Christopher: Christ's gladness is so weighty. Its gravity gathers his grief into orbit around it and makes it sing his praise. The gladness of Christ gives a tongue to his grief so that it sings his praise, sings for joy. You see that in Revelation chapter five, when the song of heaven is the lamb who was slain. The bloody cross is the song of the universe's joy because Christ is risen.
That is incredible.
Caleb: The following message was recorded at Kingstree Church. May the spirit use it to help you see, savor, and sing the beauty of God in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.
Christopher: He is risen indeed. When we say that, we're not just saying Jesus came back to life. There's other people who have come back to life. To say Jesus is risen is not just to say, oh, he returned from the dead. To say Jesus is risen is to say, death is dead.
Death is dead. It is his decisive victory over death for all those in him. Imagine death as a dragon. Imagine that there's this dragon. Everyone goes into the mouth of this dragon, no matter how strong they are, no matter how rich they are, no matter how wise they are, everyone goes into this dragon's mouth, And some people very rarely are taken out of this dragon's mouth, like Lazarus who was raised back up again, like Jarius' daughter, like the son of the widow of Nain.
These people are brought back out again, but then they have to
Christopher: go in again. They don't get
Christopher: to stay out. They come out of the dragon's mouth for a time, then they're gonna go back in. Everyone goes into the mouth of the dragon, and that's the end of the story until Jesus comes. Jesus as a human being like us dies like us, goes into the mouth of the dragon just like everybody ever has, and everyone assumes that's the end. He's gone.
He's gone into its mouth, but the difference is when Christ goes into the mouth of this dragon he kills it from the inside and then tears through the back of its throat and leaves it a dead corpse on the ground walking out into life on Easter morning. That's the difference. Nobody's done that before. Nobody can do that except the God man. And so now for those in Christ, death is a corpse.
The dragon death is a corpse. Now it's still a frightening corpse. It's still a huge mouth with sharp teeth laying on the ground, and we still have to walk into it. And many times walking into it, we're cut on those teeth because it's still a dragon, even though it's a dead one. But for those in Christ we see a path is torn through it.
Its mouth is laying open. We're looking into that horrible tooth fringed mouth, and we see light in it because it's been torn through. Christ is risen from the dead trampling down death by death, and for those in their tombs bestowing life, and we're all in a tomb in sin, and he's bestowed life upon us. And that's just a fraction of the glory of the resurrection. As I said before, all hope, all goodness, all laughter, all joy, all peace is true because Christ is risen.
If he's not risen, it's all a lie, but if he is risen, it's true. The laughter that rises to your heart when you see your children or grandchildren or when you see something beautiful in the world, that's not
Christopher: a cheat if Christ is risen. It's true. The birds that sing in
Christopher: the morning, the sun that rises in the morning, the rainbow that crowns the storm when it's passed by, the joy that pierces your heart like sorrow and moves you to tears of hope in the midst of
Christopher: the night. That's true because Christ is risen.
Christopher: If he's not risen, all of that's a lie. Life is eviscerated of meaning if Christ is not risen, but if he is risen, this is all true. This is all true. So today I'm hoping that we will be able to consider something of this glory together. What can words do?
But something of this glory we might be able to look at together, How we're going to do that is by looking at the first words the risen Jesus speaks to his people in Matthew's gospel. So if you'd like to turn with me to Matthew chapter 28, we're going to look at Jesus's words together. Let's start in verse nine, chapter 28 verse nine. The women are running from
Christopher: the tomb of Christ. They've seen that he's not there, and they're fleeing from the tomb. And it says this in verse nine of chapter 28, And behold, Jesus met them and said, Greetings, or as we'll see, Rejoice. That's
Christopher: the command that's underneath the word greetings. Rejoice. And they came up to him and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. Then Jesus said to them, Do not be afraid. Go tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.
Let me pray for us and we'll look at these words together.
