Title – Hope for Tomorrow
Scripture reading – 1 Corinthians 15:12-22
Closing song – G5 Great is Thy Faithfulness.
Intro
[DP TIME] One of the things I have always been fascinated by is time travel. In fact
time travel is the topic of my favourite movie trilogy ever – [DP BTTF] Back to the
Future - the story of a teenager named Marty McFly, and his mad scientist friend Doc
Brown, and their adventures in a time machine built into a DeLorean motor car.
[DP TIME TRAVEL] I think Time Travel is fascinating because we all wonder what it
would have been like to go back in time and see the past. [DP WEST] What was it
like to be there during the Wild West, [DP DEC] or when the declaration of
independence was signed? [DP DA VINCI] What would it have been like to talk to
Leonardo Da Vinci or Johann Sebastian Bach? It would be nothing short of amazing.
I’ve always loved sci-fi films and films about mysteries, and I don’t know about you,
but many of the films about time travel and the future have a common theme. In the
film the answer will usually be that in the future, technology will be better and that will
enable us to live our lives the way we really want. Once technology is advanced
enough, then humans will truly be free to live life to the max.
And what you find in each of these films is that it never works out. Technology
doesn’t solve the problem of tomorrow, and often makes it worse. In fact I don’t know
of a time travel movie that has a happy ending that’s in the future, or that’s a result of
technology. Even in Back to the Future, the time machine itself was the problem.
Nevertheless, the reason time travel fascinates us is because we wonder what it
would be like to go into the future. How long will I live for? What will my life be like in
the future? Will my hopes and dreams come true?
These are the kinds of questions we all have. We’re all asking what tomorrow will
look like. And that’s because right now, every one of us has something that we are
hoping for.
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What I want to talk to you about today is how Christianity, specifically how the Jesus
and the message about Him, give us hope for tomorrow. The Bible tells us that the
answer to the problem of the future is in the past – and it has to do with Jesus.
[DP POINT 1] The need for hope
Like all people on planet earth, each of us has something we want in the future, and
that’s often a source of worry for us. [DP SURVEY] The Centre for Emotional Health
in Australia conducted a survey that asked people what they worry about, and the
good news is that Queensland ranks number 6 in the states and territories, with the
Northern Territory ranked as number 1. [DP NT NEWS] Of course if you’ve ever
seen the Northern Territory News, you’ll know that the biggest worries include things
like what to feed the crocodiles at the beach! [DP WORRIES] Men and women
basically worried about the same things, except the girls had my weight as number
three, and the guys had “doing well at work or school” as number 5. All in all,
Aussies are most worried about their careers and their future. Funnily enough, no
one worried about filling in surveys.
[DP NO WORRIES] And so it seems that the old adage – no worries mate – isn’t
exactly true – Australians do worry about things – we are all asking – what will my
future be like? And part of the reason we do that is because we all have and need
something called hope. [DP HOPE DEFINITION] The Oxford dictionary defines hope
as:
“A feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen”. In many ways
our hopes for the future are our expectations or desires for the future.
In fact hope is so important to human beings, you can’t live without it. [DP
AUSCHWITZ] One of the survivors of Nazi concentration camps in World War 2,
was a man called Viktor Frankl, who was a neurologist and psychologist, [DP
FRANKL] and after the war Frankl wrote a book called “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
In it Frankl talked about his experiences in the Nazi death camps, and he asked why
it was that some people survived and others didn’t. Prisoners in the camps had to do
hard manual labour, they had all their freedoms and privileges taken away, and
endured starvation because they weren’t fed properly, and if you got too sick and
couldn’t work, then you were killed. Some of prisoners just gave up and just died or
were killed – but others had an incredible desire to survive – what was the
difference?
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[DP QUOTE] Frankl writes:
“Any attempt at fighting the camp’s psychopathological influence on the
prisoner…had to aim at giving him inner strength by pointing out to him a
future goal to which he could look forward…It is a peculiarity of man that he
can only live by looking to the future…”
Frankl’s conclusion was that the people who had a will to survive were those who
looked to the future. Frankl noticed that between Christmas 1944 and New Year’s
1945, a large number of prisoners died because they thought they would be home
before Christmas, and it didn’t happen. In light of this event, Frankl said [DP QUOTE
2]:
“Any attempt to restore a man’s inner strength in the camp had first to
succeed in showing him some future goal”.
Frankl quoted the German philosopher Friedrich Neitzche who said [DP NIETZCHE]:
He who has a why to live can endure almost any how.
