Now let's go to the Word of the Lord to John, St. John's gospel, chapter 20, and reading beginning in verse 19. On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, peace be with you. And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so, I am sending you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of anyone, they are forgiven. If you withhold forgiveness from anyone, it is withheld the Word of the Lord. It is obvious to anyone who reads the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus Christ that Jesus had a profound sense of mission. He had been sent from the Father. He had been sent to earth, the eternal Son, the second person of the triumphant Godhead had come to earth, being born and taking on human existence. And he had lived his life on earth for above 33 years. And he had gone to the places that the Father had sent him, teaching, preaching, healing the sick, casting out demons, working the works of his Father who had sent him. Jesus had been sent on a mission. In fact, the whole gospel story is filled with this notion of sending the Latin word misio, which means to send, gives our English language so many words and ideas about being sent. The word mission comes from that word. The word missile, that is, the sending of a ballistic missile, an emissary, someone that is sent on a mission for a sovereign state, the notion of an ambassador, the notion of a cryer, someone who is sent to give a message, a herald, who is to go forth with a message. All of these ideas are carried in this idea of being sent. In fact, Malachi talks about two people that the God would send in the last days. He would send Elijah, who we know, of course, was John the Baptist, and then he would send one who would accomplish the mission. Jesus had a profound sense of his mission. It centered everything he did. He would say often, for this cause, I came into the world, the Son of Man did not come to be ministered in two, but the Son of Man came to minister and to give his life a ransom for many. He said, I came to seek and to save that which was lost. Repeatedly, Christ made reference to his mission. And there was a point just a short time before his death. When the Bible says that he sent his face like a flint to Jerusalem because while he had traversed Palestine several times in his three or three and a half years of ministry, and had been to Jerusalem more than once, he had a mission that was to move to Jerusalem, to go through those great gates, to go down that central highway to move to the garden, to be brought to Galgotha's hill, and there to be hang upon a tree. And while hanging upon the tree, he was able to say it is finished. A debt has been paid, a war has ended. A mission has been accomplished. It is finished. And laid in that garden tomb to rest upon the Sabbath. He rested on that seventh day, having finished all his work of redemption that he had come to earth to accomplish. Just like the Godhead had rested on the seventh day in creation, Jesus rested on that Saturday, that Sabbath in the tomb. Redemption was accomplished. Before dawn, on the first day of the week, when the women came they did not witness a resurrection.
That had already taken place. They witnessed an empty tomb. And the other disciples came and you're very familiar with the drama of that early morning there when the garden with the angels and with all that took place there. But the Lord was not there. He had risen, and the work that he was to do now would continue. And from that very morning, that first day of the week, that very morning, Jesus began what I think is one of the most significant and under-analyzed and under-preached and misunderstood phases of Christ ministry. Jesus began a 40-day ministry there on that Sunday morning. It was 40 days between the resurrection and the ascension. 40 days, very significant number in Bible terms. Don't you know the work that the Lord would do? In the beginning of his ministry, the very first days of his ministry, as he had come forth to be baptized of John, were spent in the wilderness. They're suffering in his humanity, the privations and the difficulties and the pains and the limitations of his humanity. But now 40 days at the very end of his earthly ministry in his risen body, that body that had been restored to life, that body that the Spirit of God had raised with power, that body now that was the same human body, but was a resurrected body, a glorified body, a body now that was fit for heaven. Jesus began that very day doing something that is most significant. And if he had not done it, we would not have the Christian faith as we know it today. There would be no worldwide Christian faith in spite of all that Jesus did in his earthly ministry, in spite of his death, in spite of everything that had happened, the sermon on the mount, the teaching, the miracles, everything that Jesus did would have been for naught and would have been lost in history. Had it not been for the ministry of Christ after his resurrection. These are sometimes referred to as the post or the after-the-post resurrection appearances of Christ. But this was the time when Jesus convinced his disciples, 1st the 11th and then the wider group, the 70, the 120. He convinced his disciples that he was alive by many infallible proofs. The episode that we read about here is just a little thing that happened there on the evening of that first day. As Jesus begins the first day of his post-resurrection ministry, things completely change. The disciples who had been fearful, who had been in despair, were one by one by one beginning to turn around as they saw the risen Lord. That afternoon, Jesus had taken a stroll down the road to Emmaus with two disciples, not even numbered with the 12. And on that conversation Jesus had opened to them the scriptures and showed them from the law of Moses to the historical books, to the writings and the Psalms, the great tripart division of the whole Old Testament. He showed them himself in the scroll. And their testimony immediately was, did not our hearts burn