Christopher: Father we are enmeshed still in death. Our bodies are breaking down. Our minds are breaking down. Our lives around us are tenuous. We're still in
Christopher: the midst in the shadow of death, and yet Christ is risen. Our king and our God is risen, and we are united to him. So father I pray now that the Holy Spirit who rejoices to glorify Jesus would be in our midst now to glorify your son, to take from the riches of his word, of his beauty, of his excellence and make it known now to his people. So Lord, may my words be the fallible means and vessel that you would use now to give Christ in his beauty, in his radiance, in his strength, in his victory, in his lordship, and his kingdom to his people this morning. We look to you, Father, for this and for all good things that we can't think to ask because you are our good Father, and we pray in Jesus' name, amen.
So I noted that what we read here, in Matthew's gospel, these
Christopher: are the first words Jesus speaks, greetings or rejoice. We'll comment on that
Christopher: in a moment. Do not be afraid. First things he says, but it's important to
Christopher: see these aren't just words that he speaks. They're actually commands,
Christopher: and that's important. The risen Jesus, the first thing he says is not a suggestion or a question or a statement or an observation. The first thing the risen Jesus says is a command, two commands that he gives. The first one is hidden under the translation greetings. This is like when we say If you say adios, we just think that means goodbye, but it means with God or go with God.
So there's this idea of you're saying something about God. You're saying, Be with God, go with God, when you say that to someone, even if you don't think about it. So too in this era, the word for greetings was just rejoice. It's the second person imperative, rejoice. It's a command.
Now typically that would just be heard as somebody saying, Hi. But when Jesus says it here, it's carrying all the weight of a command. So the first thing Jesus says to his disciples as a risen one is to command them, Rejoice. And then he gives them another command down in verse 10, Do not be afraid. Rejoice, do not be afraid.
That's awesome. Those are the first commands that the risen Jesus gives. Now it's significant that he gives commands. He's speaking with authority. He's not speaking as one who suggests or comes alongside and says, Well, maybe we should consider He speaks with authority.
And in fact, in a few verses, he's going to say, All authority, down in verse 18, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. So as the one, as the human man who has passed through all of sin and its consequences, all of Satan and everything he can bring, passed through death and conquered it, passed through hell and exhausted it, passed through every enemy that could ever oppose him as the one who has gone through and conquered all, Jesus stands beyond every possible opposition and is able to say, All authority is mine. Every authority, every shred of authority in the cosmos is now mine. So the risen Christ is unmatched, unparalleled, unchallenged in his authority, and really that is enough for us this morning. If we just heard that, we could just hold on to that.
In the face of all the uncertainty that's facing your soul and your family, that's facing our country and the countries of the world, that's facing the whole world, in the face of all the other powers that would claim authority over you, in the face of governments and militaries, doctors and cultures, sickness and mental illness and demons, anything that would exert authority over us in the face of that this morning, we confess with the words of Jesus, there is one, one with all authority, one who holds all power, one in whose hands every other crown is a paper mache toy for him to crinkle up when he wants to and get rid of whenever he pleases. There is one who holds all authority in nail pierced hands, and that's the risen Jesus Christ. So all the militaries and countries of the world, all the cells and the breaths of your body and those you love, all is held in the hands of this Christ. He has all authority. Take heart then this Easter morning.
Take heart that the one who is risen from the dead has all authority. And as the risen one, he speaks with that authority. He speaks, he commands. Now, just hearing somebody has all authority isn't necessarily comforting, because the immediate question is what kind of authority? What kind of person?
If a cruel person has all authority, that's no comfort to me. If a biased person has all authority, somebody who's gonna bend the rules for the rich and the powerful, well, has no comfort to me. If an indifferent one who cares nothing about me has all authority, that has no comfort to me. We've established he has all authority, and he commands out of that authority, but now we ask what kind of authority does he have, and to discern that we'll look at what kind of commands he gives. Look what
Christopher: he says. What's he say? Verse nine, rejoice. And then verse 10, do not be afraid. So that's the kind of command the risen Jesus gives to his people at that time and at all times.
Rejoice. Do not be afraid. Now don't take that for granted. He could have said anything. He could have said anything in that moment.
