Easter: the Truth of the Resurrection | Matthew 28:1-20 | Jarryd Cole

Pastor Jarryd shares this Easter message about the hope we have in the truth of the resurrection of Jesus. 

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Transcript

Tempo: 120.0

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Welcome to the Ambassador Church Podcast, a church in the city for the city, on Milwaukee's east side. We pray this message meets you where you are, challenges your faith, and draws you closer to Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Alright, hey. Well, welcome to Ambassador Church and Happy Easter. Um, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give it up for Easter, man. Ambassador Church's very first Easter Sunday. Man, I'm really excited about this. Hey, um, man, I love the traditional Peshaw greeting, okay? But hey, um, I want to start a new tradition here at Ambassador Church, okay? The very first time. Um, I'm gonna say he is risen again. And when I do, instead of the traditional, hey, he is risen indeed, how about we just give it up for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who's risen from the grave. How about that, okay? Let's practice. He is risen. Amen. And amen. Well, hey, if you're new to the room, we're excited that you guys are here. And this is an exciting time, okay? Ambassador Church, we're a new church, we've just been here for about six months now, okay? I think this weekend marks our sixth month anniversary as a church here in Milwaukee, and God has done incredible things, okay? The fact that we get to celebrate Easter Sunday, year one, like this, man. I am floored. I'm grateful, I'm honored for what God has done here. But man, we're still praying that he does even more. And we're praying specifically today that, man, the gospel comes forth, his spirit is made real in this place, and there's a stirring in here for new people. Maybe you came in today and you're warning about this faith thing. Somebody dragged you here. It's Easter Sunday, and they're like, hey, get in, loser. We're coming to church. Okay. Um, we're glad you're here. And we don't hope you're here just for the sake of being here, but we believe that God has something special and specific for you. Okay. And so, number one, um, we'd love to connect with you outside of this space. If you've never been here before, you're new, um, you can head back to the Connect station uh after this message and get plugged in. We'd love to get together with you, get coffee, get lunch, and hear some of your story and share some of our story too. You can also scan that QR code right in front of your seats. Um, that's a great way to also get connected. Okay. Here, I I know that Easter is a time when there's a lot of family visiting. Like maybe you're in this room and you're not really from this part of town or you're not from Milwaukee at all. And I want to honor that, okay? And I just want to say, hey, thank you for being here. I'm excited you're here. But those of you who are new in this room and you're actually looking for a church, maybe you live around the neighborhood, or maybe you live around the area and you're like, man, I've been looking for a church. I've been searching. My prayer today has been that, hey, you consider that ambassador church become that church for you. Okay. I know it's hard to commit to a church. You're looking, so many different things you're trying to find. Okay. And here's here's my charge of you. You're not going to find it in one week. And so here's what I want to ask you to do: commit to six weeks. Don't let this be the first and only Sunday you try out Ambassador Church. The emotion is high. It's Easter Sunday. Hey, come back next week and the week after that and see if this can be a place. Not only can you come in and feel the energy and excitement of what it means to praise Jesus, but can this be a place where you're actually witnessing community and life transformation as well? Amen? So consider that. There's a charge. Six-week commitment. We'd love to have you here with us. Well, hey, if you have your Bibles, you can go ahead and get those out. We're Bible people here at Ambassador Church. And we're going to be in the Gospel of Matthew, okay? That's the first gospel account in your New Testament. You can find me there. We're going to be at the very end of the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew chapter 28. We're going to unpack literally just the resurrection narrative as told by Matthew. And as you're getting there here, I want to start with a question this morning. In your mind, what is the most audacious claim that can ever be made? Or the most audacious claim in human history? Think about this. And there's a lot of them, okay? Maybe so many things ran through your mind. Here's what we need to know: not all audacious claims are made alike. Okay. They're not all equal. Like there's some that you hear and you're like, man, this really sticks out to me. Some sticks out to some other people in your life. Okay, here's a couple I just want to hit the room. Bigfoot. Audacious claim. There's an entire generation, I don't know if you know this, an entire generation that's like has hunted for Bigfoot, who's been scared of Bigfoot, who's been like out in the woods, like camping and been like, hey, you gotta watch out for Bigfoot. You know what I mean? Like, like that's an audacious claim to really consider that there's this huge hairy monster that's out there somewhere lurking and is looking to take your lunch. I don't know, like ruin your campsite. I don't know what Bigfoot does, okay? Um, but that's an audacious