The Nazi Death camps are an extreme example of how a man or woman with hope
could endure extraordinary difficulty, and it proves to us how critical hope is to
human beings.
And you know that’s true of all of us right now as well – we can only live by looking to
the future.
[DP AUSSIE DREAM] An easy example would be the great Australian dream –
owning your own home. In the 1940’s, the American dream was a catchphrase that
meant the same thing. After the 2nd world war ended in 1945, countries like Australia
saw a large spike in births or a baby boom, and increases in things like
manufacturing and construction.
The Australian Dream was generally the hope of owning a simple one storey house
on a quarter acre block, complete with a hills hoist clothes line and a barbeque. The
man of the house was the breadwinner, and the lady of the house was the
homemaker. [DP HOIST & VICTA] On the weekends the man would mow the lawns
with something like a Victa lawn mower, and wash the car, which was generally
either a Holden or a Ford. The family would have the stereotypical beach holiday
once a year, and that was your life. [DP MIGRATION] In fact the Australian dream is
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one of the reasons so many of us, even Kiwis like me, moved here in the first place
[DP BLANK].
Immigrants came to Australia and went into their working lives with the expectation
that they too would enjoy the great Australian Dream – that was their hope. But
today many of us have had to change our expectations - the housing market in
Australia and New Zealand have ballooned out, and many families now struggle to
enter the market at all. The idea that a family could live off a single income has
largely been given up on, and today more often than not both parents have to work
to make ends meet. Perhaps the only thing that’s the same, is that the lawn still
needs mowing – the price has gone up but the grass is still growing.
Today even those who do achieve the great Australian dream are told they will need
massive reserves of cash to sustain them through their retirement, and the hope of
many Queenslanders is just to have enough left over for some fun on the weekend,
and that we’ll win the Origin again this year.
And so in the 70 years since World War 2 our hopes - our expectations - have
changed quite a bit, yet hope is something that we can’t live without. If you look at
something like Gold Lotto, it’s actually about hope. The product that Gold Lotto
actually sell isn’t lottery tickets – it’s hope. It’s a different future – a future that can be
yours for a $14.95 quick pick.
Everybody needs hope, because we are wired to look towards the future, and so the
biggest question in our lives is what will tomorrow bring?
[DP POINT 2] The problem of tomorrow
Now the question what will tomorrow bring is actually a very easy question to ask –
so what makes it so difficult to answer?
It’s difficult to answer because tomorrow is uncertain and that’s what makes
tomorrow a problem [DP BLANK]. Who here can honestly say what their life will be
like in a year let alone a month? It’s almost like when you’re driving behind a big
truck, and you can’t see what’s in front of the truck, or what’s on the road ahead, and
all you can do is keep following the truck. That’s what tomorrow is like for us – we
can’t see around the corner.
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Perhaps the biggest and main reason tomorrow is such a problem is because we all
die. I think it’s fair to say that if we didn’t die we would worry much less about
tomorrow than we do. We instinctively know that our time in this life is limited.
Whatever it is that you want to accomplish, you know that you need to somehow fit it
in the small window of time between your birth and our death.
Now sometimes you pick up books and you ask yourself “What were they thinking?”
Which is what I thought when I recently found [DP BOOK] “Death: A Survival Guide”
at my local library. In it, Dr Sarah Brewer talks about 100 ways that people die, and
how to avoid them. Now from a marketing point of view the book’s target audience is,
well, pretty much all of us. It should be a bestseller – so why isn’t it?
I think it’s largely because of the quality of many of the answers the author gives.
Each method of death comes with some advice about how to avoid dying that way.
Some of the deaths on the list are ones you actually want to know about how to not
die of – heart attacks, pancreatic cancer, electrocution – all helpful topics. But others
are just plain awful.
One of the entries she had was war, and the way she gave to avoid dying of war was
peace talks and negotiation. Obviously this book wasn’t written for people who are in
a war right now. Run might have been a better suggestion!
Then there’s dying of a plane crash, and her advice was don’t fly, but if you do, listen
to what the flight attendant says, and consider taking a parachute in your hand
luggage. Not sure the guys and gals at Customs would be OK with that.
In fact for her entry on how to not die of old age, the one we actually can’t avoid, her
first piece of advice was to die of something else listed in her book, which I imagine
would make you want a refund.
The reason a book like this doesn’t sell, is because we expect to die, and accept that
one way or another, this will be the lot of us all. In fact in her introduction, Dr Sarah
Brewer writes [DP INTRO]:
“…despite increased medical advances and an ageing population, the global
death rate remains constant at 100%. There is no cure. Despite millions of
pounds, dollars and euros spent on research, death remains the number one
killer world-wide. Good health is just the slowest possible route to getting
there”.
