LU Convocation - Mar.10, 10:30AM

worthy of your name in my jesus [Music] [Applause] [Music] the darkness [Music] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] my savior my refuge and my hiding place and you're my helper my healer my blessed redeemer my my saving grace [Applause] [Music] jesus [Music] jesus [Music] yes [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes everything is yours yours [Music] your yes my jesus thank you worship collective this is a sad day for all of us here at liberty university this is kela's mother and we're glad to have her with us today his brother and a friend of mrs banner and a friend of keelan and today mrs banner i want you to know that my wife and i want to express our sorrow for your loss at this time and as president of liberty university and all of our family here i want to express for them our condolence for your loss [Music] and of course we know that one day as believers in jesus christ we're going to see each other again and we're so thankful for that and today brother david is giving me a diploma here and it says liberty university the board of trustees on the recommendation of the faculty hereby confers the degree of associate of arts in disciplinary studies your son has completed the coursework for this degree and today we want to present this to you and as you look at this we know you're going to remember your son and we know it's going to be sad but just remember that here at liberty university we're so proud of him and we're honored today to present this degree that he has earned and deserves today and when you look at it we just hope that it will remind you that liberty university is praying for you and if we can do anything to help you in the future please let us know please let us know and these folks that you see here many of them and you your son keelan and they're going to be praying for you also yes i'd like for you to just hand this over to your son and then my wife would like to present you these flowers and we'd like to have a word of prayer with you today but all of you just bow your heads together as we pray for mrs banner this mother in her loss and her parents loss dear lord today lord we want to come along beside of her and comfort her but we know you're the only one that can really bring comfort and peace to the heart and the mind during a time like this [Music] and lord we just know that you're going to do that because you're a loving god dear lord we must confess today that we don't always understand why things happen in our lives but one of these days we'll understand so into then give mrs banner and her son and their family the comfort they need the assurance that you're a loving god and that one day you will explain to them why all of this happened and then they'll understand it better lord we think of that song that song that will understand things better and better one day but lord it's hard to trust you during this difficult time but we know you're a faithful god and we know this mother this brother and the family will lean upon you to bring comfort and sorrow and assurance to them and we ask you to do it in jesus name god bless you and i want you to know that we love you and the family here at liberty university loves you now they're going to sing for us kelan's favorite song oceans let's walk off the platform and enjoy and remember today thank you [Music] [Music] you called me out upon the waters [Music] and there i find you in the mystery [Music] [Music] upon your name and keep my eyes above the ways when oceans arise my soul will rest and you are my [Music] [Music] me you've never failed and you won't start now and i'll call upon your name [Music] and keep my eyes above the waves when oceans arise my soul will rest for i am yours [Music] let me walk upon the waters wherever you would call me take me deep within my feet could ever wander and my faith will be made stronger in the presence of my savior spirit [Music] and my faith will be made stronger in the presence of my savior [Music] wherever you and my faith will be stronger in the presence [Music] [Applause] is [Applause] [Music] made my [Music] when oceans arise my soul will rest in your embrace where i [Music] you know the essence of the christian faith really comes down to that very last short sentence i am yours and you are mine that's the very first thing that keelan hears when he enters the gates of heaven that i am yours and you are mine and this is your kingdom this is your home welcome home and i love that miss tina was telling me yesterday that was his favorite song a song that the globe the whole world has sung and has been ministered to but those lyrics have got to mean something very different familiar lyrics but they've got to mean something very different today when this room is filled with good friends who have been weeping for the last 25 minutes thinking about their friend and their loss but at the same time knowing that the hope of heaven is that if jesus is yours if jesus is yours and you are his that it's ultimately not a goodbye that we know that one day in heaven all who are his will be together again until then we'll miss him i've heard so many great stories uh from so many of you about just keelan and the impact that he had here i was telling tina i've heard nothing but just amazing stories about the son that you raised the brother that you have and so i just want to tell you we honor you today we think about you today he's made a great impact here and i think his impact will go beyond his time here on earth it'll continue to be an impact for us i want to say this to you uh about the family you know in moments like this what we want to do is we want to come around a family and one way that we honor them is that we fight vain imagination we fight the urge to want to tell a story that doesn't belong to us to tell we fight