claim. Here's another one. Any hip hop fans in the room, rap, make some noise if you are. It's okay, it's a church, it's all right. You can be honest. Church ain't a place for being honest, no, I'm just kidding. Tupac. Some say my man's still alive over in Cuba. That's an audacious claim. Tupac alive right now in Cuba. Like, I wish it was true. The rap game needs saving nowadays. You know, Tupac, I think, is the only one that could revive it. That's an audacious claim. And there's some smaller ones, okay? I'm a I'm a sports fan. I played basketball growing up, played in college, played pro overseas for a little while. And LeBron James, my favorite basketball player. I think LeBron James is a goat, okay? Audacious claim, I know. But no booze today. Okay, that's great. All right, we're making progress. This isn't the first time some of you have heard this in the room. Amazing. But to a lot of people, that's an audacious claim. Why? Because everybody thinks it's Mike Jordan. Mike Jordan is the goat, right? And those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, goat isn't like literally an animal, okay? G-O-A-T, the greatest of all time. All right, for all you non-sports fans in the room. What about this one? In the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a lot of people think peanut butter is the star of the game. Absolutely not. It's jelly. Jelly is the star of the game, right? Amen? Amen. Yes, yes. Audacious claims. Hey, there's so many audacious claims. And what happens with audacious claims is that if you're the one making the claim, you're the one that's gonna have to defend the claim. You're the one that's gonna have to bring the proof. This is what's true. And I want to present to us that the thing of the resurrection is that this is also a very audacious claim. And it's the most audacious claim that we can ever make, honestly. That a man really lived, that a man really died, that a man was really buried in the grave, and three days later he walked out of his own grave. That is the most audacious claim that anyone can make. And those of us in the room who call Jesus our own, and we are Christians in this place, we have to understand that everything about our faith literally hinges on this reality. Every song that we sing that we just sang up here, every prayer that we pray, every reason you showed up this morning rises and falls on whether that claim is actually true or not. Like I love the way, if you know your Bibles, the Apostle Paul talks about it in his letter to the Corinthians. He says, if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is worthless. That's how confident Paul is in this claim. He says, if the resurrection didn't happen, then we are, as he puts it, the most to be pitied people on earth. If you ask me, that's a pretty strong claim to make. And those are pretty strong words to describe something if it weren't true. Like if it weren't true, y'all, you guys came here for no reason. You got all dressed up, dolled up, nice dresses, flowers, pastels, all the kind of stuff, okay? For no reason if this isn't real. But here's what we know the resurrection is true, amen. In this Easter Sunday, like I don't just want to celebrate the fact that the resurrection is true, but I also want to defend it. I want to defend it from the stage and maybe even give you guys some things in your toolbook where you can actually defend the cause of the resurrection as well. Because here's what's true. You might have came in this room and you thought, hey, Christianity means that I have to blindly walk in and believe this thing. But no, like there's so many historical evidences in the faith that we don't have to just blindly believe it, but we know that things hold up to scrutiny when it comes to this faith. Like we don't have to blindly believe the resurrection, but it actually invites your questions. And when you actually press into it, what you find isn't some religious myth that's kind of held together by this wishful thinking, but what you find is a historical event with overwhelming evidence. Here's what we find that the resurrection is the greatest truth that the world has ever known. So as I get into the text, here's kind of what I want to do this morning, just to give you a little map where we're going. Some background on the text that we're in to paint the picture for Easter morning. Then I want to give us three reasons why we can believe in the resurrection, and then lastly, a little bit of how we can apply this to our lives. You guys ready? Let's do it. Method chapter 28, let's get it, verse 1. It's gonna pop up here on the screens as well. Here's what it says It says, After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to view the tomb, and there was a violent earthquake, because an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and approached the tomb, and he rode back the tomb and was sitting on it, and his appearance was like lightning, and his clothing was as white as snow. And the guards were so shaken by fear of him that he became like a dead man. Okay, a couple observations here. Like we have to know that the account of the resurrection, this happens after the Sabbath. Okay, Sabbath is Saturday, this is the first day of the week, Sunday morning. And as we see in the text, there's a couple women that are making their way to the tomb. And I want to point out these aren't just any women, these aren't just anonymous women, but these women are named. You see the names pop pop up here in the text: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. Okay, a little more inconspicuous, but she's still named. Her name is