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It leaves you wondering, is the author a pessimist, or just a realist? [DP BLANK].
Now for those of us here today who would identify as being Christians, death has a
different meaning. In the Bible, death is an unnatural limitation that is placed on
humankind as a direct result of an incident that happened very early in our history. In
fact, in the Bible, death goes right back to the very first human beings, a man and a
woman called Adam and Eve.
They didn’t always know death in the way we know it today. They started out their
lives with the expectation that they wouldn’t die. God made them in a garden that
was called “Eden”, and them that within the garden they could eat the fruit of all the
trees except for one – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now that particular
tree didn’t have some special knowledge contained in it, but the act of eating from it
would be disobeying God and that would result in them knowing good and evil. And
as you can guess, they ate the fruit, and they were told that from now on they would
die, and as their descendants we too have the same fate. We have a 100% death
rate, and tragically we all commit what the Bible calls sin – we say wrong things,
think wrong things and do wrong things. Everybody sins.
Now aside from the problem of death, tomorrow often holds many other problems –
arthritis, cancer, osteoporosis, Parkinson’s disease and dementia – all the
degenerative diseases that we get make tomorrow a fearful thing. Couple that with
financial instability in an uncertain world, and the normal problems in working life and
relationships, and I think you’ll agree, life has its difficulties. But it turns out Nietzsche
was right when he said – [DP NIETZSCHE] He who has a why to live can bear
almost any how.
[DP POINT3] Hope for tomorrow
In the New Testament there’s a book written by one of Jesus’ followers called the
book of John, and in it there are many sayings of Jesus and stories about things that
happened to Him, including most famously His death and resurrection. And one of
those stories is about a problem that happens with three of Jesus’ friends – Martha,
Mary and Lazarus – two sisters and a brother in the same family. And this story is in
John Chapter 11 if you want to turn there in your Bibles.
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The two sisters, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus that their brother and
Jesus’ friend Lazarus is sick. [DP JOHN 11:3-5] John 11:3-3 says:
3 So
the sisters sent word to Jesus, ‘Lord, the one you love is ill.’
4 When
he heard this, Jesus said, ‘This illness will not end in death. No, it is
for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.’ 5 Now Jesus
loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. 6 So when he heard that Lazarus
was ill, he stayed where he was two more days, 7 and then he said to his
disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea.’
Now at this point in time, the people who knew Jesus had seen Him do a number of
miracles – they’d seen Him feed large numbers of people, in fact thousands of
people, with only small amounts of food; there’s a blind guy Jesus meets who’s been
blind His whole life, and Jesus heals Him and the guy can see for the very first time.
There’s a number of people who had long term health problems, and Jesus heals
them, and these sisters knew that [DP BLANK].
But when Jesus hears that his friend Lazarus is sick, he deliberately stays put for 2
days. He doesn’t rush off and snap his fingers and Lazarus is healed; he doesn’t just
send the messenger back as he had done at other times, and the people find the
sick person well; he stays right where he is. All the other people that he healed were
just people that He came across when He was travelling, randoms He didn’t know
them from a bar of soap. And yet when one of His friends is ill, He just stops.
And Jesus says to the messenger, that this sickness won’t end in death, and that this
is actually somehow about God’s glory. Jesus tells the messenger He’ll go back
down to Bethany, the town where his sick friend is, which is right next to Jerusalem
the capital of Israel. And the people say to Him, Jesus you were down there just a
little while ago and people were trying to stone you to death, they’re trying to kill you.
And the story continues [DP JOHN 11:11-15]:
11 After
he had said this, he went on to tell them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen
asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.’
12 His
disciples replied, ‘Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.’ 13 Jesus had
been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep.
14 So
then he told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead, 15 and for your sake I am
glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’
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Now that’s the kind of response you would expect from the people - if he’s only
asleep then you don’t need to go down there Jesus, at which point Jesus says He
means that Lazarus is dead. We still use that metaphor of sleeping for death today,
we still bury people like they’re lying down.
But when he finally gets there, His friend Lazarus has been dead inside a tomb for
four days, and their burial practices meant he would have been wrapped up in
bandages, we might imagine he looked a bit like a mummy. And Jesus’ friend Martha
comes out to Him, and she’s upset. She can’t believe that He took this long to get
here, and in verse 21 we read [DP JOHN 11:21-22]:
21 ‘Lord,’
Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not
have died. 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.’
