Intro/Outro: Welcome to GARDEN CHURCH Podcast. We are a community in Southern California dedicated to raising resilient disciples of Jesus Christ.
Darren Rouanzoin: It's great to be with you guys. Sorry. I I'm almost I was shaking down there. So I just need to feel my body for a second. I'm pretty overwhelmed.
If you're new, this is not normal for us. We usually fit in like one of those sections. For me, I'm tripping out because like the the church started I don't know if you can pan, but to this section right over here, the first two rows was about the size of our church of our first Sunday. Can you get that? No.
You probably can't. It's right here. Yeah. Go over there. Go down.
All the way to the far back, the first two rows. That was GARDEN CHURCH when we started. Yeah. You did get that. Hi, guys.
You didn't know you're gonna be in the Sunday sermon today. I'm gonna take my time. We don't have five services. We don't have seven services. We have one service today.
So happy Easter. Happy Easter. So glad you came and I'm so glad some of you are at Seymour. I'm sorry you didn't get a seat in here. But we we we're glad we're one family today in one gathering.
It's such a privilege to be here to to announce the risen Lord Jesus Christ. It's amazing. I'm thinking about all that God has done this year. It's been a wild year for us. If you if you call GARDEN CHURCH, you you know that this has been a wild year.
God is moving. And I'm thinking about who's in this room. There are people sitting in this room that a few years ago could not even imagine being back in a church because of all the pain that they experienced in their previous church. And yet something happened this year where they rededicated their lives to Jesus and now they're sitting here on Easter Sunday. Isn't that amazing?
That's resurrection. There are people I was talking to Wendy who's new to our church, four or five months. She just introduced herself to me. I've never met her before. She was speechless, but she was saying, I have this joy I can't explain.
And next week I'm getting baptized. She's here. There's some marriages I know that are in this room where a couple of months ago you didn't think you would be married. You looked at your spouse and you thought, it's only pain, betrayal, and a broken heart. And yet Jesus did something.
And you're sitting in the room next to your spouse because Jesus lives. You know, it's it's amazing because this year we baptized kids. We baptized Kevin who's 63 years old. He dunked himself. You didn't know I was supposed to do it.
He just dunked right right in. And he said this line, it's never too late. Isn't that the truth? Oh, some of you are in the middle of it right now and you haven't seen the other side quite yet. But if there's a word that Easter Sunday gives to the world, it's hope.
Because it is the human experience that when things die, they stay dead. But on Easter, gathering with millions, billions of people around the world, we have this audacious claim. We say that Jesus lived in human history. He died on a Roman cross. He was buried in a borrowed tomb in a borrowed tomb.
And three days later he walked out of the grave. And so we announced to the world, he is risen. He is risen. He risen. Hey, I I am so excited to preach Easter sermon because I I have a hard time preaching the same content over and over again.
Don't know about you, for all of you preachers in the room. Christmas and Easter are the hardest Sundays to preach because they're so familiar. But today what I wanna do is I wanna show you three things. And I just have three points. We're gonna walk through this together.
I wanna show you first that the resurrection really happened. And then I'm gonna show you that the resurrection has changed the world that you live in. And the third point I wanna make is that the resurrection has the power to change your life today. And so I I would love for you to If you have your bibles, can we just see those bibles? If you brought those, let's just see a wave of thousands.
Look around the room. That's right. Would you go to the gospel of Luke chapter 24? Can you say Luke real quick to me? My disciples.
Luke chapter 24 is the end of the account that one of the gospel writers Luke gives. And here's what I want you to do. I'm gonna read two accounts and I just want you to pay attention to the details. Okay? If you're a skeptic this morning, I really want you to pay attention to the details.
This is the most significant moment ever recorded in human history, and I want you to pay attention to how it's written. Is that alright? Alright. Before I open the word, just would love to pray for you to hear the word of God. So Lord Jesus, in this room that looks like a sea of pastel colors, Would you Holy Spirit fill us afresh?