He could have said, Serve me, which in a
Christopher: sense he does. We are called to serve him. He could
Christopher: have said, Bow down, which of course we do. He could have said, Depart from me, which is terrifying, and I pray none of
Christopher: us hear that. He could have said anything, but instead with all the authority in all the universe, when he speaks his very first commands, he
Christopher: says, Rejoice. Don't be afraid. That's awesome. That's awesome. So before we think about what these commands mean for us, just think about what it tells us about our Lord that he says this, because no one could tell him no.
No one could tell him to stop. No one could counter his words, which means he's speaking out of the freedom of his heart. He can say anything he wants to say, and from that freedom, which reveals who he is, our words show our heart, from that freedom he says, Rejoice, rejoice, and don't be afraid. Rejoice and don't be afraid. That is the heart of Christ for us this morning.
When God can say anything to his people, risen from the dead, he looks at us and says, Rejoice. Don't be afraid. Not because he doesn't know what you're facing, not because he's oblivious to it, Oh Lord, if you knew you wouldn't say that.
Christopher: He knows, and still his command to us is rejoice, do not be afraid. That's his will for us this morning, not in a flippant way, but in a deep and transforming way, so may he grant us grace to obey those commands. Praise God, those are commands. May he give us grace to obey them. Now there's something else to see here that's interesting.
Rejoice, do not be afraid. This is echoing a very specific Old Testament passage. I'll turn there for you, and you can turn back with me if you'd like. It's in Zephaniah. This is actually a passage that we read fairly often here at Kingstree.
It's in Zephaniah chapter three. So go right around to the back of your Bible. Write following Habakkuk. We all know where Habakkuk is. Following Habakkuk, and right before Haggai, you'll find Zephaniah, and if it's too struggling to find it, just listen.
It'll be fine.
Christopher: Here's what it says in Zephaniah three.
Christopher: Listen for the echoes of Jesus' two commands, Rejoice, don't be afraid. Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion. Shout, O Israel. Rejoice and exalt with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord has taken away the judgments against you.
He has cleared away your enemies. The King of Israel, the Lord is in your midst. You shall never again fear evil. On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, fear not, oh Zion. Let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by his love. He will exalt over you with loud singing. He will gather those who mourn to the festival.
So this word, this passage from Zephaniah is being echoed by Jesus's words in Matthew. Did you hear it? Rejoice, fear not. Rejoice and exalt with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. Sing aloud, daughter of Zion.
So there's this echoing of Jesus's call to rejoice, and it's paired with the call to fear not. Fear not, O Zion. And look at the call to rejoice or listen to me tell you about it. When he says rejoice, it is the very same Greek word in the Greek Old Testament, and it is given here in Zephaniah to the daughter of Zion, to a feminine object, a feminine subject. He's speaking to a woman.
Rejoice, daughter of Zion. And then Jesus to the women outside the tomb says, Rejoice, rejoice. So there's this echoing, the joy, the joy that Zephaniah saw is the joy Jesus proclaims at his resurrection. And again, fear not. In verse 16, fear not, oh Zion, let not your hands grow weak.
The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. So Zephaniah is anticipating a day when the presence of Yahweh will be with his people in the midst of his people, and that presence will banish their fear. There'll be no more fear of evil because he's present with them. And by fusing together these two commands, rejoice and fear not, Matthew is echoing Zephaniah and he's calling us to see that the day Zephaniah anticipated is the day that dawns with the resurrection, the day that dawns when Christ is risen, and that means the presence of Yahweh that banishes fears that Zephaniah sees coming is the presence of the risen Christ as he stands outside of the tomb on Easter morning. And that's critical to see.
Zephaniah anchors the joy and the courage, the fearlessness of God's people in the presence of Yahweh with them. Because he's with them, rejoice, fear not. By picking up these two commands, rejoice, fear not, Matthew is saying the presence of Yahweh in our midst, the presence of the King is now fulfilled in this one, in Jesus Christ, in the risen Christ. So by echoing this passage, Matthew is signaling that Jesus is not merely the risen one as awesome as that is, but that he is in fact the divine king, the prophesied Yahweh present now in flesh and blood with his people. What Yahweh does and who Yahweh is in Zephaniah three is what Jesus does and who Jesus is in Matthew 28.
