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We are good at recognizing what is wrong—and remarkably bad at fixing it. Isaiah 1 warns that the strong become tinder and their work a spark, exposing every human effort we trust to make life secure and lasting. What hope does Easter offer when the things we build, the solutions we devise, and even our own strength end in ash?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher says we’re “good at recognizing there’s a problem” but “not very good at fixing it.” What problems in your own life do you recognize but feel powerless to solve—and what do you typically try instead of admitting you can’t fix it?
Where in your life do you recognize a pattern of building something that feels permanent—a career, a tradition, a relationship, a sense of security—only to watch it fall into disrepair? How does the image of the Millennium Hotel connect with your own attempts to create lasting stability through human effort?
How do the disciples’ journey from Palm Sunday (excitement about a human messiah) through Good Friday (despair) to Pentecost (empowered by the Holy Spirit) mirror your own experience of faith? When have you tried to “rescue yourself,” and what changed that?
Judas, the disciples, and the Palm Sunday crowds all respond to Jesus differently, yet share something in common. What is that shared human impulse, and how do you see it operating in your own decisions?
The sermon suggests Easter joy alone isn’t enough to sustain faith over time—we need the Holy Spirit’s power. How do you distinguish between temporary emotional excitement and the kind of endurance that carries you through difficulty? What does it look like practically to stop trying to rescue yourself and instead receive the life God brings from ashes?
We often try to “track” our progress—sleep scores, career advancement, spiritual growth—to feel like we’re solving problems. Where are you most tempted to rely on self-measurement rather than dependence on God, and what would it look like to surrender that control?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Oh, God, you are wild. I’m dumber than an ox and I don’t know why.
Good Lord called his people to account. They didn’t do what he said they oughta. Racking up, they can’t pay. Wow, hotshot like they could’ve. And the thing is, they’s me. That I get working out in my field. Seems like them scenes need all my time too tired to pray. I got it down till I don’t double than an oxen. I don’t know why. I’m dumber than an oxen. I don’t know why.
The technology is really, really excited that it’s Easter. It is so excited. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. The rocks are crying out. Thankfully, it’s mostly been cooperating, but thank you for your patience. The soundboard is actually changing itself. So, Phantom of the Soundboard.
But anyway, speaking of things that might be haunted, if not, you know, I don’t believe that things are haunted, but if they were, what about the Millennium Hotel? Anyone know the Millennium Hotel downtown? Fascinating building, round building, right? And for years, it was one of the premier hotels in St. Louis. Since I live here, I never stayed there. I never had a reason to stay in a hotel in my hometown, but maybe if you came to St. Louis for our online family, if you came to St. Louis and you wanted to see something spectacular, a view of the riverfront, the arch, might have been a good choice.
Or maybe, if you’re one of those folks that likes to go to Easter brunch, maybe you decided to go to the Millennium Hotel, which has, on top of it, or should say had, the Top of the Riverfront Restaurant. The Top of the Riverfront Restaurant was famous for its Sunday brunch, and it had a unique feature. It rotated. One of the nice things about a round building—you can have a rotating restaurant. And so St. Louis had one of those. And notice I’m speaking in the past tense because the Money Motel has been abandoned for 12 years now, and they’re busy tearing it down.
But for decades, it was a spectacular place. It was this premier place. And so I thought about all the people in years past who maybe went to church on Sunday morning or if they were going to church like Little Hills; we weren’t meeting at the time that the Millennium Hotel was open, but if you were going to church at an evening service, maybe you went to brunch and then off to church. But whatever it may have been, you may have gone there, and it would have seemed strong and mighty and permanent. But now it’s fallen into disrepair. It’s one of those buildings that people start telling stories about, well, maybe it’s haunted. Maybe there’s something going on in it because it’s just dead and slowly deteriorating.
How can that be? Well, what we see consistently in history is that our best efforts, whatever they may be, our best human efforts, are going to fall into disrepair. We cannot, somehow, in our own doing, make something that won’t—something that will last forever. We want to, we want hope. We want to know that what we invest ourselves in, what we do, isn’t here just for this moment but is here to stay, that it can be held on to. That if you go to Easter brunch there at the Millennium Hotel this year, that you can go there next year. And I’m sure when it finally closed, there were people who had that tradition that felt very permanent, right? It’s not going and trying to do something with this new novel place, this place that’s always there. And then suddenly it wasn’t.
So we think about Isaiah chapter one that we’ve been looking at over the course of Lent. What we see is various attempts at human strength, at human monuments, building up things that we can do. Maybe we’ll pick out a different god who will somehow help us out. Maybe we’ll be strong on our own power. Maybe… what we really should pursue is our happiness and those things, right? They feel in the moment like they’re permanent. It’s like 1969 opening up that hotel and thinking, wow, this is a big place. People will come here forever, right? It’s not going anywhere. It’s too big, too big to close.