within us as he opened to us the scriptures. They didn't even really know who he was at the moment. But they recognized him at evening in the breaking of the bread. By the way, I'd like to mention that sometimes we can really recognize the Lord as he manifest himself in the breaking of the bread. If our hearts are attuned, if God has granted us eyes of faith to see, when we partake of the bread, broken, and the wine, the blood, shed, we see Christ. He has manifested to us. This particular event is noted in other gospels as well. We looked at one gospel account last week, marked it in the Easter sermon. This particular meeting was with Christ and the 11. The 11 had absolutely been terrified. When they saw that Christ had been crucified and beaten and treated the way he did, they were pretty sure they were going to be next. If there was any word out of them, if they made any public appearance, if they showed up again in the temple area, if they had walked in the footsteps of Christ and it assumed his ministry and his mantle, in any way they would have received the same treatment that Christ received and they knew it. Instead of boldly proclaiming the gospel and talking about the toning death of Christ, they were trying to come to terms with his death. They saw him die. They knew he died. They saw him be buried. No doubt they'd even participated somewhat in the burial event. The women certainly did and now Christ is in a tomb and they know it. And all day long, they've been cowering in fear. Even when those two disciples who were probably among the 70 that Jesus had sent at one time, even when they ran back to Jerusalem from Emmaus to report that they had seen Christ alive, these 11 did not believe him. And another gospel mentions that Jesus sort of chastened them a little bit for not believing the witnesses and not believing the report that he was alive. But when he came to them in the midst of their feared and the midst of their seclusion within this locked room, and some believe this was the same room perhaps where they had had the last supper with Jesus just a few days earlier. They're in this room and they're cowering and they've locked the doors and I bet it wasn't just a little lock either. I bet they'd put some of those big steel bars and staves across the door. They had locked themselves in, they had locked in their gospel, they had locked in their religion, they had put a bushel over their light. They were in fear and darkness and trembling and an uncertainty. I just get weary sometime when I hear these liberals talk about what Christ didn't really raise from the dead, rise from the dead. What really happened was his disciples just got to think about it and they thought, you know, he was such a lovely person. We need to keep his memory alive and we need to tell people about him and we need to sort of understand what Christ does in resurrecting our feelings and our attitudes toward God in our hearts and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm telling you that those disciples wouldn't have told us so or anything about Christ except they saw Him alive. One of the most beautiful understatements in the Bible is here it says, when the disciples were glad, when they saw the Lord, all they were glad, they were absolutely overwhelmed, they were shocked, they were absolutely just thrilled to be a lot and Christ the risen Lord appeared to them and in that meeting in that time their hearts began to change. They begin to realize that this is something extraordinary, that that which Jesus had talked about and they had not really understood when he talked about his kingdom, when he talked about the power of God, when he talked about the resurrection, when he talked about all of the things that he had preached they began to see that there was real truth to it, all the teachings of Christ would probably have not even been recorded and we would not even know them if it were not for these disciples witnessing eyewitness to the majesty of the risen Christ and yet he was still Christ, a man five foot something hundred something pounds whatever, a Jewish carpenter, their friend, their companion and he didn't break stride, he kept on eating with them and for forty days he visited them, he met with them out in the cool damp morning of the wee hours on the lake, if they saw an apparition or a ghost or some kind of just some kind of phantom appearance of Christ in that darkened upper room and that was the only time they ever saw Christ, we might have reason to sort of question them that Jesus appeared over and over to different combinations, to individuals, to small groups, to large groups and eventually at the end of this forty day period he will appear before five hundred brethren on the mount, he had told them to go before him into Galilee, he had told them where he would rendezvous with them and meet them and we have recorded several of these post-resurrection appearances where in Jesus established beyond a shot of a doubt that he was alive from that grave, one of the things that I think was part of the rationale for the awful death Jesus died, the public suffering, he was not executed in a prison like John the Baptist or like St. Paul, Jesus was had a public execution, a vlogging and a crucifixion that took about eight or nine hours from the very beginning to the end, something that all manner of people had witnessed, there was a pilgrim throng in Jerusalem in those days in that time for the Passover and for the sacrifice and they all saw that death, making a very public death certified that he was dead, the witnesses could testify to the death of Christ, now the witnesses could testify that he was alive and that he was alive in vitality and he was alive in power and he was alive in his humanity, it was Christ the risen Lord who was in their midst teaching them, well I need to wrap up and here's the way I'm going to do it, Jesus said to them as the Father has sent me so am I sending you, Jesus profound sense of ministry of why he had been sent and what he had to accomplish was now