The angels say to these women, this don’t be alarmed. Go, go to the end of the earth. Go. I am with you to the end of your rope. I’m with you to the end of the age, because I am risen when it looks like it’s over. It is only the beginning. Circumstances seem like a death, but they are the way to life. There’s purpose in all that comes. There are no dead ends. I want you to think with me about that for a moment. Because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his presence now in your life, there are no dead ends going on. Whatever’s going on in your life right now feels like a total dead end. I don’t see where I am. God says, No, I am superintending your life. I am working in your life. There are no dead ends. You may say, Well, this one is. It’s a total rock face. He says, Not for me. There are no dead ends. Death could not hold me.
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Pastor Mark Willey
Excerpt from “Words from the Empty Tomb”
Video Transcript:
If you’ve embraced Jesus Christ as your Savior, you saw yourself the way Peter came to see himself.
We failed in our own attempts to measure up to God’s righteousness. We’ve seen ourselves as screw ups. The amazing thing in the Christian life as we journey with Jesus is the more you go on in the Christian life, the more you see how much a screw up you really are. The more you see the self centeredness of your own heart, the more it becomes about grace.
The more you really do embrace, with Samuel Rutherford who said, I see the seed of every known sin in my own heart. It’s grace. It’s the sense that this is all of God. The more you come to realize the astounding work that Jesus did in dying for us and suffering for us, and then ultimately affirming the freedom that has been purchased by rising for us.
This past Monday night, we were, we had a board meeting and Doug Linda, our chairman. showed, as he often does to start our meeting, a worship video. And, and this was, he taken a video clip of the passion Mel Gibson’s movie and the brutality of the depiction of Jesus being beaten and lashed and scourged by the Roman soldiers.
And the song was being played in the background, the Via Dolorosa. And the voiceover was just Down the via dolorosa the the way of suffering and you’re just watching and most of us in the room Had tears down our face Doug had us then get into groups of two or three and we’re praying and as we’re praying this this This guy’s crying with cry.
Why? Because when you know christ And you journey with him the more you see your own heart and the more you realize He did that For a guy like me, he rescued me. He brought me into relationship with God. And the more we go grow in our, our understanding of our own hearts, the beauty is that God only shows you your heart.
So you will understand his. The more you see yours, the more you see his for you.
The message of grace at the tomb is
He’s risen. Go tell the disciples and name Peter by name. He names your name. He makes you an object of grace. He says, I did this for you. The work of Friday, the cross, the scourging, all of it. I rose. I left the grave and I’m never going back because I am the risen Christ who’s declared by my resurrection.
That the work that I did on the cross and dying in the place of sinners that they could be forgiven
Will never fail they are eternally forgiven and accepted And so peter the biggest screw up the biggest mess up jesus could say this to him On you i’ll build my church and i’m giving you a new name Your name’s been simon now. It’s peter petra. You’re my rock You That I’m going to build my church on.
Peter, you will have the biggest resurrection of all. It’s a word of grace to our hearts. It’s a word of mission to your life. The angels say to these women, this don’t be alarmed. Go, go to the end of the earth. Go. I am with you to the end of your rope. I’m with you to the end of the age, because I am risen when it looks like it’s over.
It is only the beginning. Circumstances seem like a death, but they are the way to life. There’s purpose in all that comes. There are no dead ends. I want you to think with me about that for a moment. Because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his presence now in your life, there are no dead ends going on.
Whatever’s going on in your life right now feels like a total dead end. I don’t see where I am. God says, No, I am superintending your life. I am working in your life. There are no dead ends. You may say, Well, this one is. It’s a total rock face. He says, Not for me. There are no dead ends. Death could not hold me.
There’s no places that can hold my work in your life. God will not necessarily protect you from the things that will perfect you. There are things that would say, well, how can this be? Well, God’s using it. How can this hard God will use it. God is changing us. All of it’s being done because he is continually bring being bringing life out of death.
It is so hard for us to face limitations and loss and cost.
First of all, because we don’t believe that there are no dead ends. But second of all, we don’t remember that we are not living with this place as all that we have. Johnny Erickson Tata was a young woman who had a tragic diving accident in her late teens. She became a believer in Jesus Christ. She, afterwards, she was completely paraplegic, has remained that way her entire life, and she tells the story of, of how the hardest part of dealing with her limitation, which was acute from her neck down, that she could, she would go to church and she went to an Episcopalian church where they would kneel down every week.
And she couldn’t kneel down and she said, I am in the place of hope and safety and even here I am confronted with my limitation. And then she said this, then I suddenly realized that when I get to heaven, I’ll get there on glorified legs. And the first thing I’ll get to do is to drop down on them on my knees and kneel quietly before the feet of Jesus.
And then I’m going to get on my feet and I’m going to dance. Can you imagine the hope that the resurrection gives to someone whose spinal cord was injured like me? Can you imagine someone who is manic depressive? No religion, no other philosophy promises us new bodies along with new minds and new hearts.
Only in the gospel of Jesus Christ do people hurting like me find such enormous hope to live. It enables us to go. It enables us to go forward in difficult and overwhelming circumstances. Because there are no dead ends. There is nothing that contains the work of God and the purposes of God, not a grave, not a dead end.
Jesus left the graveyard on Easter Sunday. He left it 2, 000 years ago and he isn’t going back. It’s a word of challenge to your mind. It’s a word of grace to your heart. It’s a word of mission to your life. Lord, I pray you take these simple words. Speak them into our hearts as you see the need. Apply them to us, I pray in Jesus name.
Amen.