So when Jesus stands beyond death, he commands, Rejoice, do not be afraid, and therefore echoes Zephaniah and is presented as the presence of God in the midst of his people. Now let's look at these commands a little bit more closely, the two commands he gives. Rejoice, do not be afraid. We're going to spend the majority of our time on rejoice, not because do not be afraid is unimportant, it obvious it is, but because if we get the rejoice peace, the fear not peace falls into place. The reasons to rejoice are the reasons to fear not.
So we're gonna look at this rejoice command, and we're gonna consider five reasons that we can find here in Matthew and in Zephaniah for why we ought to rejoice. So let's look
Christopher: at that together. First, the main answer to why does Jesus stand beyond death and say rejoice? The main answer, the simplest answer is that Jesus
Christopher: who was crucified is alive, is alive again. We miss that. It's simple. It's right there of course, but think of what this means for his friends, for those who had followed him, for those who had loved him. When Jesus died on Friday, the beloved one was lost.
The beloved one was lost. I think of that so often as part of our faith, part of
Christopher: what we believe, Jesus dies, that it's hard to remember the agony, the horror, the sorrow, the grief that pierced like a sword through the hearts of those who loved him. Think of his mom standing at his feet. Think of those who grew to love him and trust him and look up to him, and he was their whole life, and he didn't just die. He was crucified. He was put on display.
He was belittled and shamed before their eyes, and when Jesus died, the beloved was ripped away, was lost. And I think we all know something of what that feels like, the loss of the beloved. Probably most in here are able to think now of a moment where the beloved was lost, and it's world shattering.
Christopher: It's not just sad. When the beloved is taken away, it's world shattering.
Christopher: It should not be. It cannot be, you tell yourself. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. And then you wake up the next morning, and it has happened, and you think, how can this world keep turning when that happened?
How could this continue to be if the beloved is lost?
Christopher: Love longs for the beloved. That's what it is. Love longs for the beloved, and there is no pain more excruciating to the human soul than when that longing is denied, when that longing is stopped by the grave, and love can't embrace. Love cries out and says, Where? Where is it?
It should be. The beloved should be here, and he's not. She's not. It's not. It's gone.
There's no pain more excruciating in all of human experience than that. The beloved is lost.
Christopher: And yet, yet when Jesus appears on Easter morning, the unthinkable happens. The unimaginable happens. The gift so good we hesitate to allow our hearts to feel it happens. The beloved returns beyond death, beyond loss, beyond every imaginable possibility, the beloved has returned. The beloved one lost beyond all hope is given back into our arms, and in that unlooked for embrace, that unexpected embrace, that embrace we dared never to hope for, all the death, all the pain, all the loss is swallowed up in the weeping wonder of joy.
In that embrace, in that return, the wonder of it drowns the pain in the tears of joy that are elicited.
Christopher: That's what happens on resurrection morning. The beloved one who was lost is found. The one who is dead is alive. The one who was gone and beyond all returning has returned and gathered us up again to himself. That's the first reason the Lord says, Rejoice, rejoice, the beloved has returned.
But then it's not just that Jesus returned for those who loved him two thousand years ago, but the return of the beloved in Christ is a declaration now of what is true for all those who are in him. That return is not just the grace given to the select group of disciples two thousand years ago. That return of the beloved is promised in the risen flesh of Christ to all his people. All of life now is hewed with the joy and anchored to the hope of the beloved's return. And so I want to unfold for you four further reasons that the resurrection of Christ is a command for us to rejoice now today.
The beloved has returned, and what else can we see? Well, if we go back to Zephaniah where this text has been Where this text is alluding to, when we go back to Zephaniah, we find a number of things here. First, Zephaniah three fourteen, Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion, shout, O Israel. Rejoice and exalt with all your heart, O daughter of Jerusalem. The Lord has taken away your judgments.
That's the second reason. Our judgments are taken away. What judgment? Well, the judgment of God against humanity. The judgment that we are all under for our sin.