the urge to to get ahead on what it can be and so in moments like this i just want to say to you that let the family in due season give us permission to to memorialize at their pace to be able to tell the story at their pace and so that's important in just a life principle anytime you come to like a moment like this where you're just looking to figure out how to serve a family who's just hurting tina as a dad i think i can begin to try to understand but i'm not a mom and i know that this wound is deep but i just know that jesus is a healer and that um we're praying for you right now i know dr prevo prayed for you already but that whole family can we just put our hands and even if you're watching on on television today just if you would put your hand towards just the tv screen and just put your hand towards his family week we ask for comfort lord we ask for stamina it's just got to be so many sleepless nights in the last few days we ask against confusion and bitterness in moments like this our faith can get better or bitter and so we pray that this sweet family would just get deep in their faith they would rely on you god not walk away from you we pray that that even in in the family memorial on tuesday and then later on when we recognize and think about that on campus that you would god do immeasurably more than just honor keelan that you would point to the gospel in a moment like this and so just again peace we cast peace upon our sister our brother our sister right there and we prayed this in your name amen amen let's sing just one more chorus of this and then i'll come up and uh introduce our guests [Music] and i will call upon your name and keep my eyes above the waves when oceans arise my soul will rest in your embrace but i am yours [Music] today's scripture is from john 20 19 through 23. on the evening of that first day of the week when the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the jewish leaders jesus came and stood among them and said peace be with you after he said this he showed them his hands and his side the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the lord again jesus said peace be with you as the father has sent me i am sending you and with that he breathed on them and said receive the holy spirit if you forgive anyone's sins their sins are forgiven if you do not forgive them they are not forgiven this is the word of the lord you may have a seat i know that um there's a sense of gravity in the room today and um at the same time i know that god wants to leverage this moment in our lives and i pray that you would just be open to what he has through his prophet today through his messenger today he's really no guest to us at liberty university tyler staton is one of our most requested guests in the last few years he's been with us on multiple occasions and every time he's been here god's used them in a tremendous way just about every week i find time in my own schedule in my own spiritual growth to sit under his teaching as a pastor at oaks church in new york his podcast is available and not just me but my wife jennifer can tell you this my daughter grace can tell you this my son rudy that we just always have been able to learn from god's word from him love his heart for ministry he recently just last week released his first of many books all right and uh it's called searching for for enough and um this book will be available at our barnes and noble sign copies of it will be available all day today so i want to encourage you to go and support that but that's not why he's here he's really here for this morning and for tonight to unpack god's word for us and my heart for you in this moment is that when times like this happen and all of you are a little more vulnerable a little more emotionally leaning in to not waste it to allow this to be a moment where you really are thinking about eternity and thinking about things that matter and some of the cloud just gets a little more clear and that you just come and you're just soft in god's hand as god's word is unpacked for us okay so let me pray for us and then uh pastor tyler will come and preach god's word for us father we love you we thank you for your word that's a lamp onto our feet we pray that your word would bring conviction and comfort and your word would bring clarity and your word would even bring action that we wouldn't just be hears of it as james says but doers of it empowered by your holy spirit we love you now just again give my brother wisdom and discernment and knowing what to say what not to say when to say it we pray this in your name amen hey can we put our hands together and just welcome tyler to liberty [Music] so a friend of mine who's in recovery invited me to go to an a.a meeting with him to step onto his turf and i met him outside of this old uh church right in lower manhattan it was the west village in the midst of rush hour and he walked me into this dimly lit church basement where a bunch of old creaky metal folding chairs we're packed into every corner filling this entire room and i'll never forget sitting down in the back row and watching this meeting as it started 12-step meetings open with people who are counting their first 30 days of sobriety identifying themselves and being celebrated so it opened something like this hi i'm steve i'm an alcoholic 11 days and everyone claps glenn alcoholic 17 days james alcoholic 23 days and then this kid looked like he had to just be in his early 20s stood up visibly nervous like hands quaking forgot to even tell us his name he just said one day i want you to hold on to that moment because i want to come back to it but you're going to need a whole lot more context to see it like i saw it so as david really graciously just mentioned i released a book last week called searching for enough the high wire walk between doubt and faith and those