Will you kindly turn with me in the
words of Scripture to 1 Corinthians chapter 15
and I would like to read verses 12
13 and 14 as focusing upon the theme
of our message this morning.
But if it is preached that Christ has
been raised from the dead, how can some
of you say that there is no resurrection
of the dead?
If there is no resurrection of the dead,
then not even Christ has been raised.
And if Christ has not been raised, our
preaching is useless and so is your faith.
You will remember how the Apostle Paul began
this gigantic chapter 15 in 1 Corinthians with
a restatement of the essentials of the gospel
which he had originally preached in Corinth as
the Apostle to the Gentiles.
That preaching had resulted in the founding of
a Christian church there.
Despite the gross proverbial immorality of Corinth, there
had emerged as a consequence of the preaching
of the Apostle, a church of Jesus Christ
of men and women who were set apart
from the rest of society and became known
for their faith in God and their confidence
in Jesus Christ.
Now that gospel, Paul tells us in the
opening words, related essentially to the death, the
burial, and the subsequent resurrection of the Saviour.
Now it's important for us to grasp that.
The Church of Jesus Christ in Corinth did
not emerge by preaching simply the ethics of
Jesus, by preaching the standards of the Sermon
on the Mount, important as they are.
The church emerged in Corinth when the Apostle
preached that the Christ of God laid down
his life for our sins on the cross,
was buried in a borrowed tomb, but ultimately
emerged from the darkness of the grave, tearing
the bars of the grave asunder to live
henceforth in the power of an endless indestructible
life.
When by faith Paul was able to link
the people of Corinth with the Lord risen,
when they were brought together by faith and
linked together, men and women leapt into newness
of life.
They left their spiritual graves and immorality of
life and became newborn creatures.
And so the church emerged.
Proceeding, the Apostle reminded the Corinthians of the
many to whom the crucified and risen Lord
manifested himself after he was risen from the
dead.
You remember he enumerates individuals to whom Jesus
appeared, showed himself to be alive and well
after his death and after his burial.
He tells us that there were individuals, there
were groups, and there was one large group
of over 500 people, most of whom, says
Paul, are still alive and you could confer
with them and hear their witness if you
so desired, though some of them have fallen
asleep in Jesus.
Now subsequent to that, subsequent to the emergence
of the church in Corinth, there were some
philosophers who sought to influence all and sundry,
including some of the Christian community.
And apparently there were some unwary Christians in
Corinth who imbibed, or were in danger of
imbibing, this new philosophy, one of whose tenets
said something like this.
There is no resurrection of the dead.
Apparently it was very cleverly presented.
It was almost beguilingly appealing.
And quite a number of the folk who
were at any rate associated with the church,
even if they were not members, felt that
this was such a reasonable philosophy that they
began to think in terms of making it
their own.
Now Paul, in writing to them, has to
bid them face the issue that you cannot
believe something like that in the light of
Christian experience and in the light of the
witness of the Apostles and the preaching of
the gospel.
And that is going to be our theme
this morning.
Against the background, of course, of the evidence
for the resurrection of our Lord, it is
untenable that anyone, particularly a Christian, should receive
a philosophy which includes the notion that resurrection
is not possible.
Now the general proposition of the speculative philosophy
which Paul exposes is put very simply in
verse 12 then.
If it be preached that Christ has not
been raised from the dead, how can some
of you say, here it is, there is
no resurrection of the dead.
Now let me summarize this in order to
get its thrust.
These philosophers were not apparently denying the immortality
of the soul.
Oh they believed, most of the Greek philosophers
did, that the soul outlives the body.
And indeed many of them yearned for that
day when when the spirit would leave the
body behind because they felt there was a
larger existence beyond the body.
They spoke of the body as the tomb
of the soul, and they wanted to get
away from the tomb.
So they anticipated death as something glorious, something
leading beyond the life of the body.
And it was only then they anticipated a
fullness of experience as they spoke of it.
Now the gospel that they objected to was
the gospel that said not only that a
man's soul is immortal but that there is
a resurrection of the dead.
The literal meaning of the word that is
used here is corpse.
And this of course brings out really the
punch of the whole issue.
If Christ is announced or heralded that he
has been raised out from among corpses, that's
what Paul said literally, how say some among
you that there is no resurrection of corpses?
You see what the gospel says is this,
that by the grace of our crucified risen
Lord even the body is to be raised
again.