We are all sinners. We are all under judgment, and we are all going to face it in one way or another. Imagine life is a labyrinth
Christopher: filled with starving wolves, which are the judgment of God, and our sin is a slab of raw meat tied around our neck. Now you can run, You can try to hide in a corner, but you're not getting away from them. These wolves are going to find you,
Christopher: and we will be torn to pieces by them. That's the situation we're in. Visceral, but real. That's the situation we're in, But this text says those judgments, those wolves that hell has been taken away from you, and the resurrection declares that that is true. Why?
Because Christ on the cross takes the wolf's bait of our sin and bears it in himself, and gathers every wolf of judgment and hell and death to himself, and drags them with him to the grave, and crushes their head in his death, and rises again in life, holding the severed heads of the wolves in his nail pierced hands, saying, Rejoice,
Christopher: your judgment, the thing you were running from, the thing you were fleeing from even though you couldn't put a name to it, the judgment of God against your sin, it's taken away in my death and my resurrection. So rejoice, rejoice, rejoice. Secondly, it says Rejoice, 03:15, your enemies are cleared away. Well, what are
Christopher: our enemies? In this day and age you don't have a lot of enemies. Your enemies tweet against you on Twitter. It's not a big deal. What is our enemy?
Well, ultimately our enemy is death. Death, Paul says, is the final enemy. Death is our enemy, and death is not just your heart stops beating. Death is the whole arc of mortality that the cosmos is bound in. Death is the whole path into dissolution, into loss, into breaking down that our bodies, and our lives, and our families, and our loved ones, everything's caught in this mortal coil.
That's death. That's death. The loss of innocence, the loss of a childhood home, the loss of a loved relationship, or a place, or a memory, all that's death. Death has infiltrated the cosmos like oil into a sponge, and Paul says the last enemy to be defeated is death upon Christ's return, but in a very true sense, death is already dead as we talked about the dragon at the beginning. Death is decisively defeated.
It's a corpse. Yes, we have to walk through it. Yes, it's frightening and painful,
Christopher: it can be, but it's defeated decisively, and it will be wholly dissolved at the coming of Christ. It will
Christopher: be wholly disintegrated at the coming of Christ. Your enemy Christian is cleared away. Death, the grave is cleared away. Rejoice. But then we have a fourth reason.
In this life death still wounds. We're not pretending, Oh, it's all happy. Death means nothing to me now. I'm fine. Everything's fine.
You're fine too, right? No, that's not what Christians believe. Death still wounds us, still robs us, still brings us to grief, and that's why there's a fourth thing for us to look at here, a fourth reason to rejoice. We could pull out more, but I'll point to this one. Verse 18, I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival.
I will gather you to the festival. I will gather the ones who mourn into joy. The resurrection declares that. The resurrection proclaims that that is so because on the cross Jesus is the mourning one. All the grief, all the tears, all the weeping of his people like rain rushing down into a valley and flooding the valley, all the sorrow and grieving and weeping of his bride rushes down into him on the cross and fills him on the cross, and drowns him on the cross.
Surely he carried our griefs and bore our sorrows. There is no grief like Christ's, and yet Hebrews one:nine tells us this same crucified one, this same grieved one is now anointed with gladness beyond all creation. There is no one who has grieved deeper than Christ. There is no one happier than Christ. That's true.
That's constantly true. That's the case, and in fact Christ's gladness is so weighty, its gravity gathers his grief into orbit around it and makes it sing his praise. The gladness of Christ gives a tongue to his grief so that it sings his praise, sings for joy. You see that in Revelation chapter five, when the song of heaven is the lamb who was slain. The bloody cross is the song of the universe's joy because Christ is risen.
That is incredible. Look, stand for a moment at the foot of the cross on Friday at mid afternoon. Stand for a moment and see the broken body of the beloved one. See the ugliness and the blood and the agony and the shame and the utter hopelessness of that moment and consider the madness to point up and say, He'll be happy again one day. He will rejoice again one day.
He, he will be the wellspring of the joy of the universe. That's madness on Friday. But Sunday makes that true. Sunday makes that true. That is what the resurrection does to the crucifixion, and that is what the resurrection does to every sorrow born within it.