are the two themes that i want to talk to you about today tonight i want to get all into the weeds of doubt but this morning i want to talk about faith now i am a 33 year old mentally healthy educated relatively well-read person and i've based my entire life on the belief that an ancient uneducated not particularly well-read jewish peasant opened up his own grave somewhere near the turn of the first century and i know how that sounds but one of the things that distinguishes christianity from every other major faith movement in history is that it traces its origins back to a definitive historic event that is not true of judaism buddhism islam or atheism that event is called resurrection and there's real historic evidence that might surprise you to the validity and legitimacy of that event but the truth is i'm not really very interested in presenting the evidence like a lawyer because one of humanity's worst kept secrets is that we don't actually choose the direction of our lives based on carefully weighing the evidence as if we're on a jury we live on moments of clarity the really important decisions that we make are not the product of left brain rationality alone rationality is definitely a part of it but there's always this moment when everything just clicks everyone regardless of your preferred brand of belief or unbelief lives on moments of clarity i'm talking about things like that one dance at that other guy's wedding reception when all of a sudden it hits you that you love her and everyone else faded into a blurry background and suddenly every other plan that you had made for your life slid into second place at best or that one camping trip when you were sitting by a campfire at night and suddenly you just knew i've got the nerve to move to the big city because failure involving risk is actually more livable for me than playing it safe and wondering what could have been or that one class when that one professor said that one throwaway line but all of a sudden you knew i'm changing my major and yeah sure that means risking my identity and my security and probably backtracking a semester or two but staying on the path that i started on might mean risking my soul who you love where you live what you do if you are lucky enough to have had a choice in any one of those things your choice did not come through mathematical left brain thinking alone there was a moment when it clicked and here you are there's this one scene in the movie shawshank redemption which is a painfully dated reference but such a classic so anyway there's this one scene where a prisoner named andy locks himself inside the warden's office and he begins to play a piece from mozart over the prison's pa system and and all of the prisoners stop what they're doing and everywhere in the prison everyone just lets the music wash over them and andy's sitting in the in the high back chair of the warden's desk and he puts his feet up on the desk and his head behind his hands and just breathe and the guards are all banging on the door and looking at him through the little glass and he just smirks at them and turns up the volume and then leans back again and at that point the epic narration of morgan freeman says for the briefest of moments every last man in shawshank felt free what is that is that just an adult interrupting other adults with a childish moment in a fairy tale or is that a man pulling back the curtain on a truer reality than metal bars and counting days until my next court date is that senseless romanticism or is it a profound moment of clarity and on which of those foundations should you build your life do you build your life on all the ordinary moments of monotony when you're counting the days go by in your cell or do you build your life on the one transcendent moment that seemed to pierce through all of the others so yeah i believe in the resurrection of an ancient jewish rabbi with no credentials but that's not because i watched the trial tapes and bought the defense argument it is because there was a time in my life when that story intersected with the story of my life in such a profound way that the story of jesus was the only possible explanation for the story that i was living in it was a moment of clarity and it awoke something in me that will not go back to sleep it wasn't an empty tomb that did it for me it was the presence of the living god so before resurrection was an occasion for pastel colored sweaters and egg hunts and holiday brunches it was a shocking unexpected moment of clarity called resurrection and it still is and as i've come to understand it resurrection is an encounter with the living god that completely redefines a few different things creation sin suffering death life and love and so i want to tell you that story and let you decide what to make of it so first resurrection is about creation contrary to popular belief the resurrection story doesn't start with jesus it starts in genesis creation is divided in to six days or depending on your reading of the text six time periods the first five days god fills the earth with everything to support human life there's sun and moon land and sea plants and animals and then on the sixth day god creates human beings and he puts his breath in them so people are set apart as the high point of creation the masterpiece of the great artist bearing his image the point on page one of the bible is this if you want to look at creation at its high point at its most glorious don't travel to the swiss alps or book a flight to fiji just look at a person an elderly woman on her last leg a businessman on his way to work a screaming infant or just yourself in the mirror he she you are god's masterpiece there is nothing that prepares you for being in the room when a baby is born like you are laughing and crying at the same time even though you promised yourself you're