Made for More

Many of us are living a life we never really wanted for ourselves. We don’t realize we were made for more than dead relationships, dead dreams and dead ends. Jesus is alive and he’s calling us by name, wanting us to experience the resurrection Life only he can give. Will you answer his call?

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If you are visiting, guys, we are so glad that you're here. My name is Ryan, uh, one of the pastors here at Impact, and what a blessing and a privilege to be able to gather together as the church and to remember the greatest events in human history the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. That's what all of this is about. Make no mistake. All of our faith, all of our life, everything we we preach, we teach, we live, it is all about the resurrection. Right? The Apostle Paul said, if there was no resurrection, then we're still dead in our sin. But because Christ has risen, we can have new life in him. And that is definitely something that we can celebrate. I don't know if you guys have ever at any point in your life had a moment where you kind of just step back and went, there's gotta be more than this. I had to be made for more than the life I'm living right now. Anybody ever experienced that? Right? This is the whole reason in our country we have midlife crises. It's why people buy convertibles. Because there's this whole moment of dawning of going, wait, this is not the life I signed up for. And we're not really sure how we got to where we are. And we certainly have no idea how to get out. I think back years ago when my sister met her now husband, and at the time they were just dating. And so he was kind of one of those crazy adventure guys. And he one day asked me, Hey, you want to go and hang out a little bit? I'm like, Yeah, sure, man, let's go grab a coffee. That sounds good. He goes, I was actually thinking if you want to go rock climbing. You know, coffee, rock climbing, same thing. So if you've been around a little bit, you know, I am not a fan of heights. I don't like heights at all. They freak me out. I don't even like being on a high ladder. The second story of my house never gets Christmas lights. That's how much I don't like heights. And so there's something that came over me, though, in that moment where I might, this is a guy that my sister's dating, and I need to be able to, you know, be a man and impress. And so my ego wrote this check that my my body couldn't cash. And so I said, sure, let's go. So I told them and warned them, like, I'm not a fan of heights. I've never been rock climbing. So make sure it's just kind of like an easy thing. It's oh, yeah, no problem. His definition of easy was very different. His definition of easy was climbing lily rocks out in Idawild, which is about a thousand-foot climb. And it's just straight down into the valley of Idawild. So we had to hike two miles in carrying the big packs. By the time we got to the base of this mountain, I'm already tired. And I wanted to go home at that point. But we still had to do the climb. So we hike a little bit more up, and then there's the point about halfway up where you had to kind of climb out onto the rock face, and it is just flat, it is straight up, and when you look down, all you see is ground about 500 feet beneath you. And it is terrifying. So he walks out, no problem. He's done this a hundred times, and he said, Look, I'm gonna go up, I'm gonna set the little, what are they, pitch or something like that? You set up top, and he goes, I'll climb ahead of you, I'll get you set, and then you're you'll be tethered to me, and then you can climb up after. You know, it sounds so easy, no problem. It's like, okay. So he just disappears, Spider-Man, out in the side, and he climbs all the way up, and I kind of wait for a little bit, 10 minutes go by, and finally he kind of yells down. He's like, Okay, we're all set. Just kind of come out around to the to the to the rock face and then start climbing. And I'm looking out there and I'm going, come out around to what? There's no handles, there's no grips, there's nothing. I was like, what do I do? Where do I go out on? He's like, just kind of climb out on the ledge. Do you mean the crack on the side of the rock? This is where I learned that that words mean different things to different people. There's no ledge, it was just this little crack. I saw a bug fall off of it. I mean, there was nothing there. So I managed somehow just to put my toes in there and just kind of like hold on for dear life and manage to kind of climb up. We got about, I don't know, maybe two-thirds of the way up. I am so tired, I'm exhausted, my legs are shaking. I feel like I can't do this, but I am in the middle of this rock, nowhere to go. And I remember having this moment where I was waiting for him to go set the next little little anchor. And I leaned my head against the rock, and I'm still holding on for dear life, and I'm tired and exhausted. I remember thinking to myself, this is just a nightmare. This isn't real. I'm gonna open my eyes, I'm gonna be comfortably sitting in my living room watching Sports Center. Like, that's what's happening right now. And I opened my eyes, I was still there. And that was the moment where I kind of looked and went, How did I get here? What sequence of decisions led me to be in this place and how do I get out of this situation? Guys, some of us, it's not climbing rocks, it's every day, isn't it? It's waking up every day thinking, How did I get into this place and how do I get out of it? Because this is not the life I had planned for myself. Now, one of the things that we love about Scripture as we look to God's word, there is nothing you and I go through that we cannot find encouragement and hope in this. Where we do not hear God speaking