Mary, which I think is kind of wild in this context, okay? You get to this juncture, like you think you'd want to be a little bit more specific, but hey, we're here nonetheless. But the thing I want to point out to us right here is the fact that they have come back to the tomb, but not only that, but they've come back alone. They're the only ones. If you guys know what had just happened before this, okay, um, a couple days before Jesus was tried, he was killed, he was put on a cross, and he was buried in a grave. And what happened after that? People who believed in him, his disciples, they began to scatter and they went away. They ran away. Why? In fear of persecution, in fear of violence, and fear of, hey, maybe what Jesus was saying, maybe it wasn't going to be true at all. And they were like, How can I get as far away from this as possible? And what we see here is two brave women who, in the light of all of that, said, Hey, I could run away and I could go hot, I could stay back, but no, no, no, no. I'm going to come and pursue my Lord Jesus. And the question we have to ask is, Why on earth would they come back to this tomb? And why would they come back alone? See, other gospel accounts say the Mary's brought something with them. It says they brought some oils with them. And these oils we have to know would have been used for like proper burial rituals. They were going to anoint Jesus' dead body. And there's two things we have to note because of that. One, as they're on the way back to the tomb, they expected Jesus' body to still be in the tomb. Now, I think that's important because they weren't going back thinking like I know he talks about raising from the dead, I know this kind of stuff, and so when we're going back, we're just gonna spend on the same. No, no, no, no. They carried stuff with them as if they were going to see somebody dead, not somebody alive. They risked that on the way back to the tomb. And not only that, the second thing is that they were actually hoping to get into the tomb. And in those days, like these stones would have been rolled in front of these tombs, and these stones would have been incredibly heavy. Too heavy for any two women to be able to move on their own, too heavy for any two men to move on their own. Like these stones could have weighed up to a ton or more back in this time, which means like they would have had no way of rolling the stone themselves. And there's other gospel accounts in the in the gospel of Mark, chapter 16, it tells of the Marys going to the tomb and it marks their conversation. And something they say in conversation to themselves is literally this hey, who's going to roll the stone away when we get there? Like this is in their thought process. Who's going to roll the stone away for us? Which means this, that the Marys were going back to the tomb in faith, not knowing if they'd even be able to get in or not. But check this out, look in the text. God was already ahead of them. Because when they get there, it says an angel had came, there was an earthquake, and the angel rolled away the stone. And I love how it kind of paints this picture because it says, Hey, the angel does this thing, the stones rolled away. And when they get there, you see the angel just kicking it, chilling on top of the stone, like, yo, what's up? Like, what's good? I'm glad you're here. What'd you come to see? You're right, like he's like, Yo, what's like what's up? Like, this is this is the angel. And they get there, the stone is rolled away, and Jesus' body is already gone. And look at this, look at verse five. Here's the narrative. It says the angel told the women, he said, Hey, don't be afraid, because I know what you're here for. You are looking for Jesus who was crucified. And here's the greatest news of Easter Sunday. He is not here. Why? For he has risen, just as he said. He says, Come and see, come and see the place where he lay, and then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee. He says, You will see him there. Listen, I have told you these things. And so departing quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy. Could you imagine that feeling in the bosom of these women? With fear and great joy, they ran to tell the other disciples the news. The scared dudes who were out scattered, doing who knows what at this time. And just then Jesus pops up. He meets these women on their way. He says, Greetings. And look at their response. They came up to him, took hold of his feet, and they worshiped him. And then Jesus said to them, Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to leave for Galilee, and they will see me there. Okay, there's the background. Sunday, the first Easter morning, tombs empty, angels chilling, and the Mary's at the tomb heading out to go share the news with the disciples. And so for the rest of the morning today, I just want to give us and show us three reasons why we can believe that this is true. Y'all, this is an audacious claim. Like if you just pick this book out of anywhere else, maybe you go to the library and this story kind of pops out in some random book on the shelf, like you're gonna think this is something of myth, this is something of legend. But no, this is in the word of God. And we have to know that this isn't just some mythological event, it's not some fairy tale, but this is actually true. This is real history. And so, three reasons why we can believe the resurrection of Jesus is true. The first reason is this is that there were eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. And even more importantly, as we just read in the text, women were the first witnesses.