I bet on the day they had the ribbon cutting, if you’d leaned over with a time traveler from 2026 and leaned over to someone and said, in five, six decades, they’re going to tear this place down, the person would have looked at you like you’re insane. This is a big spectacular building with all this amazing architecture. And did you know there’s a rotating restaurant they’re going to open up later today up on the top? There’s no way they’d ever take this down.
But whatever we tell ourselves that on, it will be torn down. And if, odd as it seems to start an Easter message on that note, it’s exactly why we have Easter.
Let’s pray that we can see the hope of Easter in our own failures. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for this evening, Lord. We thank you for your word. We thank you for the book of Isaiah that has so many encouraging and sobering aspects to it. As we come to your truth, would you help us to come as those who serve the risen Lord, those who have hope because our Savior lives. And because of that, we see and we hear and we respond to the things that we read here. But we know that’s not the end of the story. I pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
If you really want to understand Easter—and I think if you’re here, if you’re online with us tonight, in either case, to some degree, you probably say, I’d like to understand Easter, right? It’s something I would like to be able to appreciate.
Here’s what we need to know: Everything we try to do ends up in ash. Let’s return where we were last week, end of Isaiah chapter one, verse 30. The prophet writes, “For you will become like an oak whose leaves are withered, like a garden without water. The strong man will become tinder and his work will be a spark; both will burn together with no one to quench the flames.”
Everything we do ends up in ash. If you think about what’s being described here—We talked about this last week—here is encapsulation was happening on Palm Sunday, right? Because the people are excited about Jesus, but they’re excited about the wrong Jesus. They’re excited about a Jesus who’s going to be their political Messiah who’s going to build a kingdom of this world. They’ve built their hotels. Now they want someone to make sure it’s nice and stable. They’ve planned out their Easter brunches even though they don’t have Easter yet and they want to know they can come there every year. They can depend on it. And they say, and this Jesus fellow? He seems pretty charismatic. Exactly the kind of human leader you need to have something that lasts.
We know that Palm Sunday isn’t the end of the story. And we come to the rest of Holy Week. And we come to Monday, Thursday, the night that Jesus was betrayed. They’re celebrating. They’re together to observe the Passover and they’re having the meal together, but what’s happening even as that meal happens? Jesus, the one that everyone was hailing just a few days ago, is about to be handed over to the authorities and killed.
And if the conception of Jesus the Palm Sunday folks had was the end of the story, Good Friday would be the end. How often does that happen? Promising leader rises up, is assassinated, is put down by those who see him as a rival, and so, you know, you could win the hearts and minds of the people, I’m just going to kill you. That’s basically what happens if you think about it.
The Jewish leaders, they say Jesus is teaching religious things that sound pretty promising. We should kill him so that he doesn’t threaten our authority. The Gentile leaders, what do they say? He’s threatening the authority of Rome. Not directly, but by stirring people up. He’s whipping them into some kind of frenzy and we don’t like that. Be easier just to kill them.
Incidentally, if you think of the way that scripture divides the world, you have Jew and Gentiles. So if the Jewish leaders and the Gentile leaders are both against him, guess what? That means the world is against him. But it looks so promised.
At one point during Holy Week, it might have looked like Judas was actually the power broker. There are different ways people try to read the life of Judas, right? What was it that motivated Judas in that moment? What was going on in his head? What was he thinking he was doing by betraying Jesus? And perhaps one of the best reads you can provide of Judas is that he thought that Jesus needed an extra little push to go ahead and do what he needed to do, right? I’ll betray him, make some money. And guess what? I’ve seen him do miracles, he’ll do a miracle, I’ll be fine. And I have 30 pieces of silver on top of that.
Was that what he was thinking? Did he really think that Jesus would die? We’re not told. We’re not told what ultimately hits Judas the hardest, that he hadn’t really come to terms with the price he agreed to, that he thought it would play out differently—that maybe they’d just tell Jesus, “Hey, get out of town. We don’t want to see you anymore,” and he’d go off and maybe a few years later Judas would run into him again. He’d open his little hotel and it had its revolving restaurant and it was going pretty well. And he could say, “Hey, Jesus, you know I’m sorry I did that, but you know, it worked out pretty well for both of us, didn’t it?”
I don’t know exactly what Judas was thinking. But it seems as though Judas was at least in part thinking in Palm Sunday terms—in the terms that this is about human effort, right? Maybe Jesus will do something if I help him as a human, or maybe Jesus is just a human that I kind of like, but I’d really like this money, and so it’s okay. And if I’m gonna get ahead, I have to put in some human effort to get ahead.