to us through his word that he's given to us, even sharing stories and history of others that have gone through similar things, that we can find comfort in that. I want to read about a woman named Mary Magdalene today. If you have your Bibles, we can open to John chapter 20, the Gospel of John chapter 20. And this is after Jesus, the Son of God, lived three years in this world doing ministry. He lived for 33 total, but for three years he preached the kingdom gospel. He he did miracles, he raised the dead, he healed the sick, and he preached with this authority from the kingdom of heaven that nobody had heard before. And so he had these disciples that followed him. And they they thought that he was gonna be the one that came in riding in on this big stallion white horse and led the people of God into war against the Roman Empire, defeating the Roman Empire and establishing Israel as the ruling nation on earth. That's what they thought he was gonna do as what they called their Messiah. And so they waited for him, they believed he was the one, and they followed Jesus. Now, Mary Magdalene was one that followed Jesus during this time. And Jesus called her early on in his ministry, and so she had walked with him for years, knew him, and yet she finds herself here in a situation that she probably did not ever think she would be in. John chapter 20, after Jesus goes to the cross, dies on the cross for our sin. We read the first part of this chapter, by the way, uh, during the worship time in between that first and second song, where Peter and John go to the tomb and they see that it's empty. And John believes because he remembered what Jesus said, I'm gonna rise from the dead. But Mary is still confused here. Verse 11, let's start reading. But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. And as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. And they said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? She said to them, They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. I don't I don't think it's computed in Mary's mind right now that these are angels, messengers of God. Having said this, she turned around, and who does she see? She saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. And Jesus said to her, Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? Did Jesus know whom she was seeking? Sometimes I like to think Jesus just had fun messing with us. Says, Who are you seeking? Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. And Jesus said to her, Mary. She turned and said to him in Aramaic, Raboni, which means teacher. And then we read that she went and told the disciples, I have seen the Lord. Mary, this story ended well for her. But what a beginning. As she's standing outside the empty tomb of Jesus, confused, not knowing what's going on. As in this moment, you better believe she was asking that question, how did I get here? Because in her mind, Jesus was the one that was gonna lead the armies and establish victory and do all these amazing things. And then she watched with her own eyes as he was crucified. Jesus was him who saved her out of a horrific life, who rescued her and redeemed her past as a prostitute, doing terrible things with this horrible reputation. And Jesus said, You will sin no more, come and follow me. And everything in that moment was changed for her. Her sin was forgiven. She was walking in freedom and this newness of life. He was her hope. He was the one. She pinned everything on and she watched him die. And here she now stands, Peter and John having left in the early hours of a dark morning, not knowing where the body of Jesus went, not even being able to embalm him like she wanted to, to pay him respect. And you know, she's thinking to herself, How did I get here? This is not the future I was expecting, as she's alone in this graveyard. As many of us are not where we expected to be at this point in our lives. We feel like our lives are really filled with nothing but dead things. Right? A graveyard, maybe even a graveyard we feel like of our own making in many ways. Right? Dead things, dead relationships that we try to make right, and we just can't seem to fix them. They're dead or dying, a dead marriage, a dead friendship, a dead relationship with a parent, and we don't know how to make things right. We feel dead inside. Even as we meet dead end after dead end after dead end, where every door of opportunity seems to close, and this is just our lot in life, and we're stuck. So every day we just white knuckle it through, we count the hours on the clock until work is done. We live for the weekends and we just go through the motions. And then we wake up the next day and we lather and rinse and repeat. And this is our life. Like Mary, we weep for the life that we wanted for ourselves. Like the life that we feel like maybe now we are never going to be able to have. Guys, if any of this resonates with you today, please understand the root of our problem, why we find ourselves stuck in this dead end life. Here's why. It's because you and I, according to God's word, we are dead in our sin and we continue to chase after the dead things of this world. And so it makes sense that we're dead in our sin and chasing after dead things, and we can't experience life. The Apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter 2 tells us this. He says, You were dead in your trespasses and sins as you're walking your own way. We think I'm just living my own life. I'm just doing what I want to do. And we have no idea we're living in rebellion against our Creator. We do things our way, like the great theologian Frank Sinatra once said. And we don't understand why living our way keeps leading to a life of emptiness and loneliness and death. Death is separation. That's what the word means. And we live