not that kind of person and this mysterious love comes alive in you for this tiny screaming infant who so far has only made you pull an all-nighter and then hold them while they're still covered in gross liquids i've been to colorado in the spring in vermont in the fall i've sat with my feet dangling off a cliff overlooking the mediterranean and i've walked on the cobbled streets of an old colombian city i've seen the sun set in paris and the sun rise in california i've stargazed in wyoming and i've spent many many late nights and early mornings on rooftops in new york city and none of it compares to that tiny sterile hospital room at 1am in august when i met hank my oldest son and he came into the world for the first time this says genesis is the reaction of god over every human life and yet of course that the corrupted world that we live in does have a way of drowning out that first sense of value right you are the masterpiece of the original artist but you'd also change a few things about yourself if you could you'd rework this bit of your personality and change that about your complexion you'd probably tighten up your abs and change a few things about your body you'd rearrange your cheekbones and rewrite this chapter of your past so genesis 1 sounds beautiful but we also all struggle to believe it my friend john tyson introduced me to the artwork of michael awuna who's an african artist and he did a particular series called infinite essence and in this series he hand painted the skin of every one of his subjects and then using ultraviolet light took a photo so that for the span of the flash of a camera they could see their bodies the way that he saw them all the time he slowly deliberately hand painted each one of them so that for a second they could catch a glimpse of themselves through the eyes of the artist and when he showed the subjects these images and some of them wept because you get a glimpse of yourself through the eyes of the way the artist sees you all the time it moves you it brings you to tears to glimpse yourself through the eyes of god does the same like there's this homesickness for an identity that you had at first but then it was taken from you before you really got to feel it and walk around and know what it felt like to wear that first identity and you're still longing for that true home to see yourself just for a moment through the eyes of the creator that is the only plot in which resurrection makes sense to believe in resurrection is to believe that the universe is god's good creation his great passion is to heal and redeem it but it's also so much more personal than that it is to believe that i am god's great creation and his great passion is to heal and redeem me that's why god would come in human form because he dignifies our bodies by living in one and he dignifies our pain by feeling it himself and he dignifies our emotions and our psychology and our family histories and our inner wounds by taking them all on himself and at the end of all of that he says i still see you the way i saw you first would you have the courage to believe me when i say that this is who you are but why is it that we have such a hard time buying that first sense of value well it's because resurrection is also about sin gk chesterton wrote a book titled what's wrong with the world back in 1910. when there was plenty of talk about social progress the world's getting better we can now all agree on ideas like equality and freedom and justice so surely that's where we're headed and he added to that conversation saying you're after all of the right things but you're ignoring a key part of the diagnosis so he wrote this book what's wrong with the world and his conclusion was essentially me i'm what's wrong with the world and the world doesn't get sorted out unless i do and that's actually not a primitive conservative religious idea freud plato martin luther king jr gandhi and jesus all agree on that point i've got two categories of problems in my life i've got problems outside of me and problems inside of me my problems outside of me go by names like my checking account my upstairs neighbor and a virus that's forced the entire world into hiding problems inside of me go by names like my ego anger my lack of empathy and my obsessive preoccupation with my own comfort the way i deal with problems outside of me is mostly blame and attempts at control the way i deal with problems inside of me is to select one aspect of my life magnify it and then ask it to hold the full weight of my identity so i take my status or my reputation or my social life for my appearance or whatever and it becomes a way for me to affirm my own importance or a way for me to ask you to affirm my very fragile sense of importance it's an attempt to regain the genesis value that we lost without the god who gave it to us in the first place a way to become god-like without god to borrow a phrase and that is what the bible calls sin and sure that word's been abused by some and so it may reek with emotional baggage for you so switch out the vocabulary if you'd like but just do not ignore the diagnosis everyone's got two buckets of problems in their life outside and inside problems sin is not a condemnation and certainly not an accusation it's just an honest diagnosis it's a trip to the doctor where you describe your symptoms and then discover oh there's a name for this disease the the trouble with pretending i'm healthy when i've got all of the symptoms is that i miss out on healing the trouble with sin at the end of the day is that it gets in the way of love there's all sorts of ways to describe the symptoms of sin within ourselves but one of the most stark is this it's our inability to love it's that one conversation near the beginning of the brothers karamazov when an old man approaches the elder and confesses something