If you are trusting Christ, you're there in that brokenness. All your grief is there, which means you're also there when that grieving one is gathered into the festival of triune life and rejoicing in his resurrection. That's not just, Oh, good for Jesus, he's raised and happy. No, that's my hope because I'm his body, you're his body. We have nothing except that we're the body of Christ.
Nothing except that we're the bride of Christ, nothing except that we're united to Christ. So he will gather those who mourn to festival. He's done it in raising the crucified one. He will do it in raising all those united to him. Praise God, and when we sit around that table, when we sit around that festival, Christian, all of our sorrow will be turned to joy.
The cups on the table of the banquet of the king are filled with the tears of our grief turned now to the wine of our blessedness in the light of his risen face, and we drink deeply from it and say, I could never have thought I would rejoice here again, but you do now because he's risen. Just that no one would ever have thought I can stand at the foot of
Christopher: the cross and rejoice in Jesus. You're insane. No, if he's risen, that's exactly what he does. Wait and see. Don't try to feel
Christopher: it now for your griefs, but wait and see. You have no idea, we have no idea what slain and risen love is going to do, and we will rejoice. It will be such wonder grieving Christians to see he did this. He turned that to this. I'm here rejoicing.
I thought I could never come here again. I thought I could never look at this again. But I'm here rejoicing because Christ is risen. And you can't believe it now, it's okay. Just wait.
You'll see and you'll weep for joy. Christ is risen from the dead. Praise God. And then finally, briefly, there's a repeated refrain in chapter three. Look at it with me.
The Lord your God is in your midst. The King of Israel, the Lord is in your midst. This is the deepest reason for our rejoicing. The deepest reason for our rejoicing is that our God dwells with us. Our King is with us.
Our Lord, our covenant head and covering is with us. His presence is our joy, and he never leaves you or forsakes you. He's in every night. He's in every darkness. He's in every horror.
The cross proves it. He is our joy with us. And by echoing this passage from Zephaniah, Matthew is telling us, Yes, and Christ is that presence of Yahweh with you. Christ is that final end time coming of God to be with his people. Right now, Christian, Jesus is not a distant religious idea.
He is a risen person, a human being, the God man who lives and hears and knows and sees you to the roots, and is with us in this room by the presence of his Holy Spirit. He is with us as our head and our covering. He's with us as we go out from here, and the high of Easter morning dwindles back into the monotony and the rain and the drudgery of life. He's with us there. He's with us as we go into the highs and the lows, into the sorrow and the joy, into life and death.
He's with us. He's with us all the time. And because of that, rejoice, rejoice. He's the God who reveals himself in the work of Christ, and that God is with you. So summing this up, because the beloved has returned, and in him every beloved will return, Because our judgments are exhausted in the body of our God, because death is slain by the death of the Lord, because all those who mourn will be gathered into the festival of his own joy, And because the God who does these things and is like this is with us now, rejoice.
Christopher: Commanded to us by God, rejoice.
Christopher: Now in closing briefly, the second command is fear not, and you might think, boy, you didn't even touch on it. Don't tell me you're gonna do a whole another thing for fear not now. No, here's the thing. Here's the beautiful thing. If we get the reason for rejoice, we've gotten the reason we are not to fear because they are both grounded in the same reality.
The reasons we rejoice now are the same reasons we are not to fear what is coming. The same reasons we don't have to be afraid of the future. The beloved has returned beyond hope and will. Judgment is born and removed. Death is overcome.
Joy is our sure future. God himself is revealed to us and given to us and with us in the slain and risen Christ. These realities command our joy, and
Christopher: they command our fearlessness. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the death of fear. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the death of fear,
Christopher: and I do not say that as a naturally courageous person. I don't say that as someone who's over fear now, and I can tell you, Well, this worked for me. It'll work for you too. I say that as someone who struggles with fear, who would love and looks forward to the day when the constant oppressive teeth of the specter of fear are removed. I say that to someone who sees in truth, in scripture this truth, and is straining to lay hold of it with you, and ready to learn from you as well.
But I can tell you this, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the death of fear. May my soul, may your soul hear that this morning. Christ is risen, and fear, fear, that monstrous liar that hounds our heels from the moment we begin to think until the moment we die, fear is dead. It should be dead. It is dead.