being moved to the disciples, this is just hours after the resurrection, Jesus is beginning to commission his disciples and he is beginning a ministry of empowerment for that ministry, he is sending them and he is giving them the Holy Spirit, this is something that will occur several times over this period of time and will climax with the great commission at his ascension when he will say unto them go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature and it will be culminated in climax when just 10 days following that the Spirit of God will descend upon them with power as he had said you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses, that's a quotation by the way out of the book of Isaiah, you shall be my witnesses, now that's what the Lord is sending his disciples to do, this was a very special commissioning of the 11 where he said to them as the Father sent me so send I you, let me try to make this a little bit practical here by way of application and I want you to hear me well, if you've been dozing please wake up for just a moment and hear me and this has been recorded and people downloaded and I hear from people all over that hear these little messages, it kind of goes beyond these four walls thanks to technology, so I don't want to be misunderstood when I say what I'm about to say but when I say I hope it'll help you, if it doesn't help you just forget it, I said it, just forget I said it and don't tell anybody I said it okay because here's what I'm going to say, I think one of the things we're missing when we spread the gospel and when we preach and teach and when we converse with our friends and our loved ones about Christ is that we sort of forget that it is a story, it is a narrative, it's a story about a person and that's what we need to, when we read the gospels, what do we read? We read the story of the birth and the life and the ministry and the the events and the works and the miracles and the death and the burial and the resurrection, we read a narrative, we read a story about a person and I think one of the things that's heard us, this is the part I want you to be helped by it if you're not helped by it, forget it okay, I've been preaching along enough to know that it's easy to be misunderstood, we have had in our culture so many systematic witnessing tools that have been given to us and they're all good and they're valuable and I've used every one of them, the ones I shall mention but they're such a thing as the Roman road which is very theological, you start with for all of sinned and you go through the scripture verses and Romans and you memorize that and when you're witnessing to someone you talk them through the theological truths of sin, salvation and redemption, faith and repentance, nothing wrong with that but that is a systematic theological approach to witnessing and some people feel so inadequate because they're not theologians and they may not understand the doctrines as well as they think they should so they're reluctant to do that. Then we have a wonderful method that's been used mightily by God all throughout the world that deals with four spiritual laws and the four spiritual laws centers upon the heart of the recipient, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and so it is centered on you and you're well being and your salvation and so forth and it's wonderfully being used but it has its emphasis, its point of departure and start is the person themselves and they're well being and so forth and some have used that marvelously but some find that a little awkward because of some of the follow-up propositions and there's a method that is born in our own denomination and I studied it in seminary in 1972 that was the personal evangelism course we went through it's it's a place where we ask diagnostic questions we ask someone about what will they say if they appear before the Lord and so our witnessing tools follow these these schemes please understand me I have not saying anything negative about any of those I've used them all I love them all I find them some some times more effective but let me just tell you this when it comes time to witness when it comes time to share the good news when you want to talk to your friends and your loved ones just talk about Jesus just tell the story just talk about him living teaching preaching doing miracles talk about him loving caring talk about him raising the dead talk about him feeding the five thousand that's what the gospel writers do we call them gospels and that's what they do they tell the story of Jesus matter factly historically confidently telling the story of this one man the son of God talking about him as though you would talk about a neighbor or a friend or a relative talking about him as though you talk about your pastor talking about him in his death his awful death which way way beyond a martyr's death it was a sacrificial death a substitutionary death it was a significant death in the eyes of God and his burial and his resurrection and what he did after he was raised from the dead just talk about him talk about Christ don't try to have a theological framework don't try to have a psychological counseling encounter talk about Jesus there is power in Christ it is the spirit of God that honors the testimony in the message of Christ you believe the eyewitnesses Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter all the eyewitnesses just talk about Christ tell people what you know about him if you find you don't know as much about him as you want to study a little harder get in the gospels a little more if you find you maybe get the story confused a little bit go back and try to straighten it out a little bit keep working on this story the old him writers knew it tell me the story of Jesus right on my heart every line tell me the story of Jesus I love to tell the story they see that's what we're being sent to do we're not being sent to make theologians out of ourselves or anybody else we're sent to tell people about Jesus say one day I met a man and I just can't get over it