that's nagged him his entire life i love people but the more i love people in general the less i seem to love people in particular then he goes on to describe his symptoms i'm so full of love for the world but i'm incapable of living in the same room for another person for just 48 hours because this one has a cold and keeps blowing their nose and that one takes too long eating dinner my actual love runs cold the closer i get to the people that i love in my imagination the elder just responds soberly active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams the idea of love in my imagination is always so much better than my attempts to love an individual person wouldn't you agree does that line up with your experience there's a gap between the intentions of my in my imagination and the outward expression of those intentions what is the disease that those symptoms point to jesus once said something a lot like this when he was at a dinner party at a priest's house the priest criticized jesus for keeping a prostitute in the company of his disciples prophet if this guy were a prophet he would know exactly who he's brought to my dinner table and jesus response to him is really interesting he says suppose a wealthy man learned pocket change to one guy and a fortune to another and neither of them was able to pay him back so he just decided to forgive the dead of both which one of those people will love him more i guess the one with the greater debt exactly to be forgiven much is to have much capacity to love and to be forgiven little is to love little you see the trouble with sin is not that god's got a tight moral grid and coloring within the lines is how we show him that we really like him it's that sin inhibits us from doing what we were made to do best to love and the only antidote to sin is forgiveness to be forgiven much is to have much capacity to love first john chapter one if we confess our sins he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness forgiveness is god's way of giving you back the genesis worth that you had at first before you had a chance to earn it or lose it it's his way of restoring your value without you needing to prove your worth resurrection is about god being loving enough not about us becoming good enough the only way to express the love that you inherit it is to receive it freely without merit that's forgiveness that is why the only antidote to sin is forgiveness it's the only cure for the disease that you and i carry eugene peterson says it this way god does not deal with sin by ridding our lives of it as if it were a germ or mice in the attic god does not deal with sin by amputation as if it were a gangrenous leg leaving us crippled holiness on a crutch god deals with sin by forgiving us and when he forgives us there is more of us not less so when jesus woke up from death and walked back out into the world he didn't come with big ideas about social reform he dealt with the core issue you are forgiven you're free free to go unforgiving free to go unloving and resurrection is also about suffering human beings are meaning seeking creatures we tell ourselves stories that integrate the fragmented events of our life into some kind of coherent whole so that we can make sense of it all and the greatest disturbance to our self-storytelling is suffering i had a story i was comfortable believing and telling myself until my fiance died in a car accident because a drunk driver ran a red light or until i walked out of a doctor's office with leukemia diagnosis as a teenager or until i was manipulated and abused by someone that was supposed to love and protect me that's why the psychologist david benner says ultimately we need a meaning strong enough to make suffering sufferable this is the crucial test of any life meaning it has to help us live life for it to do that it has to help us cope with suffering the most scandalous part of jesus to our modern ears is his claim to be lord but the most scandalous part of jesus to ancient ears was that he the lord would suffer a god who bleeds a god who weeps a god who dies god on a throne sure god on a cross never and i understand why it's such a shock that god would suffer but i also think that a god who doesn't suffer isn't a god worth trusting because without the courage to take his own medicine to crawl into this world and feel the darkness and helplessness along with the rest of us how could god be trusted how could he be relatable without suffering how could god help anyone else cope with suffering how could god tell a story that our real lives actually fit with him there was a public opinion poll done in austria to determine what traits the general public finds most admirable in others and they discovered that contrary to pop culture it is not the great athletes or artists or actors or politicians the most universally admired trait according to this broad study is to go through something difficult with your head held high everyone you respect the most has had the wind completely taken out of them a time or two usually publicly and dramatically and at the end of your own life you're gonna look back on your great moments of accomplishment like success or recognition and you'll look back on great moments of pleasure like that one vacation or your 40th birthday party or but the moments that you'll hold nearest will be the suffering that you endured with dignity those are the moments that most profoundly made you who you are and most profoundly made your life worth living those are the moments that filled you with meaning human beings are meaning seeking creatures and in this life in this world meaning is tied to suffering jesus and only jesus makes suffering sufferable because he dealt with suffering by suffering and he made a way through suffering by suffering and he looked me in the eye in the midst of my suffering by