And those who trust in our Lord Jesus
Christ have a future which involves a new
body, a rising out of the body that
has been there is a body that will
come.
There is a connection between them as Paul
teaches us later on in this chapter.
Now the philosophers simply could not take this
in.
The Greek philosophers were bewildered, totally bewildered by
that, because of course they did not believe
in the supernatural.
They did not know God.
They were clever, they were wise according to
their own standards of wisdom, but they knew
not God.
And therefore they poured constant scorn upon those
who believed that a body that has decomposed
in the grave can possibly, can possibly be
brought together again in a new way or
in any way.
Celsus, one of their sarcastic writers put it
like this, he said that the hope of
resurrection is really the hope of worms.
For what soul of man would wish any
longer for a body that had rotted?
Such was the scorn poured upon the Christians
and upon the doctrine that we have a
Savior who himself rose from the dead and
will cause his people to come out from
their graves and give them a new body
at last.
Now that was the general proposition.
Now Paul looks at the logical implications of
that speculative philosophy and he ruthlessly exposes it
in verses 13 to 19.
He addresses the entire church and he wants
to make it very, very clear that you
can't, you can't as a Christian imbibe any
teaching such as that.
It cuts the main nerve and what is
more it would seem to me, the Apostle
wants us to see that if we really
are Christians and if we have a valid,
genuine Christian experience, we ought to know better.
If by the proclamation of the gospel of
Jesus Christ we have been brought into fellowship
with the Living God, then we ought to
know that the Christ who brings us into
fellowship with the Living God is no dead
corpse any longer.
He's alive.
A dead Christ cannot save me.
A dead Christ cannot bring me into relationship
with a Living God.
He has to be alive in order to
introduce us to court as Paul puts it
in one of the chapters in Romans.
Now a basic implication of the tenet that
there is no resurrection of the dead then,
is that if that were so then even
Jesus could not have been raised from the
dead.
If the philosophical tenet is true it not
only applies to us but it applies to
Jesus.
But now the Christians in Corinth ought to
know by the very experience of life through
Jesus Christ and of fellowship with God and
with the Holy Spirit who has graced them
and gifted them with different gifts.
They ought in themselves to have the answer
to such a speculative philosophy.
The Christian and the church, the Christian is
an answer to this speculative philosophy if a
man is really a Christian.
But now I want to come down to
two of the more general implications of that
basic tenet and Paul deals with four.
We are going to look at one or
two this morning.
The four that he deals with in this
passage here is as follows.
He shows how the philosophy concerned one, denies
the substance of the apostolic preaching beginning of
verse 14, belies the truthfulness of the apostolic
witness verse 15 and in consequence the Christian
experience is thus shown to be a fraud
and the Christian hope is baseless.
Verses 18 and 19.
We are going to look at the first
two of these if time permits.
The first, if this philosophy is true then
the apostolic preaching is rendered useless is the
word here.
It really means empty.
The preaching is empty.
In other words it's like a cartridge that
has been spent.
There's no power in it.
You preach a Christ who lived and died
and is finished with, however great his life,
however precious his life, however noble his teaching,
if he's dead and gone he cannot help
you now.
And this is important.
A message relating to a dead Savior is
powerless to save.
It would be like a cartridge that is
spent.
Death is the ultimate expression of man's impotence
and limitations and a Savior who cannot master
death and transform it would be no Savior
at all.
He would be impotent at the point where
mankind needs him most.
Now this becomes more tellingly clear when we
rightly understand what the Bible teaches about death.
Scripture assures us that death is much more
than the mere exit off stage, off the
stage of our present existence.
Death is much more than the snuffing out
of the candle of our present life.
Of course it is the exit off stage.
It is the way we leave this world
unless we are alive when Jesus comes again.
We shall all leave this world the way
of death.
We shall all be buried in a cemetery
or otherwise disposed of.
We shall die.
It is appointed unto men once to die.
But death is much more than that.
Death has unique dimensions.
It carries in its bosom a peculiar sting
for us humans that it doesn't have for
the animal kingdom.
And it's not simply confined to the emotional
upheaval of letting go of our loved ones
when they're called away from us.
There is an emotional upheaval.
There is a tearing of the spirit.
If you have loved those who were called
away, well you know what it is.
And all of us have had death visit
our homes at one time or another.
There is an emotional upheaval, but death is
much more than that.
What then is death according to the Scriptures?
