women bowed down with their faces to the ground.

But the men said to them, why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee, the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified, and on the third day be raised again.

Then they remembered his words. When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles.

But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

Amen. Now keep your finger in that place in the Bible, but let's go on and take one more reading. No apologies that so much of this service has been given over to the reading of Scripture.

In one sense, this is what this church stands for, the truth of the Word of God. We have no other message. What's in this book is all that we have to share.

And what's in this book is all that we need. So let's read again from 1 Corinthians chapter 15, this time you joining in. You see, it's so important that we go through Scripture, and really we could almost go to every page of the New Testament, because there in anticipatory fashion, or in fulfillment, or in didactic, that means in teaching fashion, is the message of the resurrection.

So one is utterly bemused when anyone who claims to be a leader of the church in these days denies the historicity of the return of Jesus Christ. He would cross swords with the Apostle Paul, who built the whole of his understanding, by the grace of God, of Christian doctrine on the fact of the resurrection of Christ. So let's read together what Paul has to say.

Here is Paul's creed. Here is Paul's creedal statement, what he, the Apostle, believes. 1 Corinthians 15, we read 1 through to 11 together.

Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I pass on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day, according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Peter, and then to the twelve. After that, He appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all He appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

For I am the least of the apostles, and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecute the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me, whether then it was I or they.

This is what we preach, and this is what you believed. There will be no scandal when I disclose a piece of personal information. I have on my desk at home a picture of a lady who I love dearly.

She was one of the members of our tabernacle family. When I get to heaven, she will wig me for mentioning her. Her name was Nellie, Nellie Spencer.

She was beautiful when she died. She died in her nineties. She's one of these sort of people who, though the days go by, they are aged, but they're not aging.

She retained a very youthful outlook. She approved of drums on a Sunday. I had the sweet privilege of speaking at her memorial service and then committing her body to Mother Earth.

And up there at the cemetery where I've been so often over these years, I noticed that her grave was adjacent to a very well-known Baptist minister who happened to have been her pastor before it fell to my lot to try to take over. I said to her nephew, who happened to be her executor, is this just chance that her grave is alongside that of the Baptist minister? And he said no. That was her choice.

Because she said that when the resurrection occurred, she'd like to go with someone that she knew. And as he'd helped her in time, presumably he'd have some insight as to what to do at that particular moment. And so she'd take the nub from him.

I tell you not that story because there is a tinge of humor. There is that. But you've also got an illustration of a person who took the creed seriously.

I believe in the resurrection of the body. You see, if you really do believe that not only was our beloved Lord Jesus raised from the dead, but he became, to quote the Apostle Paul, the firstfruits of all who shall be raised, then your outlook on life will be considerably transformed as a result of what you believe. Our educationalists are really faced with a tremendous problem today.

We have now discovered, tell it not in gas, they probably realized that years ago, even in that Philistine city, that the morality of a nation is extremely important. And so we are to re-emphasize, according to our Minister of Education, morality and ethics in the tuition of our boys and girls in our schools. But you cannot base morality on a vacuum.

You can only base morality on the facts, the definite facts of history and the example of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ. Ethics requires a basic foundation on which to be constructed. And the Christian gospel says this, that our beloved Lord Jesus Christ came into this world not only to live and to die for our salvation, but to show us how to live and to prepare us ultimately for life beyond.

For our sojourn on this earth, which may be 20 years or 30 years or 50 years or 70 years or 80 years, is not all that there is. Beyond the grave, there is eternal life. Eternal life, by definition, extends forever.

Therefore, that which is beyond is far more important than that which is immediate. And if the immediate affects what is beyond, then it is necessary for you to deal with your immediate situation in a very careful fashion. And that's one of the reasons why I started out on my address this morning with giving you the illustration of this homely lady, Nellie Spencer, who believed, as did an entourage of the women followers of our beloved Lord, that He indeed is the Son of God and that He was raised from the dead.

Early on that first resurrection morning, there was a great deal of activity in the garden tomb area. You had got people coming in and off the scene, human beings, angelic agencies. It was almost a hive of activity.

The stone had been rolled away. Angels had put their shoulders to the stone. The beloved Lord had emerged from the tomb.

And rushing that early morning towards the place where our Lord had been entombed were some of these faithful women who had been with the Savior during the three years of His earthly ministry. I think it's of great credit to the female part of the human race that when our Lord was looking for someone to remain faithful to Him, some of these women were present. We're told in the 49th verse of Luke chapter 23 that all those who knew the Lord Jesus, including the women who had followed Him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things.

And the scene is of the crucifixion of our Lord. And then right at the end of that 23rd chapter of Luke's gospel, you find the reference made that these womenfolk, having assembled together certain precious spices and perfumes to anoint the body of the Lord Jesus, rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment. And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they took the spices towards the tomb to continue the embalming process which Joseph of Arimathea, a secret influential disciple of our Lord Jesus, had already commenced.