Those of us that are here because somebody said they were gonna take them to brunch and they lied. Let their hearts be softened this morning. Those of us that are looking for those answers, would you illuminate to us what we need to hear? Those of us that are carrying an enormous amount of pain, meet us in our pain. And Lord, those of us that are celebrating, would you bring a joy that's beyond what we can experience in Jesus name.
Amen. Luke chapter 24 verse one, it says this, this is the first Easter Sunday. 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. So Luke gives us an account and I want you to think about the weight of this moment if you're reading because on Friday afternoon, the disciples of Jesus watched the person they gave their life to be executed by professional murderers. The Roman Empire. They watched him die.
They heard him breathe his last breath and his body was taken down from the cross, sealed into a tomb. And the disciples went away and locked themselves in a room because they were afraid they would be next. There was no church planting going on. There was nobody writing a creed. Nobody was planning us and strategizing, you know, evangelistic crusade.
They were grieving. They were in shock. They went to the tomb with spices. That was the last thing they did to prepare a body for burial. They weren't expecting a miracle.
They were anticipating a place to grieve. And instead of a body, they found an empty tomb. And an angel asked one of the most stunning questions in all of scripture, why do you look for the living among the dead? Which for some of you just camp out on that question. For some of you today, you need to ask yourself, why do you keep looking for life in all the wrong places?
Some of you have looked for approval that never satisfies, success that leaves you emptier, relationships that you hope will save you, substances that promise relief and deliver chains. Why do you look for the living among the dead? I'm getting ahead of myself though. Let's stay to the story. I wanna anchor in on that first Sunday.
So can we go to another account of the resurrection story in John's gospel? So head to the right, say John. I'm just trying to get You didn't say it in any way. There's no Star Wars character named John. John chapter 20.
John is, was a disciple of Jesus. He's he's the apostle John and he writes the account of the first Easter Sunday from his perspective. Remember, if you're a skeptic, pay attention to the details. This is the most significant Sunday in human history. John was there and if you've ever read the gospel of John, he doesn't call himself John in the text.
He gives himself a very humble literary name, the disciple whom Jesus loved. The beloved disciple. You can't make this up. It's in the text. In verse three, after they hear from the ladies, they come back.
It says this, and pay attention. So Peter and the other disciple, John, started for the tomb. Both were running. I love it. But the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.
He bent over and looked at the strips of linen lying there but didn't go in. Then Simon Peter, just in case you forgot, who came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. They had been folded in the Greek. The cloth was lying in its place separate from the linen.
Finally, the other disciple, in case you already forgot who had reached the tomb first, also went and saw aside. He saw and believed. They still did not understand from scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead. I love it. I love it so much because here in this story what we have is the burial cloth is described as folded over in one place and then you have these witnesses who are not triumphant heroes.
They're a mess. They're frightened. They're confused. They're surprised by what Jesus said would happen when he was living. He said they're gonna I'm gonna die and then I'm raise from the dead.
And what they want you to know is Peter barges in and John hesitates, but John got there first. The greatest moment in human history and there's simply rivalry written into the documents. And you're like, exactly. There's something wrong with the ancient documents. Hold on.
No critical scholar questions the legitimacy of the written text. It The New Testament is the most well documented text in the ancient world. Over 5,000 Greek manuscripts survived with the same content, some dated just a couple of decades after the event that took place. There's no other ancient document as integris as the New Testament. Now I don't wanna argue apologetics about the integrity of the text.
What I wanna argue is the fact that what brings the greatest evidence to the resurrection that it actually happens is what happens to the followers of Jesus. We read in the story, they're confused, they're questioning, they're full of grief, they're full of doubt. They don't know what's going on. And all of a sudden, there's all these details. Why would you include the details unless that's exactly why it happened or how it happened?
Why would you include in the details of the people that you're building a religion on stumbling with faith, stumbling with what was going on? The only reason you would include it is if in fact that is exactly how it happened. If you were creating a religion, you would wanna leave out that the the founders were cowards. But in a couple of weeks, those cowards become martyrs. Something happened to them didn't just change them, it changed the world.