unknown 15:32

Right?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

The story begins with these women walking up to the grave before sunrise. And there's a weight to this detail because if someone in the first century was to fabricate a resurrection story with the intention of it being believed, they would have never written it this way. Like they would have left that part completely out. Because here's the historical reality in the first century Roman world and Jewish world, a woman's testimony, here this was not considered legally valid. Like it just wasn't. There's a Jewish historian named Josephus, uh, who was around during the time of Jesus and who had on written record that in this day, a woman's testimony was so invalid that women were not admitted as witnesses in court. So, y'all, if you're inventing a story and you want it to be taken seriously and you're factoring in this idea of credibility, here's what you don't do: you don't make women the first witnesses at the empty tomb. You don't make women the first people to see the risen Jesus, you don't make women the first ones commissioned to go tell the disciples about the message of the gospel that Jesus is no longer dead. You don't do that, but this is exactly what Matthew records. And Mark and Luke and John, all of them do it, they all agree on this point. See, there's a term that uh historians and scholars call something like this. They call it this the criterion of embarrassment, which means if a detail in an ancient text would have been socially awkward or like counterproductive to include, and they still choose to include it, then that means it's actually more, not less, likely to be true. It's more reliable. Like when you're trying to gain credibility, nobody invents any embarrassing details. Why? Because there's there's no advantage in that. And a lot of us know that to be true. Take, for example, like say you're heading into a job interview and you really want to get this job, okay? What you're going to do is you're going to do everything in your power to put on the best face and the best front. You're going to sit in that thing and you're going to be even thinking before. What questions are they going to ask me? What are they going to want to know? And you might maybe take some notes. Like, I'm going to for sure mention this. You know what you're not going to mention? The embarrassing details about your last place of work, the places that you've been that you don't really want to go. Like the thing is, you know, and I love interviews and jobs because they often try to get to the crux of this. And you guys know because there's questions that they ask in these job interviews. Hey, tell me about one of your weaknesses. Tell me about a time when you failed in your job. You know, the worst questions anybody could ever ask you. And you know what you're gonna be tempted to say, you're gonna be like, yeah, yeah, one of my biggest weaknesses is like I can't stop working. I just give too much of my time to my job. You know, tell me time when you failed. Oh, I don't really delegate well. I just hold on too much and do too much, and uh, people just rely on me for everything. And uh, you know, I fail at trying to be a good teammate because I just want to do everything, and people just let me, you know, like you can kind of talk about it that way. And here's what happens the interviewer isn't gonna say something like, okay, well, since this is true, we're not gonna hire you because it sounds like you don't have a really good work-life balance. No, no, no, no. They're gonna be on the first call to corporate and be like, hey, this person's the one, he's the one, she's the one. Even if you're lying, it doesn't even really matter. Like this kind of stuff is fail-proof. When you do this in an interview, you're believed. And not only that, but the people love it, the companies love it. And here's why I say this: I say it because it would have been more advantageous for Matthew to do something like this. For him to lie and say a bunch of brave dudes came back to the tomb and camouflage, they had their eye black on under their joint, right? They had the boots and stuff, and they was like Rambo coming in. And they had dynamite blew the tomaway, boom, that's why the ground looks like it is. It's the earthquake. And no, like that bright shiny thing, that's not an angel, that's just the dudes looking up there smiling, right? Like, like that would have that would have been the thing that Matthew could have said, and it probably would have been more believable. More believable to say, hey, there were a couple women that came back with some essential oils to anoint the dead body of Jesus. So you wouldn't write something like this down if you weren't looking for credibility. You'd only write something like this down because you're trying to tell a true story that actually happened. Matthew empowering women in this light should have been to have made the resurrection harder to believe, but in the miraculous way that only God can do, he made it so that women helped the gospel advance, not hurt it. But the women weren't the only people who witnessed Jesus. There's more eyewitnesses in 1 Corinthians 15. If you're quick with your Bible, you can meet me there. It's gonna come up here on the screen as well. Uh, 1 Corinthians, written a couple decades after the resurrection account. And here's what the apostle says to this church just to remind them, he says, Hey, Jesus, the resurrected Jesus, says he appeared to Cephas as well. This is another name for the Apostle Peter, then to the 12, the 12 disciples, and then he also appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time. And most of them, you hear this, are still alive, but only some of them have fallen asleep. And then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me. He appeared to me, the apostle Paul. See what Paul's essentially saying is that if you want witnesses, here are the names. And not only here are the names, but here are the names of the people who are still alive. If you want to know if this resurrection thing is true, if you want to falsify it right now, you could do that by simply going to ask them, Hey, did you see the resurrected Jesus? And none of them said that they did not see him. Paul said, Hey, go go ask him yourself. See, so many people don't write Christianity off as some myth or some kind of legend, but it's none of these things. It's literally falsifiable history. The resurrection story has eyewitnesses, there's real ones, people who have real names, and it centers the testimony of women in the world that would