Scripture views death as a composite phenomenon that
assumes its most challenging characteristics because of human
sin.
Now something akin to death might have been
our experience even if man had not sinned.
But it would be completely different from death
as we know it.
The sting of death is sin, says Paul
at the end of this chapter.
We might have had some way to leave
this world even if man were still the
kind of being he was when he was
created.
But death as we know it is altogether
different from that.
What is death then?
There are three things that always need to
be remembered when we view death in the
light of Scripture.
And our Savior must be able to deal
with these three aspects of death.
And he can only do so if having
died for our sins he's alive again.
First of all, death is the outworking of
a sentence of the judge of all the
earth.
Death is the outworking of a judicial sentence
by the Creator and the judge of all
men.
A way back at the beginnings of the
human race the recently created man in Eden
was told by God, a quote from Genesis
2 17, you must not eat from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
for when you eat of it you will
surely die.
Now Paul assures us in his epistle or
epistles that death is nothing less than the
carrying out of that sentence threatened back there
in the book of Genesis.
Death is the wages of sin.
The wages of sin is death.
Or to put it in Paul's words elsewhere
in Romans 6 23, sin entered the world
through one man.
And death through sin.
And in this way death came to all
men because all sinned.
Death therefore is the outworking of a sentence.
The judicial sentence of the Lord and the
moral governor of the universe who said that
when we sin we shall die.
As one aspect of it.
The second aspect is this.
Death then becomes a state of the soul,
a condition of the inner man, the inner
being, the inner person.
In writing to the Ephesians in chapter 2
Paul reminds them that when they were dead
in trespasses and sins they were already dead.
Not physically of course, but spiritually.
When they were dead in trespasses and sins
God broke into their lives and brought them
back to life.
He quickened them.
He gave them a spiritual resurrection through Jesus
Christ.
Now what is this state of death within?
Well you have only to read the epistles
of Paul particularly and also some aspects of
the gospel of our Lord or the Gospels,
the four Gospels.
And you'll come up against it over and
over again.
Let me quote Paul because he gives a
summary of it in Romans chapter 8 verses
6 and 7 and 8 particularly.
The mind of the sinful flesh of the
sinful man is death.
Paul says that a man is in such
a condition spiritually that the way of his
way of thinking, his very mind, the very
motions of his mind exhibit the characteristics of
death.
Well you say how is that?
Well I think Paul explains it just by
going on.
He says it expresses itself in a hostility
towards God.
Doesn't like the Holy One, doesn't like righteousness,
doesn't like the character of God, doesn't like
the company of God, doesn't like the truth
of God, the word of God, the Son
of God, the people of God, the day
of God or anything that belongs to God.
It is hostile toward God and then it
is a refusal to submit to Him because
it is hostile to Him.
And then finally it is a consequent inability
to please God.
Man in this state of spiritual death just
cannot please God even though he may do
some things that God requires, he cannot please
God because inwardly there is an antipathy towards
God.
So there are two aspects of death.
A Savior must deal with both.
There is a third.
Death is also something beyond both features we
have mentioned.
Apart from the saving work of Christ it
leads to what scripture significantly refers to as
the second death.
The physical aspect of death awaits all of
us alike, believers and unbelievers, even though the
knowledge that we have a Savior who is
risen from the dead transforms death or should
transform death for every believing man and woman.
But we have to die.
Beyond the physical and beyond the present condition
of our souls which is called death, however,
Jude and John speak in terms of a
second death.
Whilst Paul refers to the experience of a
final banishment of men and women from the
presence of God in 2 Thessalonians 1.9.
Jesus himself speaks of the cursed as going
into eternal fire prepared for the devil and
his angels Matthew 25 41.
What John speaks of as a fiery lake
of burning sulfur is a second death.
Now whatever image you take it points to
a grimly terrifying reality beyond physical death and
beyond our present experience of being inwardly dead
to God.
There is this other dimension to it.
Now a Savior needs not only to rid
us and to save us from one aspect
of death but from all aspects of death.
And it was necessary in order so to
do for God to become incarnate in his
Son.
No man could do this.
No man could face death in all its
manifestations, in all its forms, in all its
power.
It was necessary for God to become incarnate.
So the Lord Jesus was born of the
Virgin conceived of the Holy Ghost.
He lived among men and he laid down
his spotless life an atonement for our sins
to deal with death in all its dimensions.