separate from the only one who can bring fulfillment and hope to us, which is our Maker, our Creator. And we remain in this place of deadness in our sin. I know this runs against every message we hear from our world. Because the world wants to just give us good, healthy, positive self-talk, doesn't it? It wants to increase our self-esteem and make us feel better about ourselves. The world says you're a good person. You have a good heart. The problem is that we read this and it says, actually, you're a bad person. You have a bad heart that is selfish, that lives for you, that will use things around you, that will even use people you profess to love and care about to achieve whatever end you have in your mind and your heart. And it's this selfishness that places us at enmity with God, that puts us in a position where we need rescuing because Jesus didn't come to make decent people better. He didn't even come to make bad people good. Jesus came and died and rose again to bring spiritually dead people to life. Are you experiencing that life? Are we still living every single day in all of these dead things, trying to find life by chasing after the dead things of the world? 1 John chapter 2, it talks about this. It says that everything that's in the world, the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, just trying to get as much as we can for us. And this world, with all of its lusts, its desires, is passing away. It is dying. Only the one who does the will of God lives forever. So we are dead in our sin and we keep chasing after the dead things around us, thinking, okay, I'm gonna find contentment and fulfillment here, and it never satisfies. And we wonder why there's just more emptiness after we continue to feed on emptiness. Now, when we can't experience, when we can't know true life, guys, we will settle for a little bit of excitement. We'll settle for that little dopamine hit of, ooh, that was fun. Right? Because we know we're dead. So we want to feel alive. We have these, like, you know, the little paddles, clear, you know, shock moments. We look for those in our lives. For some of us, it's something as simple as social media. We have our accounts and we want to get as many followers as we can, and we post something and they like it, and they comment, and we start feeling like, ooh, this is exciting. And then they post something negative and we hate them. Because that's the only feeling of life that we ever experience. A lot of us we escape and we try to experience life through shows and movies, maybe it's even gaming. Why is gaming a multi-billion dollar industry in our world? You know why? Because people want to feel alive without actually having to live life. Right? We want to sense the adventure without taking the risk. And make no mistake, a life of following Jesus is an adventure because there is risk. That's why he said, if you want to follow me, take up your cross, die to yourself, and follow me into the only one who is life. That's it. But we look to escape through gaming, through social media. We we look to escape through adventure, through dating a bunch of different people, flirting with our coworker, even though we're married, and that little sense of, ooh, this is wrong, and it makes us feel alive in a moment until death hits. For some of us, it's drinking too much, it's partying, it's hitting the gym, it's extreme sports, it's buying the new cars, it's it's the luxury living, it's travel. And we're looking for these experiences of excitement because we're not alive. We remain dead in our sin. And we know something is missing, we've been made for more. Everything this world has to offer, and everything you are trying to get from this world is dead and dying. Please hear this. If there's nothing else you leave with today than this, the only hope you and I have for life is the one who is standing right next to you. And I don't mean the person sitting next to you today. I mean like Mary, our Savior, who is risen from the dead and has been there and will always be there all along. And he's right next to us, and we just don't see him for who he is. Mary, what was her problem? She she did not know that it was Jesus. This is kind of a little bit of a head scratcher, isn't it? I mean, she was his disciple. She walked with him, knew him. Now, the last time she had seen him, he was hanging on a cross, and we read that that he was not recognizable as a man because he was so beaten and bloodied and has gone through so much. But I think there might be a little bit more to it. We know that when Jesus rose, he was in this resurrected, glorified state. But I think we kind of overcomplicate what we also read at the beginning of this chapter is that Mary came to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. In verse 1, it tells us while it was still dark. Why did Mary not recognize Jesus? I don't know, maybe he was dark. The darkness keeps us from recognizing, from seeing Jesus for who he is. Now, figuratively, darkness in scripture, it represents evil. It represents sin. It represents our rebellion against God, represents living our own way and doing things our own way, and all the destruction that comes with that. So we're called to follow the light of the world, who is Jesus, and to walk in light as he is light. But man, we live in a dark world, don't we? And a lot of us, there's darkness in us, and it keeps us from seeing him for who he is. John chapter 3, Jesus is speaking to a man named Nicodemus, this religious leader, and he says, This, and this is the judgment. The light has come into the world, meaning Jesus. And people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his work should be exposed. Man, we've experienced this, haven't we? If you're a kid and you're getting the cookies out of the cookie jar, you want it as