have found that radically inconvenient, which is exactly why we should believe it all the more. The second thing why we can believe the resurrection is this it's because it stands against opposition. Look at your text. Verse 11. It says, As they were on their way, some of the guards came into the city and reported to the chief priests and everything that had happened. After the priest had assembled with the elders and agreed on the plan, they gave the soldiers to a they gave the soldiers a large sum of money and told them, Say this, that his disciples came during the night and stole him while we were sleeping. If this reaches the governor's ears, we will deal with him and keep you out of trouble. And they took the money and did as they were instructed, and their story has been spread among Jewish people to this day. Or maybe some people came to the grave and took it out of the grave so that way they could hide it and then falsify this reality that he wasn't taken, but he was actually risen. This didn't start in today's age. This started way back then. And that is so important for us to see. Because it's not only hard to believe the resurrection right now, but it was hard to believe the resurrection even in its own day. But y'all, here's a key detail I want to point out from this part of the text. It's easy to miss because you would think that like somebody might have said, Hey, the body's not really gone, it's still in here. Nobody was confused that there was actually a body in the tomb. Even when they're trying to decredit the reality, everybody at least says, Hey man, the tomb is empty. Either he's risen or somebody took it. Like the body is gone. And so the the conversation about the resurrection isn't if the body's in the tomb. The body's not there. The question we have to answer is why? And the answer that the soldiers were paid to spread was that the disciples snuck in at night, they rolled away a sealed stone past armed guards, took the body, and then told everyone that Jesus rose from the dead. Super unlikely. You know, way back in the day, 1972, for my young people in the room, there was a situation that happened here in America. They call it the Watergate Scandal Now. Okay, I want you to hold on to this reality about Jesus and now about this Watergate scandal. See, back in this day, there was this political scandal where these people were trying to cover up something that Richard Nixon was doing. The details aren't that important. But here's the deal: there were three men: Chuck Colson, John Dean, and Gordon Liddy. And these men were all a part of this scandal. And the whole thing was that, hey, they were willing and ready to take this scandal to the grave. They had done it, they known that they had done it, all this kind of stuff. And when you're in a situation like that, maybe you felt caught in the lie before, and you're like, man, I just want to hold on to this thing. But how many of you know that like lies come out no matter what? You will eventually be found out. But this is what was true for these political men. But this is also true. They had every earthly incentive to hold on to this lie. Their careers were on the line, freedom was on the line, their reputation was on the line, and all they had to do was keep their story straight about the cover-up of this political scandal. But you want to know what happened with Watergate? That scandal unraveled within two years. The disciples, however, 11 ordinary men who were not these high-level political pundits, they were fishermen. It was the tax collector, a former zealot, some dude that carried a knife in his back pocket in case something very pop off. These were the kind of dudes that followed Jesus. And they held on to the testimony of the resurrection, not for just a couple years, but for decades. Not in comfort, not with political protection. And most of them were imprisoned. These guys were beaten, they had their lives taken away, they were executed. Peter, if you know his story, he was crucified upside down. Paul, he was beheaded, James was killed by the sword. We have to know this because three men in the Watergate scandal couldn't hold their story for 24 months. But 11 men could with Jesus. And here's the reason why. Because people don't die for a lie. I don't think I do all hear that. People don't die for a lie. People will never die for something they know not to be true. But people will die for something they think to be true, at least that they're convinced of. You won't die to hold on to a lie, but you will give yourself up if you truly believe and if it is truly real. And these men, they believe in that. Like this is how human psychology works. You might die for something you genuinely believe in true, even if it isn't, but you do not go through the torture and the execution for a story that you personally made up by stealing a corpse of a guarded tomb. The disciples and many others have died proclaiming the resurrection because it's true. And the opposition, listen to this, has never stopped. See, Matthew says the stolen body story has been spread among the Jews, the Jewish people, even to this day. He's writing that in the first century, and we can update this. We all know this, right? The story of the resurrection has been opposed. All of us know this. It's been mocked. Maybe you're sitting in your seat right now, and you're still trying to understand it. It's been suppressed and it's been buried in every single generation by Roman emperors, by the Enlightenment philosophers, Soviet regimes, so many different people, academic institutions. You go to any college around here, which is a shame, actually, because so many of the institutions in our country, they actually started as theological training grounds. Like you think of all the Ival Leagues over on the East Coast and all that kind of stuff, they popped up. Why? Because they wanted to train people to become ministers of the gospel and now look at the main thing that they're espousing with their institutions. It's all around us. Pop culture everywhere, every generation gets its own version of the disciples stole the body. But here's what I want to come back to. Why? Why all of the opposition? If Jesus was just some good moral teacher who died and stayed dead, then you don't need soldiers to cover up this story, do you? You don't need centuries of state-sponsored persecution. You don't need to burn churches and imprison pastors, you don't need to mock it this aggressively. You look around the world, and nothing is more scrutinized than the Christian faith of Jesus Christ. You only fight that heart against something that you sense has real power. You don't fight that heart against something that you don't think is real or true. And look around you now. More songs have been written about Jesus than any other figure in human history. More literature written about him, more arts depicted of him, more hospitals and schools, justice movements, you name it, built all in his name. The gospel right now, even as we speak, is on its way to every nation on earth. A movement that began with 11 frightened men who couldn't even make their way to the tomb. See, lies don't sound like this, but truth does. See, we can believe the resurrection because it stands up to opposition, and lastly, we can believe it because it comes with power. Look at Matthew 28, verse 16. The 11 disciples traveled to Galilee to the mountain where Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped. But look at this text and underline it if you can through your own Bibles. He says, But some doubted. We can believe the resurrection because it comes with power. And one of the main powers that it comes with, you need to hear this, is that it can actually overcome your doubt. Think about this. They had witnessed this brutal beating of Jesus. They have witnessed his whole life, this whole testimony for three years, walking with him, eating with him, going with him, seeing miracles. They listened to him call his shot of dying and being risen from the grave. They're now on the mountain where Jesus told them to go, I'm gonna meet you there. And so they meet him there, and here he is. He showed up, he's there in the risen body in the flesh. And he's looking at the disciples, and Matthew records some of them worshipped, but some doubted. Are you like you kidding me? We're famous, y'all, for people who ask for a sign for the Christian faith being true. All of us want to know at some point. How do I know if it's real? How do I know if it's real? How do I know if it's real? How's it about a resurrected body of Jesus literally standing in front of you? How about that? How about that? There's no sign that'll never be enough. And nonetheless, Jesus knows that, and he doesn't back away from you when you experience that doubt, but he presses into you when you experience that doubt. I love that Matthew includes that line. He says, Some doubted, because even the witnesses standing in front of the risen Jesus, some of them doubted. Jesus doesn't dismiss them, he doesn't tell them to go away, he doesn't rebuke them, he doesn't say, Hey, will the real believers please stand up? He doesn't say this. He walks toward all of them and he speaks to all of them. See, many of us think that doubt is the opposite of our faith. But I want you to hear it's not doubt, but it's fear that's the opposite of our faith. Doubt actually leaves margin for belief if you can believe it. Doubt leaves margin because even if you're not completely sure, you can operate in doubt. You can still move forward. You can say, God, I don't know, but I just I guess I'm gonna go anyway. Like, God, I don't know if I believe it completely. I don't see all the staircase, but I could still maybe take that first step. If if if if you have doubt, God can work with that. Fear is a little bit different. Doubt leaves room for action, fear paralyzes you, it makes you immovable. There's actually only a few verses in the Bible that caution against doubting. You guys know that? And most of those are in relation to not doubting when you're praying towards God. So even when it talks about not doubting, it's encouraging you and empowering you as a person who has Jesus living in your heart to say, Hey, God, you can pray some of the most audacious prayers you can pray. That's what the Bible says about not doubting. But there are over a hundred verses that caution against fear. Fear is the most emotional condition addressed in the Bible, not doubt. And maybe for you this morning, this is something that's so pertinent to you. That you came in this room carrying so many questions, real doubts, real skepticism, like you're not sure what you believe all of this, even as you hear me saying it right now. But hey, look at you now, sitting in a church, hearing the message and the gospel of Jesus Christ, at the very least, you're considering it even beyond your doubt. You are here sitting in these pews, hearing a strange man talk about this miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I'm praying the spirit does a work in you. I want you to know the text leaves room for you. The risen Jesus is not waiting for you to have every question resolved, all your questions answered before he comes near. Christianity actually addresses your doubts. And if we're honest, maybe your doubt isn't even connected to the resurrection. Maybe even as big of a miracle as it is, that's not the thing that's holding you back. Maybe the thing that's holding you back is the people who claim him. And I want to address that for a moment. Because hypocrisy is a real thing. You can look all over the world, you can hear stories and the headlines and tabloids and all these different kinds of things, and you're thinking, man, like if this is what Christianity is about, I wouldn't know parts of it. Maybe that's the thing that's pushing you away. Or maybe the thing is the church hurt that you've experienced. Listen, I get that. Church hurt is real, abuse in the church is real, all of these different kinds of things, and and and we can really experience that. Like I've experienced some of that, and I've even been in seasons where I'm like, yo, I don't know if I can go through with this. And yet here I am, still taking a step after step, even beyond my doubt that I have in my mind. And we're here on Easter Sunday at Ambassador Church 2026. Amen. You're not alone if this is what's true of you. But this is how I know you can't allow those things to be your greatest barrier to Christianity. Because Christianity doesn't rise and fall on whether people are hypocritical or not. It doesn't rise or fall whether you have a perfect church experience or not. But it rises and falls on the resurrection of Jesus Christ alone. And so, as lovingly as I can, here's what I want to say: like maybe you came in here with your faith in shambles and you're looking at the state of the world and all the states of the people around you, the systems, the politics, your neighborhoods, right? The churches you've experienced before, you're looking at all of that. And maybe what's happening right now is like somehow you find yourself in this kind of deconstruction whirlwind. Let me just help and remind you, just for one minute, that you can be secure in your faith because God is bigger than all of that. Like one of my pastor friends likes to say it like this even though things may be over your head, they're still under God's feet. Amen. See, God doesn't hide his greatest proof from human experience, he hides his greatest proof in the empty tomb. And so if you're wrestling with the Christian faith, your biggest obstacle isn't, hey, what does the world look like? That's not your biggest obstacle. Your biggest obstacle isn't the people that claim these and don't represent him well. That's not your biggest obstacle. Your biggest obstacle is what do you do with the empty tomb? See, we can believe the resurrection because it comes with power to overcome your doubt. And here's the second thing: it comes with power to bring you into the story. Look at the rest of the text. Matthew 28, 18 through 20. Here's Jesus now speaking to some believing and some doubting disciples on this mountain. He says, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, here this I am with you always, even to the end of the age. I love this part of the text. This is what us church folk call the Great Commission. And if you want to know what our church is about, your first time stepping into this place, this is it. We're not super clever. We don't have any agenda apart from what Jesus has for us. We're not very original. We want to be about the very thing that Jesus is about. Our mission statement, ambassadors, you can read it back on signs back here. It's all over the place. You can go to our website and see it. Here's our mission: that we exist to unleash transformed people to represent Jesus to a watching world. That's the great commission in ambassador language. That's all we want to do. Be people who are knowing Jesus, who are transformed by Jesus, and are representing Jesus to the people around us. Christianity is not a spectator sport. There's some things that you can be a part of and not really have any participation in, right? Your local gym, hey now. Your country club, your fraternity or sorority. Maybe you're a sports fan. You've hopped off the bandwagon with the bucks because they've been on a little streak, right? Sometimes that can happen. But y'all, unfortunately, Christianity doesn't let you do that. Christianity is not offered to you to be this kind of spectator sport. Like you can't see the risen Jesus, you can't experience the power that he has in you and then choose to just be like, oh, okay, I'm just gonna sit on my hands and not do anything. No, no, no. The power of the resurrection includes mobilizing you into action. This is what the Great Commission is about. Not only the power to help your mind and help you understand and deal with things that you can't really comprehend, but it also has the power to fill you and mobilize you. This is what the Great Commission is about. Like Christians are people of action, which means that we go. We're marked by the spirit of movement. Like Jesus didn't die just so you could like stay here and do all these different kinds of things, but he called you to go. He called you to go to the places where you live, your neighborhoods, your workplaces, and go and actually just see people, but not just go be action forward, but go with a purpose to make disciples. Like we are people, now we believe in Jesus, who are shaped and formed more into the image of Jesus, but then we also want to see other people who are living that same way. And we have a mission. All nations, we're a people for everybody. Y'all, do y'all know, like when we talk about nations and we talk about missions, most churches talk about going somewhere overseas, the globe, all that kind of stuff. I love the city of Milwaukee because Milwaukee has a nation's coming right here. If you want to be a person that's living out the Great Commission, you want to be somebody who's been touched by Jesus, you've seen his glory, you have this power in you, and you want to be like, man, how can I live on mission? You can do it right here in the city. People all around you. And we're actually praying that Ambassador Church becomes a refuge for all people. And so we can hear the gospel and we can be moved and motivated by the love of Christ, so we can display him to a world that's watching. Like, do you know the image that can have for the people who want to know what kind of God we serve? We want to be that kind of people, but Christians are also people of presence. We are comforted by the promise of the presence of the Holy Spirit. I love this last line in the text. Jesus says, Hey, remember this. I am with you always to the end of the age. This is the promise that uplifts and upholds the Christian faith and makes everything possible. And y'all, this changes everything. It changes everything. The power and the resurrection, it's for you. And I need you to hear this because I know that there's got to be people in here that are still wrestling. And I know there's got to be people in here who are not awake yet. Like, two things I've been praying coming into Easter Sunday is that God would renew hearts and He would have you believe for the first time. But not only that, but there's Christians in here who have been sleepy, their hearts have been idle, their hands have been dull, their feet have not been moving. And I've been praying that Spirit would do a work and say, Hey, would you wake up and would you be called into mission? Here's the main point for the morning. The resurrection of Jesus means real resurrection power for you. And not just at the end of your life, when you get to go to heaven, there's real resurrection power for you right now. And so here's the charge to the room on this Easter Sunday. Don't let another Easter go by where you don't know exactly where you stand with your faith or where you are a Christian only by name. But let this Easter be the one where belief takes over and you become a person who sees the resurrection and you believe in the resurrection and you're motivated to be moved by the resurrection. So, our last question this morning: what do you do now with the story of the resurrection? And here's our answer: you respond to it. Like the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a truth that demands a response. You guys know this? You can't just hear the message and sit and be still. No, you have to respond. And you want to know what? It's not very complicated. There's two ways that we can respond. Here's my application points for this morning. One, you believe it. You stop treating Jesus like he's just some option that you can maybe choose at some point or maybe not. But you treat him like he is the end-all be-all. That he is. Like the resurrection is literally everything. If he hasn't raised all of life, it is futile. Everything that we do is futile. Like this is meaningless. It's just pointless. Philosophers have wrestled with this thought forever, and everything they get to the end to, when they wrestle with everything and calculate it all, all the numbers. I'm terrible at math, by the way. And so I can't even do any of that. Okay. I don't have the lenses to see out far beyond Earth, right? But like when they do, they always come to the same point. Man, something's got to be at the bottom of all of this. Something's got to be at the bottom of the greatest minds, y'all. The greatest minds. And if any of us had minds like that, we probably wouldn't be sitting here in this room, okay? And so if they can believe that, then we can too. We can believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the power that it has. And I love what the apostle Paul says because if you're here in this room and you don't have the faith in Jesus, it is simple. Like all you have to do is proclaim with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart, down to the depths of you, that God raised Jesus from the grave, and here is the promise: you will be saved. There's a period right there. There's nothing added to that. It's not you will be saved if you do this. It's not you will be saved if you do that. You will be saved if you go here. It will be saved if you do all these things actually. No, no, no, no, no, no. God's promise holds true. And it's through a proclamation from your mouth and a belief in your heart that Jesus Christ is who he says he is, and he's risen from the grave. He says, All the power that I have, all that I have access to, now you can have access to it right here and right now. That is the gospel of Jesus Christ. You can receive him right now. The next is you can step into the resurrection. You can believe it and you can step into it. And this means you bring your whole life to King Jesus. You can bring your doubts to him. You can bring your questions to him. You can bring your failures, your hardest relationships, your biggest fears, all these things, you can submit them underneath the Lordship of Jesus Christ. You can step into the resurrection. And you can even walk with the confidence and a vision that, man, if God can raise himself from the grave, what else can he not do in my life? Which means for you in the room, I know there's so many things that maybe you're holding on to and you're gripping and you're like, man, I hear all this and I believe in Jesus, but man, I still gotta leave out of these doors and go do something else. I still gotta go home to this family, I still gotta go back to this job, I still gotta deal with this tragedy in my life. Listen, when you believe in Jesus, your life doesn't just go from bad to good, okay? But what's true is Jesus now comes alongside you. He walks with you with the power of the resurrection so that you can deal with the things in your life, not with like this kind of rose-colored glasses, but with hope that what you're experiencing isn't all that there is, and that there is more, and that God does really have power, not just for you to raise at the end of days, but for you to actually walk into your midst as a new person with clarity and confidence. You can do that. You can step into it. I mentioned Ambassador Church is a six-month-old church, and this church doesn't exist without people who have stepped into the resurrection of Jesus. There have been people who started this church back in October, October 5th, 2025, who didn't live here in the city of Milwaukee. They moved lived in Michigan, they lived in Iowa, they lived in Minnesota, they lived in Texas, all over the country. And what they did when they were considering coming to Milwaukee and bringing themselves to Jesus was like, God, this is who I am, this is what I want to do, but I am submitting this all to you. What would you have me do? And you know what happened? All the doubts that happen when you make that kind of decision in your mind, Jesus begins to subside because there's power in the resurrection. And the action that they took to take steps to come here, they experienced that. Why? Because of the power in the resurrection. And I know in a room like this, even back to last Friday, we had a good Friday service right here. One of the activities that we did is we had these little pens and papers, and we had people literally write on those papers to be like, hey, this is what I'm holding on to right now, and this is what I want to lay at the foot of the cross. And I would bet that the people that were here that Friday, like they felt a weightlift off their shoulders. But I want to submit there's probably more people right now in this morning, Sunday morning who weren't there on Friday night who need that same experience. And so I want to submit to you that maybe there is something in your life that you are holding on to with a tight white knuckle grip that if you just laid at the foot of Jesus, oh, you could see restoration. You could see hope. You could experience power. You could step into the resurrection. Y'all, the tomb is empty. The witnesses are named, and the opposition couldn't stop it. You can believe that truth. And I love Easter Sunday because today's a day that we're actually going to be celebrating even more people who this is true of. I don't know if you saw, we have this little feeding trough up here, okay, that we call a baptism tank. And it's filled to the brim with water. And we have two people this morning at our 9 a.m. service who are getting baptized. We have one more in the next service, too, at 11 o'clock. And this is the right and proper response to a person who has seen the risen Jesus, who has had him impact their heart, and now wants to take a next step in their faith to say, Hey, I'm going all in with my Lord and Savior. I would want nothing more to do than to display to the world before witnesses and before God, hey, that I am now a transformed person. This is what baptism represents. And so without further ado, this is our next step, and I want to show us a video of two people who have their testimonies to share with us. Turn your attention to the screens.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

Thanks for listening to the Ambassador Church Podcast. To learn more, visit ambassadormke.org or follow us on Instagram at AmbassadorMKE. And if you're in the Milwaukee area, we'd love to see you this Sunday at 9 or 11 a.m. at 2308 East Bellevue Place. Grace and peace.