And that perhaps is the greatest evidence for Christianity today. Clearly, people will die for something they believe in, but they don't die for a story they made up. And let me just make it clear for all of you. As Karl Barth once said, if there's no empty tomb, there is no Christianity. Everything about the Christian faith hinders on the historical reality that Jesus raised from the dead.
He lived and he raised from the dead. This is not an idea. This is not a subject to discuss. This is not the concept of the feeling of the cosmic Christ. This doesn't fit in any other world religion.
We believe our guy literally died and literally raised from the dead. Without that, Christianity is a fraud. It's the greatest Ponzi scheme the world has ever seen. And you should base your faith on reality, on history. So I believe the resurrection really happened, but I wanna make a second point.
The resurrection changed the world. What you don't realize is the resurrection didn't just change what people believed, it changed who people became. And through them, the world that you woke up in today that you take for granted is the results of those who have placed their faith in Jesus, the risen Lord. Before Jesus, power meant domination. The strong ruled, the weak were expendable.
But after Jesus, something history, something shifted in history. Because now at the center of reality is a throne not of domination, but of a cross of self giving love. Power was completely redefined. And from that moment, a movement began to reshape the world. And I wanna I wanna just put a short list of the things that the Christian church gave the world.
Maybe you can read that from the back. Just to name a few. The hospital is a Christian invention, born from the conviction that every suffering body bears the image of God. The university university started started as as a a Christian Christian institution. Institution.
Name it. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, all started by Jesus followers. The abolition of slavery was driven by Christian, convictions that every human being is made in the image of God. Orphanages, literacy programs, the concept of human rights, what we call human rights as Tom Holland, who's not a Christian. He's a historian.
He wrote a book called Dominion, and he says, what we call human rights is simply secularized Christianity. Even people who no longer believe in Jesus are living off the moral capital he deposited into civilization. Why? Well, we've mapped the human genome. We've created artificial intelligence.
This week, we sent astronauts around the moon. But we've never improved on the Sermon on the Mount. To this day, that is used to construct the greatest forms of society as we know it. And if you put Christianity in a lineup of of other belief systems Well, think about this. Every other world religion, every other world leader that has led a religion has died.
People visit their tombs. The Buddha taught that the way out is detachment and desire less disappear into nothingness. Mohammed gave us a law requiring your good works to earn the next life. Confucius gave the world ethics but didn't have an answer for death. Every system out there except Christianity says do more, do better, climb higher, try harder.
I came across this testimony this week. Ion Herzlieli, have you heard of her? Here's a picture of her. She was she tried every alternative out there known to man and born a Muslim in Somalia. She was raised in a devout Islamic home and she suffered tremendously under devout Islamic strict religious law.
She eventually fled to Europe And after nine eleven, she renounced her faith in Islam and she became one of the leading, most vocal intellectually fierce atheists in the world. She aligned herself with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. She was called the fifth horsemen of the new atheist movement. And she had everything in the world, that makes you whole according to the world. She was famous.
She was wealthy. She was respected. She was intelligent. But in early twenty twenty three, she checked herself into a rehab center in the mountains of Utah, and she was struggling with depression and alcoholism. And it was there as her life was beginning to collapse that a therapist looked at her and said, Ion, you're spiritually bankrupt.
And she said she knew immediately that it was true. And in November 2023, she published an essay that shocked the world. The title of the essay is why I'm now a Christian. She wrote that she lived and tried to live her life on the basis of reason and found it to be completely incomplete. She described Christianity not as an intellectual concession, but as the only framework that could account for the weight of human experience.
She wrote that there is no need to look for any new age concoction of mindfulness and medication, that Christianity has it all. Islam could not save her. Atheism could not save her. Fame could not save her. Her philosophy could not save her.
Only Jesus saves. And I can go on with apologetics trying to prove to you that the resurrection changed the world. But the question is, has it changed you? I believe that the resurrection has the power to change you. Because knowing that the resurrection happened, knowing that Jesus exists is not the same thing as living your life with him.
Our culture will try to convince you that it has the answer for the ache inside of your heart. Download the mindfulness app, do the breath work retreat, do the shadow work, try plant based medicine, do a new diet. Hey, start soul cycle where you can sweat and they'll yell affirmations at you all day long. But think about it. We are the most therapized, most medicated, I made a word, the most informed, the most spiritually curious generation in human history.