But notice, however we read Judas, it always comes back to Judas thinking that he as a human being somehow needs to make something that’s lasting for himself.
Matthew 27: When Judas, who had betrayed him, saw that Jesus was condemned, he was filled with remorse, returned the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders. “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” he said. “What is that to us?” They replied. “You bear the responsibility.” He just threw the silver into the temple and left, and then he went away and he hanged himself.
Everything Judas does is clearly based on the idea that this is a human thing that needs to be done. It’s a human thing. I need to make some money, or it’s a human thing. I need to force the revolution. Or now that I’ve done it, whatever I was thinking, it’s a human thing I need to do to come to terms with it, right?
Jesus is dead. It didn’t go the way I thought it was going to go. The only escape is a human one. I’ll kill myself.
But let’s consider the other disciples for a moment. What do they do? Peter denies Jesus 3 times, right? He swears an oath, “I don’t know this man.” Other disciples run. John goes home.
What do we make of this?
Well, Jesus was taken into custody and ultimately crucified. The disciples are saying, “Well, what can I do? What can I do? Well, I can get out of Dodge. I don’t want to be around here. This is not going well. Jesus is now gone. What do we do? We run.”
We as human beings are pretty good at recognizing there’s a problem. The issue is we’re pretty bad at fixing the problem.
I was reading an interesting study this week about sleep trackers. Apparently, we’ve reached the point that in the United States, about half of adults wear some kind of device to track their sleep, whether it’s, say, an Apple Watch or Fitbit, or some dedicated sleep tracking device. Maybe there are what smart mattresses that will actually track your sleep, all these different things. And why do we do that? Well, we feel tired. We feel worn down and we recognize there’s a problem. And so we say, “Well, I’m going to track my sleep so I can fix the problem.”
More than half of Americans say they’ve used one of these apps, but only 15% said they actually were able to improve their sleep by using it. Half said they found it useful, interestingly. You use the app and, you know, I’ll wear my Apple Watch and go to bed and get up in the morning and I check my score, right? How do I score in my sleep? Did I sleep powerfully tonight? Did I do a good job of sleeping?
And sometimes I’ll wake up and think I’m really tired and I look at that watch. It says, “Oh, you slept really well.” Oh, wow, oh boy. Yeah, I’m ready. Let’s go. And then there were those other days where I think, “Ah, that was a pretty good night’s sleep,” and you click the button and it says, you slept 4.5 hours, and it’s like, oh.
You know, it doesn’t help me sleep better. And what they actually found is that a lot of people end up stressing about their sleep score and it keeps them up. And when they can’t sleep, they’re thinking, “What am I doing to my sleep score?”
We’re good at recognizing there’s a problem, right? I’m tired. I need better sleep. We’re not very good at fixing it.
And when you think about the people on Palm Sunday who are hailing Jesus, they recognize there’s a problem. We’re tired. We’re tired of being oppressed by the Romans. We’re tired of living in fear. We’re tired of not being what we once were. We’re tired.
Judas? I don’t quite know what problem he was trying to solve other than the 30 pieces of silver sound like a nice way to move towards it. But he was trying to solve something in himself. “I just want more money. I want more things. I would feel better if I had them. And I would feel better than sitting at a table listening to Jesus talking about the kingdom of God, because if I had those 30 pieces of silver, I could go and think of what I could do with 30 pieces of silver.”
And as the disciples scattered, they recognized there’s a problem too. There are people that want to kill Jesus. They probably want to kill us too. How do we solve it? We run. We deny.
The story leading up to Easter proclaims what we try to do ends up in ash every time. What is it that you’re doing that you’re saying, “God, I know you say I can trust in you. I know you say that you are the one who is leading all things and that my only hope is in you, but in what place are we holding back and saying, ‘But God, let me check my sleep tracker again. Let’s see. That score’s a little better tonight. Maybe my score is really going to be good tonight. I hear it dingy.’”
What do we do? It feels like we’re solving the problem, but what we’re really only doing a thing. I recognize the problem, and I’m going to come up with my own ingenious way to fix it rather than God’s way.
Because if you see those parts of your life—and all of us have them—here’s the thing we need to understand: You’re not weird for doing that. That’s a very human thing. Everybody does it. The problem is, maybe we’re embarrassed to admit it. Maybe we’re just too confident we’re actually able to overcome it. And we fail to come to the cross and say, “Jesus, I need you to fix it because I can’t.”