suffering so resurrection is also about suffering not a way to escape it but a way to endure it a story that makes suffering sufferable is there any other story that can do that resurrection's about death a few months back i sat down at this coffee shop across from corey i barely knew him he'd come to our church a handful of times and we'd never had a real conversation so i sit down in front of him without even saying his name he just said so do you really think that there's a heaven and a hell on the other side of all of this that's an interesting way to get to know somebody but there's a backstory to all of this you see corey was living his life as a in the city as a musician he was gigging around most nights enjoying himself and then quite suddenly his father passed away and he flew back to ohio and paid his respects and when he got back to the city his world of color had faded into black and white grief has a way of doing that it just drains the color out of everything and so at 38 his fun free life had lost all of its luster and there he was sitting in front of the pastor of the only church he had ever willingly attended and with tears behind his eyes asking do you think that there's a chance that when my father breathed his last breath there was something on the other side that might have been some kind of relief and a nagging thought i've had ever since that conversation is this i'm a christian pastor and i'm almost never asked about death see i pastor a mostly young church in a forever young city and so we all pretend like we're going to live forever in the ancient roman world where the early church took root there was a law passed that you could not bury someone within the city limits and so they created a separate city called the necropolis which literally means city of the dead it was a massive graveyard the romans were the first society to find a way to live separate from the awareness of their own death but they certainly weren't the last i mean we spend our entire lives trying to prolong our youth age-defying makeup and dietary supplements here's some red mud from the ryan's from the minds that make your forehead tighter than a toddler's right our celebrities barely look human in their old age because of all the work that they've had done and then when the end is so close that we can't deny it anymore we hide the elderly away in nursing homes and the dying are cared for by strangers in hospitals in contrast christian monks traditionally have always placed a graveyard next to their place of worship and inscribed every tombstone with the same inscription what you are now we used to be what we are now you will be see the belief was and is that the spiritual life is properly lived in light of the death awaiting you and we've replaced that with just pretend you live forever and cross the death bridge when you come to it so let me remind you of something that you definitely know but find most days a way to live without awareness of you are going to die one day in the not too distant future it won't matter what you have for dinner tonight or how good you look with your shirt off or if you get accepted to this or that program or if you book that role or how important you feel when you walk into a particular room you are going to die and you aren't taking any of that with you are you ready to leap into the void stripped bearer of everything you've accumulated that makes you feel comfortable because that's what crossing the death bridge when you come to it actually means you don't have to be a monk but at least dignify your life by considering the options every successful journey starts with an end in mind you don't set out to go anywhere without knowing where you're going a life that doesn't consider the end is just an aimless wander the french philosopher luke faree says all philosophy is really about one thing death and in his book a brief history of thought after he explores a number of different philosophical routes to dealing with death he openly an unbeliever writes this the christian response to mortality for believers at least is without question the most effective of all responses this is how a few unremarkable little house churches outlasted the romans by the way it would seem to be the only version of salvation that enables us not only to transcend the fear of death but also to beat death itself and by doing so in terms of individual identity rather than anonymity or abstraction it would seem to be the only version that offers a truly definitive victory only jesus offers a picture of love that's stronger than death and that is why an agonizing public execution is not a barbaric outdated grotesque religious idea it's a stunning picture of love because when jesus carried the cross on his back he was carrying the weight of the world suffering on his back he was holding the weight of what all of us are forced to bear and the claim of resurrection is there's a kind of love that outlives death so i'm sitting across from corey and he's got tear tracks streamed down his face and a cup of coffee's getting cold on the table do you really think that on the other side of that my dad might have experienced relief and he wasn't asking me that as a distant consideration this wasn't a philosophical question for him this question had a name and a face and a story what would you tell corey ernest becker writes resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing it means love gets the final word and that resonates with me that rings true somewhere deep in my spirit it feels like mozart playing over the prison pa system because without the resurrection of jesus corey is left in his grief there is no he's in a better place there's no he's at rest there is nothing it's the lights went out and that person that lived within your father's body with a personality and a sense of humor whose