And while they are there, certain remarkable things happen. If you read the parallel passages in the gospels, you discover that they did spend some time before they arrived at the tomb wondering which one of them would move the gravestone. There is a sense in which grief can eclipse reason.

Had they thought it through, they would have appreciated the impossibility of the task. The gravestone was like a huge cartwheel and it would have had many hundred weight encased within it and the idea of the women putting their shoulders to this wheel and moving it along, for it would have run on a little channeled out passage by the hewn rock cliff face. For the women to have done that themselves, well, obviously it would have been utterly impossible.

But nonetheless, with logic put to one side, they make their way towards this tomb and they discover that the stone, verse 2, has been rolled away. They do not find the body of the Lord. And there are two people, like men, who have got gleaming clothes and they speak to these women and the women naturally are afraid and they bow down their faces, verse 5, but the men say to them, why do you look for the living among the dead? And that statement was the trigger for their memory, for the comment continues, remember how he told you when he was still with you in Galilee, the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified on the third day, be raised again.

Then, then they remembered his words. So what did they do as a result of that? They rushed back. They go back to the disciples to tell them what they have experienced.

Great activity on that first Christian Sunday morning. Biblical sanction for having a jog in the early hours of what has now become the Christian Sabbath. But you see, when they got there, they did not have such an attentive congregation with maybe one or two exceptions as I have this morning because we gather that when they disclosed the information that something quite remarkable had happened, then the 11, the disciples of our Lord Jesus, did not immediately respond in a positive fashion to what they had to say.

The 11th verse says, their words seemed to them like nonsense. Now that must have been a disappointment. If you read the parallel verses in the rest of the Gospels, particularly in Matthew's Gospel, you discover that these women have been so impressed by what they didn't see and by what they didn't hear, but by what they did hear rather, that they moved very, very quickly.

They ran back to the disciples to tell them about the great phenomenon. The tomb is empty. There is nobody there whatsoever.

The message seemed to go up like a lead balloon. These 11 men, they were not tuned in on the same spiritual wavelength. They told all these things to the 11 and to all the others, verse 11, but they did not believe the women.

And the comment is made, their words seemed like the babbling of a deranged mind. It's a very special word which Dr. Luke uses at this point to describe the evaluation of the disciples when they hear what these women have to say. How sad that these men who'd been with our Lord Jesus for so long and had heard him speak on at least three specific occasions about his death and always twinning to his death the fact of his resurrection.

How sad that they did not immediately respond in a positive fashion. These women had come dashing back from the tomb. You cannot but admire the courage of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and these women who had been part of the procedure for embalming the body of Christ, identifying themselves publicly with our beloved Lord.

And now, as they return, fascinated, bemused, in some way perhaps still perplexed by what has happened, and they go to the men who should be able to give apt commentary on the event, we find that they're received in such an unsatisfactory fashion. But it does have some register on Peter, this piece of information. Look at the twelfth verse.

Peter, however, got up and, wait for it, and ran to the tomb. And if you take the parallel passage in the Gospel of John, you will discover that not only does Peter run towards the tomb, but also the apostle whom Jesus loved, in other words, John himself. Verse 20 and verse 3. So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb.

Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. See what I mean? When I talk about the activity that there was in the garden that first Easter Sunday, somebody has said that resurrections do make cemeteries look very untidy. Well, I don't know how untidy the garden tomb area was, but certainly it had become a hive of activity.

And when you read, and we've had such a large sample of this this morning, deliberately so, when you read the narrative accounts in the Gospels, you get the impression from several different angles that something very spectacular had happened. Not easy to fuse all the narratives together, but then you would be suspicious if three or four witnesses of an accident today, each in the law court, gave exactly the same account with exactly the same phraseology. You would think they had connived, they got together to dupe the jury, to deceive the judge.

You would expect differing facets to remain in the minds of the witnesses as they pooled the experiences of what they had perceived. And that's exactly, my friend, what you get in the Gospel narratives when the record is faithfully put down as to what happened. Here is a scene of great activity, angels coming down, women coming into the tomb, men running into the tomb, men running back, questions being asked, so on and so forth.

This amazing piece of information sinking into human consciousness and ultimately, by the ungifting of the Holy Spirit, sense being made of the whole thing. And today, exactly the same happens. The information is given.

The reason behind the doctrine of the resurrection is explained to people in their hundreds, in their thousands, here in England, across in southern Africa, there in what remains of the Soviet Union, out there in Bolivia, in Latin America, people receive the information. And it sticks in the minds of some. Perhaps they don't grasp it immediately, the full significance, but enough is etched upon their convictions for them to return to it back and back again until, ultimately, they come to a realisation, as did Thomas, one of the immediate disciples of our beloved Lord, who on first hearing of the resurrection of Jesus doubted, but ultimately, he says, My Lord and my God.

You see, that first Easter Sunday morning, there was a lot of activity and a lot of thought and some immediate negative conclusions and some conclusions which were perhaps half right and half wrong. And then there was the dawning of what actually had happened. And one of the two women who had run back to the disciples to alert them actually followed Peter and John.