Let us see it die in our lives because Christ is risen. All fear dissolves like a shadow before the sun when Christ rises from the dead. So I can tell you this, I can tell myself this, the answer to your fear, this oppressing thing, this pressure thing, this thing that's upon you, the answer to your fear and mine is here in the resurrection. It's in the fact that Christ is risen. Don't tire of pressing into that.
Don't think you've seen the end of it. Well, yeah, Jesus is risen, but no, no. It is here in the resurrection of Christ. If that soaks into the groundwater of our soul, Christ is risen. Death is trampled.
Life is open. Joy is secured. Hope is assured. Peace is given. If this sinks into our soul, fear suffocates, necessarily so.
May we be brought into it. And look at this picture to end. The women, what do they do? They fall at the feet of Jesus. They fall at his feet, it says.
Let me turn there so I can read it for you as we're closing.
Christopher: At the end of Matthew. They fall down and worship at his feet, And as they do, what are they seeing?
Christopher: What are they seeing? They came up to him and took hold of his feet and worshiped him. The feet still have the wounds carved in them. The wounds of death are carved in these feet, and yet they're risen, living feet. So that means these wounds are no longer as they were hanging on the cross, a sign of death and hell and sorrow and grieving victory over the dead, over the beloved one.
Those wounds in the feet of the risen Lord are now emblems of his conquest of death, emblems of God's victory trampling down all these enemies of his people, and the women lay hold of his feet. They bow their heads to his feet. They cling to his feet. They worship over the Lord, The feet torn with every sorrow and loss and death, now standing in victory, trampling down the serpent, leading his people out into life. These are the feet of the risen Lord.
This Easter then I'm praying that we, like these women, would fall down and lay hold of these feet, cling to the wounded and risen feet of our Lord, and worship him with joy that dawns beyond all
Christopher: fear. And one way we can do that together this morning is by coming to this table because
Christopher: the feet of Jesus that these women clinged to, the very feet that they held to, we can't take hold of them. They're here, but those same flesh and blood feet, that same Lord is right now reigning over all reality from the throne of heaven. Christ is there, but we can't take hold of him as they did, not tangibly in the same way. But when we come to this
Christopher: table, truly, when we come here by faith, we
Christopher: are coming to that same Lord. We are coming to that same wounded and risen one. We are receiving here on earth in this little church in the middle of a cornfield in Ohio. We are receiving the King of heaven and the Lord of glory present with us. So in a moment here, let us come to this table and to these elements as though these are the feet of the risen Lord, and we're the women falling at his feet saying, All my hope is here.
All my joy is here. All my life is here. The crucified one is risen again, clinging to him and worshiping him in fearless joy. And I
Christopher: would be remiss not to add this. The command, rejoice, don't be afraid. That's for those who fall at the feet of Jesus and believe his word and worship him as their king and their God. And so I am praying, and
Christopher: I know many are praying, that there would be none here this morning who remain outside of this Christ, outside of this hope, outside of this resurrection. I pray that none of you would look at the women clinging to the
Christopher: feet of the slain and risen Jesus, worshiping him as their God, and say, Not me. That's not for me. That's not my kinda thing. That's not me.
Christopher: Please, God, may that not be anyone here, but would you, even for the first time, fall at the feet of the slain and risen Jesus, proclaim him as your Lord, and be gathered up into his own joy. Hearing those words we read at the beginning, Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away. Behold, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone, and the springtime has come. Let me pray for us, and then we'll take the Lord's Supper together. Father, we praise you, we praise you, we praise you for the risen Jesus Christ who is all our life and joy and hope, And as we come now to this table, Father, grant us grace to come with faith and receive these elements as given from the very hand of our risen Lord, that by them we would participate in his death, in his resurrection, and in his eternal and joy filled life beyond all fear.
Meet your people now, Lord, we pray, and we thank you for all things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
Caleb: Thank you for listening to this message from Kingstree Church in Sabina, Ohio. To see more of the beauty of God in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ, come worship with us on Sundays at 10AM or visit our website at kingstreechurch.org.