But we are the loneliness, the most depressed, the most anxious in generations on record. With every tool, all of the information at our fingertips, but nothing actually works. Reflect on yourselves. Money promises you freedom but delivers anxiety. Success promises you significance but it delivers exhaustion.
The self promises clarity, but gives you confusion. And the guru promised you enlightenment, but got a podcast deal. The greatest thinker, Sigmund Freud, said people are hungry for love. Carl Jung said people are hungry for security, and Alfred Adler said people are hungry for significance. Significance.
They are all circling the same wound that they couldn't really name. And that's this, every human soul has a God shaped wound that only God can fill. Which is why Jesus stands up in John chapter seven. He says, let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as scripture says, rivers of living water will flow from within them.
You wanna know what Christianity is? It's not a set of beliefs that you gotta memorize. It's not a religious system. It is that you become the kind of person that brings a living water wherever you go. You become a river of life for the world.
Jesus doesn't offer you a technique. He doesn't give you a better morning routine. He gives you himself. This is not theory for me. Jesus saved my life.
Jesus saved my life. I know what it's like to be lost. I know what it feels like to be lonely and depressed. I remember taking sleep medication at 05:30 in the evening because I thought it's better to sleep than to live through the pain. At UCSB where I went to school, I convinced Christians to leave their faith because I was so angry at God.
Because the God that I grew up with was judgmental. He was religious. He was waiting for me to mess up so he could just disapprove of my life anyways. And I rejected that God. I rejected that version of God.
And I was so bitter, and I was so angry, and I was so lost. I researched. I studied. I studied Buddhism. I studied Islam.
I studied Mormonism. I studied New Age movement. I studied all of all of it. I was hungry for something. I was searching everywhere.
And then one day, when I was on my way to another party in college, I stumbled across a ministry called Jesus Burgers. How silly is that? A bunch of Christians handing out free cheeseburgers. I'm like, let's go. I grabbed their cheeseburger and someone from the ministry came up and said, hey, there's a police officer right over there.
You're drinking underage. Turn your ups up turn your cup upside down so you don't get to you don't get a ticket from the police officer. Not judgment, not apologetics, not condemnation, grace. Grace is a Christian word that could summarize the entire gospel, unmerited, undeserved favor. The ability to do what you can't do on your own.
And I was ambushed by the love of God. I ran back. I dropped the free cheeseburger. I ran back to my apartment. And I'm I got on my knees and I gave my life back to Jesus.
It started with Jesus coming into my life. It didn't happen overnight. I was still depressed. I was still anxious. I still had so much self hatred and loneliness and pain.
I had trauma. But I can tell you over the last twenty three years of walking with Jesus that Jesus lives. I can tell you because I see it every single Sunday. I see it on Wednesday. I see it on Tuesday.
I see it throughout the life of our church, but I see it in my own life. He's taken away the depression. He's taken away the anxiety. Through the partnership of of the power of the Holy Spirit, I've watched him take away trauma from my childhood and make me less reactive to my kids. Any parents wanna say amen?
Hallelujah. Jesus saves bro. The Jesus I know that I've gotten to know over the years wasn't angry. His message wasn't the message I heard growing up. He never said, believe in me so that you can go to heaven when you die.
That's not in scripture. In John chapter 10, he says, I have come that they may have life and have it to the full. Jesus is saying, you can have life before, life after death. His message is so it's called good news. It means when you come into faith, when you accept Jesus for who he really is, he begins to show you how to live the life that you desire to live in the first place.
A life marked by peace and wholeness and freedom and justice and righteousness and and healing. Jesus brings those things. And, yes, there are things offering you those things outside of Jesus, but he's the source of all good in the world. And I learned over time that Jesus invites us into a story that's been written. If you read the scriptures, the story of the Bible in a nutshell is simply this.
You and I were designed to live in perfect loving relationship with God. That in the beginning, everything was very good. And the way that we were supposed to love, live in loving relationship with God would extend a living and perfect loving relationship with everyone else. It's called shalom. Wholeness.