dark as possible. And the second that kitchen light flips on, you just kind of go, and we all have had that busted look. Because light exposes the deeds that we're doing, that we love, that we want to continue to do. Because we don't see because we don't want to see. We love the darkness and we want to keep living how we want to live. The question we gotta ask ourselves is how is that really working out for us? Or maybe we still just think of Jesus the way Mary mistook him. We still think of Jesus as our gardener. What do I mean by this? It's easy to start thinking of Jesus as the gardener for our dead lives. Think about the job of a graveyard gardener. The reality is everything there is dead. And so the gardener's job is to make things look as aesthetically pleasing as possible, isn't it? To bring the flowers in, to keep things nice and manicured, to keep everything clean and peaceful looking, to almost make it a little bit better that we're going to a place of death. How many of us, this is how we see Jesus. We look to him as a good moral teacher, we look to him as a rabbi, we look to him as somebody that said some great stuff that we want to follow his principles. And all we're trying to do is come to Jesus to clean up our dead lives, to make things look a little bit better. You know, Tracy and I, my wife and I, we take care of most everything in our house. The one thing that I make sure we pay somebody to do, landscape. Every week I want someone to come in and make sure that everything around the outside of our house looks amazing. You know why? Because it lets us keep the inside of the house however we want to keep it. And you can drive by our house and be like, wow, man, they really take care of their home. You haven't been inside. You don't know what things look like in there. And this is what we want from Jesus. We have death all throughout our lives. Pursuing all of these dead things. Jesus, do me a huge favor. Just be the gardener of my life. Make sure and clean things up. You know, maybe how I talk and how I act and how I look and make my life look more moral, make it look better, so that even especially people around me look and go, oh, they've really got their lives together. But they don't know what's inside. They don't know the motive and the intention. They don't know the reason we do these things. They don't know the thoughts we think that they can't see. That if they did see, they'd want nothing to do with us. They don't know the death that remains. We just have a good garbage. Religion is the ultimate grave tending. Everything is still dead, but it just makes everything look nicer. It cleans our act up. Guys, Jesus is not our grave gardener. He didn't rise from the dead to make you a nicer person. His resurrection proved once and for all he's not like any other religious teacher in the history of the world that has ever existed. Because all of them died and remained dead. Only Jesus rose from the dead and is alive today after ascending back to the Father, witnessed by hundreds who told of it and died for it. Jesus isn't our grave gardener. He's our grave emptier. He's the one who empties the tomb in our life and fills it with the life that only he can give. Guys, hear this, please. You were made for more. You were made for more than the same old dead life you have been living every day. You were made for more than the sin and addiction that you're still a slave to. No matter how many times you tried to quit, you just can't. You were made for more. You were made for more than the guilt and the shame that you've been carrying around with you. Trying to shed it and get rid of it, but it just keeps coming back. You were made for more than all these artificial means of excitement that don't actually satisfy. You were made for true life, for real life. That's only found in a relationship with God. And that relationship only happens because of Jesus. Not because of your morality, your merit, how good you are, but because of who he is and what he has done for you. He died on a cross in your place, took all of your sin upon himself. And then he rose from the dead to say, I have the authority to give new life to you. And here he stands right by us. The question is, will we recognize him? And I know he is calling your name just as he called Mary. Did you hear him calling you right now? And are you willing to respond? I want to give us a chance to do that. Can we? Wherever we are today here on campus, can we just close our eyes, maybe bow our heads, and just come before the Lord? And if you're here and you're just sensing something stirring, something that is calling you, guys, that is his Holy Spirit. Let him do that work. Let him speak to you and draw you to himself. And would you join me in praying today if you feel like God is calling your name to say, Jesus, I know that I am dead in my sin. And today I want life. And I know I can't find it anywhere but in you. Thank you for dying on a cross in my place. Thank you for forgiving me. And today I ask that you will come into my life and take control. I give myself to you today. I know that you rose from the dead. Jesus, please give me the life only you can give. Help me follow you. Every day. From this point forward. Jesus, thank you for being the great emptier. You didn't come to decorate our dead lives. You came to save us. To change us. To raise us from the dead. Lord, in this moment I pray that everyone here will know you are right by our side. That we will continue to hear you calling our name moment after moment throughout today and every day. Because Lord, it's all about you. And so thank you for meeting us here, Jesus. We give you all praise and glory. We give it to the risen King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, Jesus Christ. And it's in his name we pray. Amen.