Now that’s a very hard thing for her to say to Him. You can tell she’s angry, but that
she’s trying to keep her cool. And Jesus doesn’t defend himself, he doesn’t start
explaining why he was away - He just says [DP JOHN 11:23-24]:
23 …
‘Your brother will rise again.’
24 Martha
answered, ‘I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last
day.’
So at one of her most vulnerable points, she’s upset He wasn’t her earlier, and [DP
JOHN 11:25-27]:
Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes
in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me
will never die. Do you believe this?’
25
‘Yes, Lord,’ she replied, ‘I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God,
who is to come into the world.’
27
[DP BLANK] And so He heads off, and when the second sister, Mary, hears that
Jesus is there, she leaps up and she runs to Him, and all the people that were with
her ran after her wondering what was going on, and thinking she was running back
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to the tomb. And she falls down at Jesus feet, and she says the same thing – Lord, if
you had been here, my brother would be alive.
And John tells us, in one of the most famous passages of the Bible – Jesus wept.
And there it is. God had become one of us in the person of Jesus, this guy standing
here – Jesus - is God himself, and he’s entered into our experience so deeply, it’s so
personal for Him, that He weeps.
So Jesus walks up to the tomb, and tells the people to roll the stone away, and the
people are saying – this guy’s been dead for four days, by now he will stink. And He
insists that they roll the stone away, and He just says – Lazarus, come out! And the
guy walks out, still covered in all the grave clothes like a mummy, and then the
people unbandage him.
And there it is. What if, what if just for a moment, you could peek behind the veil of
time, and you could see that just maybe, death wasn’t the end? What if for just a
minute you had that moment where everything stops, because you’d just seen
something that shattered everything you believed about life and death and the
afterlife?
And that’s exactly what these people see – it’s all true. All the things he’s been
saying, all the things we read in the Bible, in the Old Testament, it is true. We saw
Lazarus die, we had to bandage him up and we had to lift him and put him in the
tomb, and roll a stone over the entrance because it’s gonna stink. And our whole
town has been weeping and wailing about this for four days, and there he is alive
right in front of us.
At the start of this story, Jesus says I’m glad I wasn’t there when it happened, so you
would believe. In fact at the end of John’s Gospel John tells us the reason he wrote
these things down in a book is so that we might believe. You see Jesus doesn’t just
have some compelling need to perform miracles. It doesn’t matter to Him where
Lazarus was when He died, it doesn’t even matter how long ago He died – it matters
that you see for yourself – that death is not the end of the story.
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Because that’s what we’ve been told all along isn’t it in our culture? Every day,
wherever you are or whatever you do, in movies, books, everything. Our culture says
YOLO – You Only Live Once - your story ends at death. Jesus says it doesn’t.
Perhaps the saddest part of this story is that some of the religious leaders, when
they heard and saw all this, it made them livid. They were angry that He had raised
Lazarus from the dead. [DP JOHN 11:53] The Bible even says:
53 So
from that day on they plotted to take his life.
Here’s a man, one of their own flesh and blood, Lazarus, come back from the dead,
and all they can think about is how the authority of Jesus will disrupt their lives – so
they work out how to get rid of him, and eventually they did [DP BLANK].
If the story of Jesus is new to you, Jesus was executed in his early to mid thirties.
The region that we would call the middle east and the Mediterranean, [DP
ROMANS] was ruled by the Roman Empire at that time in history, and Jesus’
country, the nation we call Israel, was occupied by Roman soldiers and governors
and they were the authority in charge of Israel that time.
[DP CROSS] And one of the things the Romans did was they made sure that if
anyone was stirring up trouble or perceived to be stirring it up in Jesus case, they
were killed, their death was in public, and it was gruesome. It meant being nailed to a
cross, and dying slowly for everyone to watch. The death of Jesus was actually a
joint effort between the Roman military and political leaders, and the Jewish religious
leaders. It’s a “my enemies enemy is my friend” kind of deal. The reason the
Romans crucified people like Jesus was so that everybody could see that anyone
who poses a threat to their Empire, winds up crucified, so don’t go getting any ideas
about overthrowing us.
The reason the Jewish religious leaders did this is because they had their own
expectations about who the Messiah would be, and what he would do. Their hope
was that the Messiah would basically be a liberator who would come along and kick
the Romans out, and usher in a new age where the Jews were restored to their
former glory and had control of their own land again, and Jesus wouldn’t do that.
They also didn’t like the fact that Jesus challenged a lot of their somewhat
questionable religious teachings, and also the fact that He wouldn’t play by their
rules, which they really didn’t like, and so they crucified Him [DP BLANK].