arms made you feel safe when you were a little boy and whose voice you can still hear when you close your eyes and whose little idiosyncrasies you can't help but imitate that soul who lived and loved and regretted and tried and failed and laughed and wept oh all that was for naught just meaningless happenstance without the resurrection of jesus that is the only story and as a society we have gotten so great at pretending but the undeniable truth is this death is our greatest enemy and death wins 100 of the time unless there's a kind of love that outlives death but i'm talking about more than just future security because resurrection is also about life i mean you think that jesus followers who were hiding out in fear in an upper room would have been relieved when they met the risen lord but the reaction of every last one of them is just more fear they were more afraid after resurrection than they were before because resurrection may make our ultimate future secure but it makes our present life a whole lot more dangerous but it also makes fear worth walking through finally something bigger than just the endless unsatisfying toil of project self finally something big enough to give my whole life to not just my finding final resting place but my here and now living breathing life what was it exactly that filled them with fear and simultaneously empowered them to walk through that fear it was that same old invitation to take up their cross to carry right along with jesus the weight of the whole world's suffering to bear it on their backs but to also believe that there is a victory over suffering sin and death that's a story big enough to terrify you but it's also deep enough to live for there's this troubling rumor that's been going around the last hundred years or so that the bible ends with god sweeping everyone off into some far away paradise and if that's what you've been looking forward to i'm so sorry to disappoint you but that's just not the ending that's got a whole lot more to do with plato than it has to do with jesus the juxtaposition at the heart of the bible isn't heaven and hell that's definitely in there don't get me wrong that's in the plot but the main juxtaposition is between heaven and earth god created them to be one and our sin drove heaven and earth apart the mission of god is to reunite what sin separated there are about a dozen explanations of the gospel in the book of acts and not one of them majors on going to heaven instead of hell every single one of them focuses on heaven invading earth in this present life god's not trying to scare people into heaven he's trying to invade earth with heaven you see the surprise of resurrection wasn't that there was hope somewhere beyond this life all of the jews already believed that the surprise was that there was hope here and now within this life not just hope and some far-off future but that heaven is invading earth right now in this present moment true fruitful eternal life gets planted in this hard soil and it grows up right here along with the weeds resurrection is not just a better way to die it's also a better way to live to redeem the present and participate in the arrival of heaven on earth and finally resurrection's about love because if you consider the claims of jesus you'll find it really hard not to like him i mean he's surprisingly reasonable and attractively winsome but it's not an empty tomb or a likable teacher that heals our places of doubt pain and disappointment it's not that that fills us up with healing a reasonable explanation for your soul's bruises will not heal your soul but encounter jesus personally and he fills your ordinary life with his holy spirit with his living presence and that is the most profound sense of love the sociologist alan de batan writes we're all crazy in some way the crucial question at the depth of any relationship is not is he crazy it is what are the ways that you are crazy what parts of your life have been blocked by fear how exactly do you self-destruct in what ways have you not been loved jesus's primary concern isn't to convince the world through power end game isn't that one day you'd believe in him the way you believe in gravity it's that you'd receive his love and that's why jesus did not burst forth from his tomb and triumphant public spectacle he burst forth in humble personal love because that's the only thing that lasts forever the only thing that outlives death so with all of that in mind we end where we started i'm sitting next to my friend in this metal folding chair in the basement of a church in the west village remember steve 11 days glenn 17 days and then this kid one day in silence hung in the room just like that and then i just heard the squeak of one of those metal chairs across the room and i looked over and and this old man was standing up who i later learned was over 30 years sober he stands up and he didn't make his way for an aisle he started climbing over the rows of chairs that were in front of him just moving people out of his way to get across the room to this kid and he walks all the way across the room and he just wraps this guy up and this kid just falls limp and begins weeping in his arms as this old man just holds him and the rest of the room breaks into applause because it's one thing to hear that a guy is trying to fight his demons and get sober but it's another thing entirely to know exactly what it feels like to go out for a couple of beers and then wake up on the sidewalk to hide your addiction from everyone while it eats away at you to vomit on your own desk at work to urinate on your bedroom carpet to ruin your marriage disappoint your kids and hurt everyone you love the most how bad does it have to get for a 23 year old to stand up in front of a room of strangers and say i need help and it's day one that old man across the room knew exactly