And oftentimes the bigger the pile of ash gets in front of us, the harder it is for us to do anything about it because it’s… I only have a pile of ash. What is God going to do with that? Clearly, by the time that Judas goes and hangs himself, he has reached that point—whatever he was thinking, whatever he was hoping for—he’s reached the point, “I can’t fix it. There’s nothing I have to offer. It’s over. The only thing I can do is stop the pain.”
Maybe you thought that.
What God does rises from the ash.
John chapter 20, verse 16: Jesus sees Mary, she’s mourning. Jesus is dead.
Only there’s a twist. Jesus said to her, “Mary.” And she turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabboni,” which means teacher.
“Do not cling to me,” Jesus said, “for I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go and tell my brothers, I am ascending to my Father, and to your Father, and to my God, and to your God.”
Think about that scene for a moment. Mary is in a big pile of ash. The disciples in general—they’re in the giant ash heap. They might at times maybe feel like they’re at least in it together, but I think they probably also feel alone because they’re thinking, “Well, you know, we had Jesus who brought us together. But even the comfort of being together, you know, it’s not going to last. Because what’s the point now? We’ll go our own ways and remember that time that we used to follow Jesus and how nice it was.”
And they couldn’t see what was right in front of them. They couldn’t hear the promises that God had given to them. It’s really interesting when you think about it. Mary is there. She’s talking to Jesus and she’s wondering where Jesus is. She can’t recognize him. Was he disguising himself? Was it just too unbelievable for her to even register? We’re not told the exact specifics of how it happens. But the important thing is, Jesus is there. He’s standing there. She’s grieving. She’s in that pile of ash. And he’s right there. She can’t fix it. The disciples can’t fix it.
What we saw last week and what we continue to see when we reflect on how this story plays out is that our deeds always incinerate us. If it’s us doing it, we will incinerate ourselves. That’s what happens. We worship ourselves, we worship other things. We worship success and power and comfort and maybe sleep scores.
What has God promised? He takes ash and he brings life.
Isaiah 61: “The spirit of the Lord God is on me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and freedom to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of God’s vengeance, to comfort all who mourn, to console the mourners in Zion, to give them a crown of beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, and a garment of praise for a spirit of despair, so they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.”
Why does Jesus come? He comes to proclaim the favor of the Lord, that he will bind up our broken hearts, that he will fix what is crushed and defeated and torn down and in ruins.
And isn’t it interesting that Mary is standing there. She’s broken-hearted. And what heals her broken heart? Jesus calls her by name. And then she knows.
She couldn’t see Jesus. The other disciples couldn’t see what Jesus was doing. The people who had been so excited on Palm Sunday, they couldn’t see what Jesus was doing. But when Jesus calls, we can see and he works. And our same incapable, messed up, backward, weak, bumbling selves suddenly go from being self-incinerating—the spirit of flame.
You think about the crowds on Palm Sunday. Is there a big crowd there that’s with Jesus right in front? I mean, not just those talking about Jesus, Jesus is there, and they see him and they’re excited, but they go and they abandon him.
But if we forward just a little bit of time and go to Pentecost, Acts chapter 2, what do we see? It’s really interesting. Something changes. We think about the disciples. What changes in them? How do they go from fleeing to say, “There’s a big crowd and there are people that are going to want to kill us. Let’s preach more boldly.” How does that work?
It’s not because they suddenly got a lot stronger and a lot wiser. Not because suddenly they finished the training program and they had the diploma on the wall, certified disciple of Jesus. Okay, now I can face this.
They couldn’t do it on their own. We can’t rescue ourselves. You hear this incredible, this incredible breaking news this morning. Did you hear about the airman that was rescued? I mean, yeah. Many of us have been praying, and rightly so; we should pray for those in our armed services and praying for rescue there. Think about that story.
What are we told was involved? We’re only getting some of the details. We don’t have all the details. But so if you missed it, several planes have gone down over the last few days in the war with Iran, in particular, two—a pilot and the weapons technician on the one plane went down. They found the pilot; they didn’t find the other gentleman.
And you think about it. What did Iran want to do? Well, they wanted to find him. They wanted to have a hostage, right? I mean, it makes sense. It’s horrible, but it makes sense. And so there’s a race on. Could we find him first, or could they find him first? Who’s gonna find them?
And we’re told about this incredibly intricate process that’s gone over the last few days where the CIA spread disinformation about where he was and whether they’d already found him inside Iran. Meanwhile, the military lined up a whole bunch of different aircraft and so on so they could go in and retrieve the man. And as part of that, they knew they’d figured out where he was, he was wounded and in a crevice in the mountains, and they knew where he was, and so they sent out the different helicopters to go rescue him.
And the thing is, if you’re stuck in a hostile country in the mountains, injured, can you rescue yourself? No. Is rescue costly? Oh, yes. