When you look in your bulletin and see that the title of
today’s message is “Looking Ahead to Easter,” I know some of you may be
thinking, “We knew his watch was broken, we didn’t know his calendar was too!”
Well, I fully realize that Easter is 2 months away, but there is a sense in
which every Sunday is Easter for the
Christian. In fact the reason why Christians worship on Sunday is to
commemorate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Really every day is Easter for the Christian because every day we live in the
sure and certain hope of a Christ who conquered death for us.
In our text today, Jesus speaks to His disciples about the
promises of Easter before the first Easter Sunday takes place. As Jesus speaks,
it is late Thursday night. On Friday, the next day, Jesus will die on the
cross. And as Jesus seeks to comfort them in the face of His impending death,
He points them here to Easter Sunday to reassure them that His death will not
be the end. There are three Easter promises that He gives to them here to point
them beyond the horror of the cross to the glory of His resurrection. In the
same way, these promises speak to the hearts of all who follow Him today. As we
live in broken down bodies in a fallen world that has been ravaged by sin, the
promises of Easter assure us that, no matter what comes our way, there are
blessings that only the follower of Christ can cling to when everything around
us seems to be going terribly wrong.
I. The Promise of Unending Fellowship: You will see Me (v19a)
As C. S. Lewis chronicled his journey through the grief of
losing his wife to cancer, he wrote, “I have no photograph of her that’s any
good. I cannot even see her face distinctly in my imagination.”[1] This
is one of the most troubling realities of grief, that we will no longer see the
face of the one we love. Jesus knew that the hearts of His followers were
troubled. They had left everything behind to follow Him. Every day for three
years, they had seen Him. Now He was leaving them behind, and all they could
think of is that they would never see Him again.
Jesus said, “After a little while the world will no longer
see Me.” Undoubtedly, for some in the world, this would be exactly what they
were hoping for. Jesus was a troublemaker in their minds. The Pharisees, the
chief priests, Herod, Pilate, and a multitude of others were hoping they would
never have to lay eyes on Jesus again. And to their own destruction, they would
get their wish. They would never again see His face. “But,” Jesus said to His
followers, “you will see Me.”
For a little while, they would not see Him. Most of them
scattered when He was arrested. As far as we know, only one of them watched Him
die. When He was buried, only the women were present, along with Nicodemus and
Joseph of Arimathea – none of whom were present when Jesus spoke these words.
But after a little while, these men would see Him again. After He arose from
the dead, Jesus appeared to them. It was not a vision or a hallucination – it
was Jesus in His glorified body, really present and really visible to them.
They saw Him again. But only they saw Him. The unbelieving world did not see
Him. In all of His resurrection appearances, if we leave aside His appearance
to Paul on the Damascus Road ,
He never appeared in the presence of unbelievers. The promise was for Jesus’
followers: “You will see Me.” This was the promise of unending fellowship. His
departure from them was only momentary. They saw Him again.
But what of us who live two millennia beyond that first
Easter? How does this promise secure us in a world filled with hurts and
hardships? At Easter, we sing a song that asks, “Were you there when He rose up
from the grave?” And the answer is, “No! We weren’t there!” But we see Jesus
through the eye of faith. As we believe in the Savior who died for our sins and
rose from the dead to save us, we see Him with a plainer view than our eyesight
could afford us. We see Him as Lord and Savior of our lives. And we see Him as
He works in and through us by His indwelling Spirit. Remember that there is a
special blessing attached to those who see Him by faith in this way. Jesus said
to Thomas, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who
did not see, and yet believed” (Jn 20:29). He has promised us unending
fellowship with Himself, and He has fulfilled that promise to all who have
trusted in Him.
But there is a future aspect of His promise which remains
for us. Just as He said to His disciples, so Jesus can assure us, “After a
little while … you will see Me.” The day is coming when we will see Jesus
face-to-face, with new vision and transformed eyes in heaven. The assurance
that we will see our friends and loved ones again in heaven is a great comfort,
but there is even greater comfort and hope found in the promise that we will
see Jesus. We will look into the face of the One who is both our Maker and
Redeemer, and we will see the unfathomable glory of God in His face.
This promise of unending fellowship has a profound effect on
a true believer in Christ. In 1 John 3, the Apostle writes, “Beloved, now we
are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know
that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He
is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies Himself, just as He is
pure.” The promise that we will see Jesus face-to-face one day fuels our fight
against temptation and sin, because we remember what Jesus said in the
Beatitudes: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matt 5:8).
When I surrender to temptation, I am choosing to see, or indulge in, something
other than the surpassing greatness of God’s glory. That is why all sin is
idolatry at its core. It is an elevation of my own desires to a level above God
where I serve them and obey them instead of God. But if I want to see God – if
that is the driving force behind my life – then I will fight temptation
whenever it arises for the sake of the purity of my own heart. I want to keep
my heart pure, because I want to see Him more than anything or anyone else.
This promise also provides us with endurance in trials. When
we encounter various trials in life (not if,
but when), Satan would love to persuade
us that God is not present, that He does not love us, that He is not good, and
so on. But the promise of unending fellowship here as Jesus says, “You will see
Me,” reminds us that He is present, He does love us, and He is good. We have
seen Him with the eye of faith. We have seen His goodness and grace at work in
and through us on countless “good days” before the bad days ever struck, and we
know that we will see Him face-to-face. So when those thoughts arise in the
midst of a hardship, we have to keep resting in this promise. Jesus will never
leave nor forsake those who have seen Him by faith, and when this world has
done all it can do to us, we will see Him face-to-face. That is why Paul is
able to say in Romans 8, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor
angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).
Jesus is alive, and we see Him by faith, we see His work
being done in and through us, and we will see Him face-to-face. That fuels our
endurance to persevere through the trials and temptations of life. So we have
this promise of uninterrupted fellowship. The world does not see Jesus, but we
have, we do, and we will. We are never alone, never forsaken, never abandoned,
not in life and not in death. And this brings us to the second promise.
II. The Promise of Undying Life: You will live (v19b)
In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in books
that fall into a category that some have called “afterlife tourism.” These
books claim that the writers have experienced a journey to heaven, or in some
cases hell, and have come back to tell us all about what it was like. A couple
of weeks ago, there was quite an uproar after the child whose story inspired
one of the most popular of these books came clean that the entire tale was
fabricated. Alex Malarkey, who was 6 years old when he was in the terrible car
accident that sparked the book entitled The
Boy Who Went To Heaven, is now 16 and remains a quadriplegic. But he
bravely confessed in an open letter that he made the story up in order to get
attention. Alex said, “People have profited from lies, and continue to. They
should read the Bible, which is enough.” Amen. After all, Jesus Himself said,
“No one has ascended into heaven, but He who descended from heaven: the Son of
Man.” When we want to know about heaven, we should look to what His word says
and trust that it is enough! So many of these books present accounts of heaven
which not only contradict each other, but also contradict the Bible!
Jesus offers us so much more than these stories can! He
says, “Because I live, you will live also.” This is not a promise that we can
visit heaven temporarily and come back to live on earth, only to suffer,
grieve, hurt, and ultimately die again. He promises us an undying life just as
He Himself has.
Having spoken often to His disciples about His impending
death, Jesus now says, “Because I live ….” He is looking beyond the cross to
His resurrection. He will die. He will be really
dead – not just passed out or in a coma – DEAD! He knew He was going to be
dead, and yet He says, “Because I live.” He knew that death would not be the
end. His followers would see Him again – on earth even – as He overcame death
by His resurrection. He would be alive just as surely as He was dead. In
Revelation 1:18, Jesus says, “I was dead and behold I am alive forevermore.”
Jesus is the only person who can speak of His own death in the past tense.
But notice that His resurrection is tied to a promise He is
making to His disciples. “Because I live, you will live also.” In Jesus’ death,
He took all of our sins upon Himself, and died to receive the full penalty that
we deserve. When He uttered from the cross, “My God, My God, why have You
forsaken Me?”, He was receiving the full outpouring of wrath and condemnation
that you and I have earned because of our sins. We deserve to be forsaken by
God, condemned and cast out from His presence. But Jesus took this for us. By
His resurrection, He demonstrated that our sin and its penalty of death and
wrath had been fully defeated. Therefore, for the Christian, death does not
have to be feared. Death is not the end, and it is not the entryway into
judgment for the one who believes in Christ. It is the entryway into life
everlasting.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul says:
If
Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your
sins. Then those have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. … But now Christ
has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. For
since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For
as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his
own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His
coming, then comes the end, when He hands over the kingdom to the God and
Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For He must
reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will
be abolished is death (1 Cor 15:17-18, 20-26).
And because death has been abolished by the resurrection of
Christ for all who trust in Him, that great chapter concludes by saying, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death,
where is your victory? O death where is your sting? The sting of death is sin,
and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God who gives us the victory
through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15:54-57). So death is defeated for
the Christian because the Lord Jesus lives. And because He lives, we will live
also. But it will not be life as we have known it. It will be a new life, an
eternal life, an undying life, in the splendors of heaven and the presence of
God. John recorded what he saw in his vision of heaven in Revelation
21: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among
them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He
will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any
death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the
first things have passed away” (Rev 21:3-4). This is life as God intended us to
live! And it is ours if we have trusted in Christ. Because He lives, we will
live also.
There is great help for a Christian in this promise. No
matter what comes our way, the worst thing that can happen to us in this world
is death. But Christ has defeated death so that it is powerless against us. In
Him, we are more than conquerors! So as Christians we do not need to fear
death. Death is an enemy, but it is an enemy that has been defeated on our
behalf through the death and resurrection of Christ. He has given us the
promise of undying life. Because He lives, we will live also.
Now we come to the third promise:
III. The Promise of Unshakable Assurance: You will know
(vv20-24)
When I was in seminary, my favorite class was one that many
students tried to avoid. But every Thursday morning at 7 am(!) I took my seat
with great anticipation and eagerness in the lecture hall to hear Dr. Bruce
Little teach on Epistemology. Epistemology is essentially the study of knowledge. What do we really know, and
how do we know it, and how do we know that we know it? Epistemology is
intensely relevant and practical because all day, every day, we are making
countless decisions based on what we know, or what we think we know. When it
comes to our Christian faith, epistemology has an important role as well. We
say we believe certain things. We say we know certain things. But how do we know them? How do we know that
we know them? Is there a difference between what we believe and what we know?
These are eternally important questions. When the Apostle John wrote his first
epistle, one of his stated purposes was this: “These things I have written to
you who believe in the name of the
Son of God, so that you may know that
you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13). He wants the believers to become knowers.
And so does Jesus. He says to those who believe in Him here, “In that day, you
will know.” And He explains what we know, how we know, and how we know that we
know.
Let’s look at what He says about how we know. He says, “In that day.” What day? It is the day that
His followers would see Him; the day in which, after His death, He would be
found to be alive. So the basis of what we know is the death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ. This is the basis for all Christian belief and knowledge. We
do not determine our beliefs on personal opinion or preference, or emotion or
feeling. Our beliefs are based on what Jesus said and what Jesus did. But why
should we believe what Jesus says – about the Bible, about Himself, about us,
about life, death, heaven, hell, or anything else? Well, the only reason to
believe Him is if He is able to demonstrate His own trustworthiness. He claimed
to be God. That would be pretty easy to disprove. If you kill Him, and He stays
dead, then He isn’t God. If He says, “I am going to be killed and then rise
from the dead,” but He doesn’t rise from the dead, then He is a liar and He
cannot be trusted. But, He did rise
from the dead, just as He said He would. His resurrection demonstrates the
veracity of all that He said, and therefore we can trust Him. We do not trust
our feelings or our opinions; we trust Jesus Christ on the basis of what He has
done for us. You might wake up tomorrow morning and say, “I don’t feel like I
am a Christian. I don’t feel that God is near to me, and I don’t feel that He
loves me.” Thankfully, it is not about how you feel. What are the facts? What
do you believe? Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins on the cross and
rose from the dead? Have you personally trusted in Him on that basis? Then
those historical facts become the basis for what you know to be true. That’s
how we know.
Now what do we know? He said, “In that day, you will know
that I am in My Father and you in Me, and I in you.” This is the content of our assurance. Because Jesus
died and rose again, we know that He
is in the Father. That is to say, He and the Father are one, and that Jesus is
both fully God and fully man in one divine Person. Jesus said that. It is a
bold claim. But He backed it up when He demonstrated His power over death in
His resurrection. We know that He is God in the flesh, and that He is mighty
save because He is in the Father.
Because Jesus died and rose again, we also know that we are in Him. To be “in
Christ” is to be united with Him in His life, His death, and His resurrection.
The Bible has many promises for us because we are “in Christ.” For example, in
Philippians 3 Paul says that He longs to “be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from
the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ…” (Php 3:7-9). So, when we
are in Him, we are not viewed by God
on the basis of our own merits, and that is a good thing, since all of our
works are but filthy rags in His sight anyway (Isa 64:6). Instead we are viewed
in Christ, so that God sees us
clothed (or covered) in the righteousness of Jesus Christ. He does not treat
us, receive us, or respond to us as we deserve,
but as Christ deserves, because we are in
Him. We know that we are saved because we are in Him, and we know that we
are in Him on the basis of His death and resurrection.
And then Jesus says we will also know in that day that He is in us. When Jesus died and rose again,
He ascended to His Father and sent the Holy Spirit to indwell all who trust in
Him (cf. vv16-18). In a very real way, Jesus lives in His followers. He says in verse 23 that He and His Father will
come and “make Our abode” with the one who loves Him. He has done this in the
person of the Holy Spirit. He lives within us, empowering us to live the
Christian life in obedience to God, transforming our desires to reflect the
will of God, and shaping us into Christlikeness. We know this because Jesus has
died and rose again.
We do not have to doubt these things, we know them. The
content of our assurance is that Christ is in the Father, we are in Him, and He
is in us. The basis of it is His death and resurrection. Jesus also speaks of
the evidence of these things. This is how we know that we know. The first thing
He speaks of as evidence of our assurance is the evidence of a personal
relationship -- our love for Him, and His love for us. He said, “He who loves
Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love Him.” Friends, before you were a
Christian, you did not love God. You were a rebel to His will. But suddenly,
and somewhat inexplicably, you came to grieve your sin and the gulf that
separated you from God and you longed to please Him because you found yourself
falling in love with Him. This is the evidence of regeneration, new birth, and
genuine conversion. You were responding to God’s love by loving Him, and
resting in His love for you. You may say, “But doesn’t God love everyone?”
Indeed He does. But you know from your own life experiences that there are
different kinds of love. You love your parents, your children, your spouse,
your friends and neighbors. But you do not love them all in the same way. So
God loves all people, but He has a unique and special love for those who love
Him and come to Him by faith in the Lord Jesus. One of the assurances that we
have of His love for us is that we ourselves are growing more and more in love
with the Him.
That brings us to the second evidence of our assurance. How
do we know that we love Jesus? He says that if we love Him, we will obey Him.
This is the evidence of practical devotion. For many who say that they love
God, it is merely lip service. True love for God manifests itself in obedience
to Him. Jesus said, “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who
loves Me” (v21). Again in verse 23, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word;”
and in verse 24, “He who does not love Me does not keep My words.” There was a
time in our lives when we did not desire to obey God. But since coming to faith
in Christ, our desires are changing. We want to do what is pleasing to Him. How
can we explain that? The only explanation is that Christ is transforming us. We
are not yet perfected, and we won’t be in this life in this world, but we are
growing to love obedience! We do not find ourselves obeying because we have to, but because we want to. Practical devotion, an
obedience that flows from love for Christ, is an evidence of our assurance.
That brings us then to the final evidence of assurance here
– that of profound interaction. Jesus said that He will disclose Himself to the one who loves and obeys Him. This
disclosure, or revelation, of Himself comes to us through the very word that He
has given us to obey. And these words, Jesus said, are not His only, but the
Father’s who sent Him (v24). But, here’s the thing. Once upon a time, you and I
very likely looked at the Bible as merely a book. Perhaps a special book, or an
important book, but it was still just a book. Maybe some have looked upon it as
a collection of religious rules and regulations. But something happens to us
when we are saved. We begin to view this book differently. Now it becomes a
place where we turn to meet with God. When we read it, we are hearing God speak
to us. He is pouring His truth into our hearts and we find ourselves, not
interacting with words on paper, but with the living God through those words.
So one of the evidences of our assurance is this profound interaction that we
have as we meditate upon His word, because there we have found that Jesus
discloses Himself to us.
So, we have this promise of unshakable assurance. Because
Jesus has died and rose again, we know
that He is in the Father, that we are in Him, and that He is in us. And the
evidence that we truly know this is
found in our personal love relationship with Him, in our practical devotion of
obedience to His will, and in our profound interaction with Him in His word.
Because of Jesus’ victory over death in His resurrection, He
makes three specific promises here: you will see Me; you will live; and you
will know. The promise of unending fellowship enables us to endure the
hardships of life and overcome temptation and sin. The promise of undying life
liberates us from the fear of death. And the promise of unshakable assurance
guards us against the doubts that arise from our feelings, experiences, and
emotions by anchoring us to the bedrock foundation of Jesus’ death and
resurrection. But these promises are only for those who have trusted in Christ
as Lord and Savior. If you have, then the promises are yours. Trust them. Rest
in them, because you know the One who has promised them, and you know His
promises are steadfast. If you have never turned to the Lord Jesus and trusted
Him to save you, you can do that today. He has taken your sin and its penalty
upon Himself in His death, and He has overcome sin and death for you in His
resurrection. This is why we are told that if we confess with our mouths that Jesus
is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we will be
saved. You can have uninterrupted fellowship with Him; an undying life like His
own; and the unshakable assurance that God-in-Christ has saved you and lives
within you as you trust in Him.
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