But even as death was not adequate did
he not rise again from the dead to
be the living Lord.
Manifestly a Savior who is contemporary with every
generation and not the Savior who lived yesterday
two thousand years ago upon whose memory, the
memory of whom we are asked to live.
Jesus is not a memory.
He's alive and he has to be alive
to save us from death in its present
manifestations and in its future.
And Jesus knew this.
So of course our Lord Jesus promised his
disciples that he would die for our sins
and they all tell us so.
In their preaching they echo what Jesus had
taught them.
Whether it be Peter or John or James
or whoever they re-echo the words of
their master and they tell us that Jesus
died for our sins.
But they also tell us that he rose
from the dead.
And Jesus was very aware of this before
he died so that he promised them.
Now if you want to see how telling
this is and how precious it is you
have only to read the Gospels and you
will find that when Jesus began to teach
his disciples about what were the things that
were then in the future.
He invariably taught them about the fact that
having suffered he was going to rise again.
Let me read to you for example just
one illustration from Mark 8 31.
Then he began to teach them that the
Son of Man must suffer many things and
be rejected by the elders chief priests and
teachers of the law and that he must
be killed and after three days rise again.
He knew it was necessary.
It was a must be if he's to
be the Savior.
Now he says almost identically the same thing
in Mark 9 31 in Mark 10 33
and 34 in Matthew 12 40 and in
John 2 19 to 21 to mention a
few scriptures.
This is no solitary reference.
He knew that he must die and rise
again.
Now my friends having thus recognized the need
and pledged himself to meet it.
Did Jesus fail to rise again?
He could not be the Savior of men.
Do you think they could trust him?
And do you think they would trust him?
And do you think they would go out
into a hostile world to say that he
had died for our sins and is risen
again?
If he had not they were not paid
for their preaching.
They had to pay with their lives for
the privilege of proclaiming a risen Savior.
And yet they moved into the jaws of
a hostile world and refused to be silenced
because they knew that he was alive.
One can almost sense the guilt of genuine
Christians in Corinth that had countenanced such a
timid as there is no resurrection of the
dead.
For if that were true then Jesus could
not have risen.
Paul's logic is irresistible and the challenge of
his teaching is most powerful.
If that philosophy is true then the whole
preaching of the gospel will have been powerless.
But you see let me repeat.
That is one thing that the Christians in
Corinth could not accept.
That the gospel preached by Paul was powerless.
Everything spiritually had been powerless until he came
and he preached.
And he stood on what a historian speaks
of as that ancient dunghill of Corinth.
And he stood on the dunghill and he
preached Christ crucified, buried, risen.
What happened?
From among some of the most debauched men
and women in that ancient society there came
into existence new creatures who by believing in
the Lord Jesus Christ were cleansed of their
filth, remade in their spirits, and came to
know God.
That experience can only grow out of a
gospel that has a living Savior at the
heart of it.
And I think it is most important for
us to remember.
In a day when there is not all
that evidence of power in our churches, that
in the early days of the Christian church
it was not so.
It was quite otherwise.
Even when the Apostles had died out, and
the Apostles had gone, and the next generation
came, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ
spread like wildfire.
And it could only do so if it
had power in it, if it was the
dynamic of God as Paul tells the Romans.
The same gospel of Christ crucified and risen
moved into the ancient society so that Pliny,
a governor of Bithynia in the second century
of our era, in writing to Trajan, the
Emperor, had to confess.
Christianity, he says, has pervaded not only the
cities, but the villages, and the country places,
so that the temples are nearly deserted.
That is the temples of Roman, where Roman
gods were worshipped.
And another writer, Tertullian, in the second century
has a similar thought.
He says, we are but of yesterday.
We've only, as a Christian church, we've only
been in existence, he says, as of yesterday.
And yet, he says, we have filled your
places, your cities, your lands, your castles, your
towns, your councils, your houses, your camps, your
senates, your forum.
We have left you nothing but your temple.
What a magnificent picture of this living Christ
storming the strongholds of paganism in Jerusalem, the
capital of Judaism, in Rome, the capital of
heathenism, and claiming men and women and making
them anew after the image of God as
revealed in his Son.
If it says anything, it says that the
gospel as proclaimed by these heralds of it
was not impotent.
The only explanation of the power that thus
recreated men, took them out of spiritual death,
made them fearless of physical death, and of
the beyond, is that they knew Jesus Christ
to be risen from the dead, their contemporary
Lord, who would never die, but would keep
them.