And Peter and John, you remember, who went into the tomb, John first, Peter later. They then left the scene, Peter believing, Peter beginning to appreciate what indeed had happened. But were left with this beautiful picture and I'd love to have had a video, a camcorder or whatever you call the things, at that particular point to have taken forever a record of a woman who I think is the New Testament equivalent to Eve, only her name is Mary Magdala, Mary Magdalene.

She'd ran into the garden. She'd ran back to the disciples. She's now in the garden again and she is alone.

Peter and John, they've seen the empty tomb. They're cogitating. They're working out what has happened.

She's still not too sure. And then, standing a little way back, her eyes bejeweled by tears, she turns round and sees a man whom she takes to be the gardener. Still, with the convictions that our beloved Lord's blood-stained body has been stolen and deposited somewhere, she goes to the man and she says, tell me, tell me where they've put him.

And that was the unanswered question of history because there never needed to be an answer supplied to that wasted interrogative. What happened was the gardener spoke. One word, all that was needed, Mary.

I wish that somehow we could get the intonation from Scripture of the voice of our Lord. Many of you will agree for the wrong reasons. The best sermons aren't necessarily the longest.

Sometimes encapsulated into a word is all that needs to be said. And our Lord speaks to this woman who's rushed here, who's rushed there, who's been in the bazaar when it opened in the early hours of the morning to replenish and get further spices so that she and her colleagues continue the embalming process. She who has given so much time to grief and sorrow, she hasn't thought through what she heard from the lips of her beloved Lord.

She who had loved Jesus so much for a person who has been forgiven much loves much. She who has the heartbreak now listens to a man who speaks her name in a fashion that no other man has ever spoken her name for some had spoken the name of Mary with lust, only wanting to exploit her. But Mary stands in the New Testament as the prodigal daughter who has returned to the Father's house and has been introduced by the Son to the Father, and the Son says her name again, Mary.

And in all the heights of activity and all the hustle and bustle, in that moment of rest, Mary enters into the truth, the Lord Jesus, raised, raised from the dead. Eve was deceived by the devil and was the first of the human race to break the commands of Almighty God. How much like God the Father, that the first person who receives an encounter of the risen Lord is from the sex which was first to disobey the commands of God.

And the first ever to give testimony to the risen, literal resurrection of Jesus was Mary, who again rushes back to the disciples and proclaims to them the gospel of the resurrection. Beloved brothers and sisters, let me tell you this morning that in all the activities that there may be in your life, if you do not pause for a moment to acknowledge who Jesus Christ is and to take your anchoring and your moorings from Him, you will live your life in vain. He knows you.

He knows your name. He knows all that is meant by you. He knows your character.

He knows you inside out and upside down. Yet still, He wants your company. For the likes of you, He came into this world to die on Calvary's cross.

For the likes of you, He was raised in the power of an endless life. And this morning, He speaks. He speaks through His word.

He directs His message to you. He asks you, be a man. He asks you, be a woman.

He asks you to engage in the thinking process. If Jesus Christ was indeed the Son of God, raised from the dead, having been so cruelly butchered, how much you ought to live your life on the basis of that truth. How much that ought to become the pivot that swings you from one decision to the next decision, from one period of your life to the next period of your life.

To be a fool is to be acquainted with these truths and to believe these truths and yet not to allow them to so steer and manage the whole of your future. That you bring pleasure to the heart of God and receive joie de vivre, a sense of satisfaction as you live out your earthly pilgrimage. Someone has written of the great of our world in these terms.

Shakespeare is dust and will not come to question from his aven tomb. And Socrates and Shelley keep a Grecian and Italian sleep. They see not, but oh Christians who throng Holborn and Fifth Avenue, may you not meet in spite of death a traveler from Nazareth.

Jesus lives, lives on as the Savior of the world. He would be your Savior. Confess him as your Lord and build your life on this concrete historic fact.

And then that ethical code which is so necessary in our schools, but even more particularly in your life, has a basis on which to develop. Ethics cannot exist without a base. And our Lord has come to bring a foundation for the lives of ordinary people like you and me.

Nellie Spencer was right. She lived her life for the honor of God, having been converted in middle years. And when she planned her death, she planned it with the certainty that her spirit would go to be with God, her creator.

And one day, her mortal remains, renewed, transformed, would be like his glorious body. And ere long, at that last cosmic moment, her body and spirit would be once again combined, ready and prepared to save, to serve God in a world which is yet to be. That, my friend, as best as I can explain it, is the heart of the Christian gospel.

It's the glory of Easter. Lots of activity that first Sunday morning, people running hither and thither. But eventually, there was the rest, as Mary and the disciples came to a realization of who Jesus was and is, and acknowledged him as their Lord.

Will you? Have you done the same? Let us pray. Father, as we sing in a moment about the crowning of our Lord Jesus, and as we reflect again on that lovely third stanza on the wounds that he bore on the cross of Calvary, help us to make our final anthem of praise something personal that we offer to you, our hymn of commitment, our confession that from this moment on, we shall live our lives in the light of Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Amen.