Everything held together. Imagine a world. Imagine a life where this functioned in wholeness and your and your own life, your own identity was not at war within itself, but you were living in perfect loving relationship with yourself. Wouldn't that be amazing? That's what God intended.
Only he didn't make us robots. He invited us to live out of free will. So we had a choice. We can live in loving relationship with God or do it our own way. And guess what we chose?
Do you know what I'm gonna say? You don't need to you don't need to look very far to recognize that you're not living in shalom right now. I mean, you have your Easter vest on and you look really good, but God knows in this room the suffering that's in this room is overwhelming. The pain and the brokenness, the distrust, the failures, the the lies, the deceit, the hiding, all of that is what we call sin. And sin comes into the story and vandalizes God's shalom.
But God so loved the world. He began a a mission to redeem what was lost. He sent his son into the world to die for our sins in order to redeem what was lost and invite humanity back into loving relationship now so that you cannot go to heaven when you die, but so that you can live in that right relationship with God, yourself, and everyone else right now. That's the message of Jesus. Jesus is not some cosmic traffic cop waiting for you to screw up.
He's not asking you to get your act together. And then come to him. He's saying, as you are. Because he loves you as you are and not as you shouldn't be. It says in Colossians, he forgave us our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us.
He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. I thought you had to earn your way back to God. Little did I know he was running after me. John seventeen three says, this is eternal life that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Eternal life is not a destination.
It's not based on what you do. It's a relationship that begins with inviting Jesus into your life. When I gave my life to Jesus, my life began to slowly change. He began to heal what was broken. He began to bring peace that I couldn't manufacture.
He's given me joy. He took away addiction. He's taken away self hatred. He gave me a new identity. But more importantly, he helped me forgive people I thought I would never forgive.
I was walking trapped in unforgiveness and he showed me how to forgive. And even more powerfully, he showed me all the wrongs that I caused and gave me courage to go to those people and say, will you forgive me? That's the power of the resurrection. He changed my life. I've seen deaf ears here.
I've seen cataracts fall off people's eyes in India. I've seen addict set free, broken bones healed. I've seen cancer diagnosis go away. The resurrection is real. I've seen my best friend fall to the floor in a moment prayer as God takes his greatest wound that his father left him and heal him once and for all.
Jesus is still transforming lives. But here's the deal. My sermon's not gonna save you. Historical reality of the resurrection, apologetics is not gonna save you. Nothing's gonna convince you.
What I've come to know after twenty three years is Jesus is a reality to be experienced. If I could give you an illustration that would summarize my understanding of the Christian life, it's simply this. Jesus is like a song that you hear. And it starts faint. You barely have a clue that it's even a song, and all of a sudden you're in your house and you're wondering where the song comes from.
And so you begin to walk around trying to look for the source, and all of a sudden next thing you know is you're moving the couch over here. You're taking the pictures off the wall. You're rearranging furniture because you wanna hear this song that is the most beautiful song. Next thing you know, everything in your house has been rearranged so that the song could become the source. You open up the doors.
You open up the windows, and then you realize over time that this song changed everything. And you want everyone to hear the song. And so the invitation for you is not to believe some ideas about Jesus, it's to hear the song for yourself. In Revelation chapter three verse 20, I love this because this is a picture of what Jesus says. He says at the end of of Revelation, here I am.
I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person and they with me. If you wanna know the real Jesus, he never forces himself. He invites, he pursues, he waits. If you wonder where the resurrected Jesus is right now, he's standing outside of the door of your heart waiting to be let in.
And at some point you either open the door or you refuse. He's not asking you to add a religious layer to his life that you're already living. He's asking you to trust him and believe. And that's the invitation of Easter. I've come to see that the reality of the resurrection is true.
Not only has it changed the world, the resurrection has the power to change your life, it's changed mine. And I wanna invite you this morning to believe in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. Why do you keep looking for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.
Can we pray?
Intro/Outro: Thank you for listening. For more information, please visit us online at garden.church.