Easter Devotional Message from David Jones

April 14, 2006

Dear family and friends of WCPC:

Lee Strobel is a former teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago and also Saddleback Community Church in California , two of the largest churches in the country. Before he became a pastor he was a journalist, the legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. He was also a skeptic. He investigated the claims of Christ for himself to see if they were true. Out of that investigation not only came forth his faith in the empty tomb but also two books, The Case For Christ and The Case For Faith. I recommend both to you, particularly if you have questions about whether or not this faith in an empty tomb makes any real sense.

Strobel makes a number of strong points concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ in The Case For Christ.  Let me share just a couple of them with you.  First, he writes the disciples were in a unique position to know whether the resurrection actually happened and they went to their deaths proclaiming it is true. Strobel writes, “Nobody willingly and knowingly dies for a lie.”  Second, he cites the growth of the Christian church in the weeks and the months following the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a growth that came from the Jewish community there in Jerusalem and Judea . He writes, “Jewish men, women and young people who were abandoning traditions and customs that had given them subsidence their entire lives and for generations.” Then finally, he talks about the church and its birth and how in four short centuries, it touched the entire western world.  He concludes, “the miraculous emergence of the church in the face of brutal Roman persecution ‘rips a great hole in history,’ a hole the size and shape of the resurrection.” 

If you’re an attorney you might argue all this is just circumstantial evidence. There is “no smoking gun.” But I think there is. I think the evidence is all around us.   

I have seen the evidence myself in lives that have been redeemed and shaped by the resurrected Christ. I have seen evidence, proof that He lives, as I have listened to the stories of hundreds over my twenty-plus years of ministry. To be certain some of those stories were much like mine (i.e., growing up in the Christian faith), but others were dramatic, people changing direction entirely and living an entirely different way. I have seen evidence that the tomb is empty when couples are reconciled, when families are reunited. I have seen it in the faces of men and women and young people on the mission field, both those who went to serve, and especially those we were serving. I have seen evidence as people have willingly sacrificed their time and money, and in some cases their reputation, for the sake of their faith in a tomb that was empty. I have seen evidence that goes beyond just a hope for eternity in the sky, but a life that can be fruitful and abundant and joyful right now, right here. Proof that the tomb was empty is all around us! 

Presbyterians don’t invite people to come to Christ solely because they might die tomorrow, because most won’t (thank goodness), but because you will wake up tomorrow and have to live. And the Christ of the empty tomb offers life here and now that is far better than any life lived apart from Him, and as a bonus, life eternal, that is a guarantee because the tomb really was empty!

See you Sunday!

 David Jones