Now, I must mention this other matter because
it is necessary in order to see things
in focus.
Secondly, then, if Christ was not risen, the
Christian preachers were false witnesses.
You see, the Christian preachers did not simply
preach.
The first preachers were also witnesses.
Now, a witness is to be distinguished from
a preacher, though it is to be hoped
that every preacher is a witness to certain
things.
Read verses 15 and 16.
More than that, says Paul, we are then
found to be false witnesses about God.
For we have testified about God that he
raised Christ from the dead.
But he did not raise him if in
fact the dead are not raised.
For if the dead are not raised, then
Christ has not been raised either.
You're still in your sins.
Clearly this applied particularly to the first preachers
of the gospel who had to be witnesses.
Now, you who read your New Testament carefully
will remember, we're told in Acts chapter 1
and verse 29, that when the early church
thought of having someone to take the place
of Judas, among the twelve, one of the
characteristics, one of the essential characteristic features of
such a person who would take Judas's place
would be this, that he had been a
witness to the life of Christ, to the
death of Christ, and to the resurrection of
Christ.
Let me read to you.
It is necessary, says Peter, to choose one
of the men who have been with us
the whole time the Lord Jesus went in
and out among us, beginning from John's baptism
to the time when Jesus was taken up
from us.
For one of these must become a witness
with us of the resurrection from the dead.
The early apostles then were chosen for one
thing, because they had witnessed the Lord Jesus
during his life, seen his death.
They saw him alive from the dead.
They were witnesses as well as heralds.
Now Paul, who did not qualify on that
basis to be an apostle, was given a
very special dispensation.
He did not witness Jesus according to the
flesh, he didn't, he wasn't one of the
twelve, and so he tells us here that
he was, he was, to use his phrase,
he was like one untimely born.
He had a special birth.
In other words, he became a Christian not
like the others.
He was given a vision, he was given
to see the glory of the Lord Jesus
ascended, risen at the Father's right hand.
This was something physical.
The glory of the ascended Lord broke in
upon his life so that it was greater
than the glory of the Son.
It wasn't something in his mind only, it
was real, it was objective, it blinded him
physically.
But as it blinded him physically, it convinced
him spiritually that Jesus was alive.
You and I don't have that experience when
we are converted.
Nothing like the Apostle Paul, that was especially
his, it was singularly his, because of his
need.
The Savior would have him as an apostle,
and the only way to prove to him
that Jesus was the living Lord, was by
this amazing vision that he had on the
Damascus Road.
You see, all of them could thus affirm
that Jesus was alive from the dead.
But the rest of the Apostles had witnessed
him, had seen him.
And you will notice when you read the
book of the Acts of the Apostles, what
emphasis is laid upon this, the witness factor.
They were witnesses, put in the dock, they
had seen him.
And you notice they'd not only seen him,
they'd heard him.
And not only had they heard him, they
had touched him.
They had eaten a meal with him.
He had spoken to them, he had commanded
them, he had comforted them, he'd done all
kinds of things for them.
And they had met in all kinds of
circumstances.
Sometimes it was in an upper room, and
the doors were closed, and the windows barred.
At other times it was out by the
lake.
At other times it was going on a
road into the country.
Another time it was on a mountainside.
Sometimes there were one, there was one person
alone, sometimes two, sometimes more, sometimes on one
occasion even five hundred people at once.
There were varied witnesses in varying circumstances, using
all the senses, so that there is no,
no, no, no event in history, which is
more amazingly confirmed than the resurrection of our
Lord Jesus Christ.
And then of course that to which we've
referred already.
These men were not paid for what they
did in preaching the gospel.
They had to pay for it with their
own life.
And it is very significant that whatever charges
are brought against the Apostles, no one ever
charged them with dishonesty.
No one ever charged the Apostles with being
immoral.
No one ever charged them with dishonesty or
untruthfulness.
And when they preached their gospel, they made
people who had been liars and fibbers, call
them whatever you like, they made them say
the truth.
Their ethical teaching was, you must speak the
truth.
Speak the truth in love, but you must
speak the truth.
It would be completely inconsistent with a whole
psychology, as well as the history that underlies
the gospel, to suggest that these people preached
a fraud, something they knew to be untrue.
Chuck Colson, in his recent book on loving
God, says that some of the facts to
which we've referred now were so significant in
his being convinced of the resurrection of Jesus
Christ.