how bad because he lived it what if there's a better story what if there's a god who knows your wounds not theoretically but exactly personally because he lived it what if there's healing so complete that there's nothing left to hide and what if there's love so full that it swallows up shame resurrection is about love it's god's way of swimming across all the neat rows of chairs so that he can wrap his arms around anyone who is bold enough and crazy enough and foolish enough and desperate enough to say i need help and it's day one in the presence of jesus all those places of shame are brought to an end he turns hiddenness into a lie and being seen into coming alive and he makes the places of pain doubt self-destruction and fear the loveless places the place of encounter so what is that is that just a fool playing mozart in the warden's office is it a fairy tale and nothing more or is it pulling back the curtain on a greater truth an event that redefines everything and a god who keeps appearing to everyone brave enough to say one day is it a stunning moment of clarity worth building your life on i'd just say this that if that is not the god you know this is too good to hold yourself together it's too good to resist it's too good to put off for another day will you stand i'll pray over us spirit of the living god i pray for the believing that their lives would be this that they would leave behind a string of empty tombs that however many times they find themselves wandering from this resurrection event that redefines everything that they would come back and they would be refilled and that they would come alive again and so if there's one of these pieces today suffering or love or death that is ringing true and new within them would they come alive in that way again with you today jesus and live in this present moment the power of your resurrection and i pray for the unbeliever nothing more terrifying than placing our faith in you for the first time and for some it's we meet you the first time we hear about you and others of us linger around you jesus for decades before we see you really see you and so for those for whom today is a stunning moment of clarity i pray that they would have the courage to leap and be found by you in jesus name i pray amen amen thanks brother hey tyler will be with us yeah let's just thank him for sharing god's word um remain standing i'll dismiss this in just a second but uh tyler will be with us tonight at six o'clock and at eight o'clock obviously the eight o'clock is live streamed all of our tickets for tonight all of our reservations are full like they always are by the way if you want to get in they get posted on monday morning you know and typically they just immediately fill up so just just a thought for you just monday morning is the best time to try to grab one but uh the eight o'clock is always live streamed and then obviously we'll go to community groups they're about 250 i think from what i've been told books that have been signed already at the barnes and noble just for today and so we want you to go and grab those last thing i want to say is uh in moments like this i think the one-two punch of it is really just the gravity of the reality of the loss that we're all kind of experiencing with keelan going to heaven and also really the gospel that was clearly presented today kind of brings us to a place where there might be a next step for some of you to talk to a counselor some of you uh even keelan's loss even if you didn't know him personally might bring you even more emotionally in this incredibly hard season as we deal with a pandemic and we deal with grief and we deal with uncertainty and we deal with financial stress and all these things that the enemy loves to use to take our eyes off of the real prize right um and our mental health isn't where it needs to be so many of us pressing down on that in this moment and pissing down on us so if you're at a place where you just need counseling on the hill the shepherd's office is always available for you you can immediately talk to your community group leader or your residence shepard or your rs or your ra or your rd we'll we'll find the time to make sure that we're sitting with you available to you and then if you need professional counseling our professional counseling department is a great handoff from that initial point of connection and so the enemy would love you to be isolated and not communicating in moments like this but i'm just telling you god wants you to walk in community and if you're hurting right now if you're going through a tough season right now this is that moment where you go it is a step of courage to step in and say i don't want to do this alone so talk to someone we'd be honored to be able to be available to you speaking of availability uh miss banner tina has just graciously agreed to come and side stage here and just to be available for a little while i know we have about 30 of you that we were able to make room for today in this in this room who were friends with keelan and you'd want to maybe hug uh you know miss banner's neck and uh and just uh give award of a condolence and kindness to her and so she wanted to do this i said i don't want to put you on the spot would you mind she said i'd love to to be here for them and and vice versa and so as soon as we dismiss here she will be sidestage if you want to come if you'll make a line and then if you'll also be aware of just again the stamina that it takes to walk through a moment like this and so you know be be aware of the time that you take and the toll that it takes but at the same time pour in you know what i mean and let's be there for one

Channel: Liberty University

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Id: 1DJ7JiClKxI

Length: 63min 54sec (3834 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021