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And when I tell it like that, you might begin to think that that’s all there was to it.
Jesus was just another figure from history, who lived and died, as all men do, and
that’s that. However, His death wasn’t just an accident, and He wasn’t simply the
victim of a series of unfortunate events. It’s not just a sad story about His opponents
sweeping Him under the rug so the party could go on a little longer. In fact, Jesus
told His disciples a number of times that their expectation should be He will be
executed, but that His death would bring them to God. For the Romans and Jews
this was the way to get rid of Jesus, but for Jesus, this was the way to bring people
to God. Ironically, the death of Jesus is an intentional life-saving act done on our
behalf.
[DP COL 1] The Bible actually says,
19 For
God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through
him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in
heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
And this goes back to what we were talking about before – people die [DP BLANK].
The reason people die is because we are not at peace with God. There’s a barrier
between us, there’s a wall that we can’t walk through. If death is the original penalty
for sin, and if someone were to fix that problem, what would that person have to do?
That someone would have to die, but also give God a payment for sins – saying
wrong things, thinking wrong things and doing wrong things. The Bible tells us Jesus
dies in our place for our sins.
Now that might be all well and good, but where do we go from here? [DP
RESURRECTION] The other side of the coin is that Jesus rose again from the dead,
never to die again - He fought the battle with death and He won. [DP 1 COR 15:3-4]
In the Bible we read this:
3 For
what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died
for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was
raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
The Jewish leaders had actually missed what the Bible was pointing to – that Jesus’
death is a death that pays for sins, and a resurrection which gives new life. [DP
BLANK] Earlier on we looked at how Jesus raised His friend Lazarus from the dead,
but something important to notice was that although Lazarus came back from the
dead, it wasn’t a permanent thing – remember His sister Martha said – I know He will
rise again at the last day. What Jesus was doing was giving us just a peek at what
would happen in the resurrection, and He did that so that we might believe.
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The resurrection of Jesus differs in that it is permanent. [DP ROM 6:9] The Bible
says:
9 For
we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die
again; death no longer has mastery over him.
His resurrection isn’t temporary, it’s permanent. The temporary raising of the Lazarus
is what points us to the permanent raising of Jesus.
Now if He was raised from the dead, then maybe the problem of tomorrow could be
solved. [DP RESURRECTION If we could somehow come back to life, and if the
bodies we came back to life in didn’t decay, they didn’t get old and have problems,
then that would give us a real reason to have hope for tomorrow. Our resurrection
would be the thing that we looked forward to in the future.
[DP TUNNEL] And that means there is light at the end of the tunnel, and there’s a
real reason to keep going in life. There is more to our story and the grave is not the
finish line. The followers of Jesus do have something in their future which gives them
hope, and what’s critical for us to notice is that the hope that Jesus gives is a certain
hope. It’s not wishful thinking, it’s not a ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ Gold Lotto hope, it’s a
certain hope. It’s something we can bank on.
[DP DEATH BOOK] You know before I asked whether a book like “Death: A Survival
Guide” makes the author a pessimist or a realist? And I could ask the question does
the resurrection make me an optimist or a realist? And I think the answer is that it
makes me a realistic optimist. I expect that in this life, unless Jesus returns before I
die, I will die. That the realist part. But I also expect that He is coming back, and that
I will rise from the dead, and that’s the optimistic part. The resurrection should leave
us as realistic optimists.
The message that we’ve talked about today is called the gospel, the good news, and
I trust you can see why it’s good. When Jesus said to Martha that Lazarus would
come back to life, Martha replied that she knew he would rise on the last day, but do
you remember Jesus’ question to her? [DP JOHN 11:25-27] He said:
Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes
in me will live, even though they die; 26 and whoever lives by believing in me
will never die. Do you believe this?’
25
13
‘Yes, Lord,’ she replied, ‘I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God,
who is to come into the world.’
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And today Jesus is asking all of us the same question – He’s asking do you believe
this? [DP HOPE]. The hope that He offers is for those who turn away from their sin
and believe in Him, and I want you to know that everyone who is a Christian right
now at some point life they weren’t a Christian. If that’s you today, make sure that
you hear Jesus question, and you find out as much as you can about Jesus and how
His death and resurrection give hope for tomorrow.
What I’m going to do now is to pray, that’s just talking to God, and if you’ve never
prayed before, you don’t have to join in if you don’t want, you can just listen and
watch what I do. But if you want to join in you’re welcome to, all you do is close your
eyes and bow your head with me.
It’s great to be with you all this morning, today’s a great day to ask questions about
becoming a follower of Jesus.