He says that his experience in the Watergate
affair, the Watergate scandal, made it absolutely clear
to him that Jesus must have been risen
from the dead, even apart from his own
experience of rebirth, just from the testimony of
these men.
And this is how he argued.
He said, they're involved in the Watergate scandal.
You had some of the most powerful people,
in the most powerful situation in the world.
And there they were, they were tempted to
cover up certain things, and they tried it.
But they simply could not do it.
They tried to change some of the facts.
They tried to give this color to it,
or that color to it.
But given time, out it had to come.
And even the President of the United States
of that day was proved to be other
than truthful.
And here, he says, we have eleven men,
simple, ordinary men, who are alleged by some
people to have preached a fraudulent gospel, to
have preached that Jesus was alive from the
dead, when he was not.
And they had a body to dispose of.
How could they do it?
The thing is psychologically impossible, says Chuck Colson.
I know how much effort, how much thought,
how many sleepless nights go into the business
of trying to cover up, when you don't
have anything like this to cover.
No, no, they were not fools, and they
were not fooled.
They touched him, they heard him, they handled
him, they saw him, and they received from
his lips comfort as well as challenge.
And they went into all the world to
proclaim glad tidings to all men, because he
commanded them as the risen Lord.
And they believed that he was with them
in every situation.
Why did they thus believe?
Because they were witnesses.
They knew it to be true, and it
is on the basis of this fact that
there is a gospel to preach.
Brothers and sisters, this morning let us be
reminded of this.
The Christian gospel is not just a theory
spun by men in a theological college or
somewhere else.
It has arisen out of the fact that
God has broken into history, and he's done
something.
And central to what he has said and
what he has done is this.
He gave his Son to die that you
should not perish, that I should not perish.
To die our death.
And when he had so done, God raised
him from the dead.
And he lives today at God's right hand,
a prince and a savior.
Do you trust him?
Is he yours?
What's your relationship with him?
If you have never come to him with
faith and love and obedience before, I beg
you come to him this morning.
I don't know, I guess many of you
will have heard of Harry Lauder, the British
singer of yesteryear.
Harry Lauder was a great entertainer in Britain
during and after the war, and sometime after
the war.
He was hurled into a state of total
despondency one day when a telegram arrived at
his home to say that his son had
been killed in battle.
Harry Lauder was a very jovial kind of
man.
You could never imagine him with other than
a smile on his face.
But he was, he was completely, completely beaten.
And he really didn't know what to do.
Now it was so extreme that they thought
he was going to become mentally deranged.
And a young Christian visited him, a soldier,
and told him, Harry, perhaps you didn't know.
And I don't remember the name of the
boy now, so I can't refer to him
by name.
But your son, before he died, repented of
his sin and trusted in Jesus Christ as
Savior.
And he insisted that death for him would
only be a comma, not a period, not
a full stop.
And he was going to be with his
Lord.
And Harry, if you, if you trust him
too, you can meet your loved one again.
Now this was the message of the soldier.
I'm not quoting, I'm not adding anything to
it.
This was the message.
Harry Lauder bade him repeat the story, I
think two or three times.
He said, do you say that it is
possible for me, for me, to see my
loved one again?
And the soldier said, I am as sure
of it as I am sure that this
book in my hand is the Word of
God.
Then said Harry, tell me what I must
do.
And dear Harry Lauder, in his awful condition
at that time, went on his knees and
cried to the Christ of Calvary, the Christ
of the Resurrection, to take him as his
disciple, just as he had taken his son.
And Harry came back to life again, and
sang probably better than he'd ever sung before.
He certainly was a new husband to his
wife, and a new father, and a different
preacher.
My friends, it's the only message that casts
any ray of light on this pilgrimage of
ours, and on its terminus and beyond.
There is no other, for he's the only
one who has taken the sting out of
death and says that he will keep in
his hand, keep in his care, the shape
of his fold.
If Easter be not true, then faith must
mount on broken wing.
Then hopes no more immortal spring, life prove
a phantom, death a dirge.
If Easter be not true, but now is
Christ risen from the dead, and become the
first fruits of a harvest to come of
those who trust in him.
I bid you trust him.
I bid you crown him as your Savior
and your Lord.
The rest of your days will be days
in the sunshine of his love, and the
unfailing care of the one who holds the
keys of death and of Hades.
Let us pray.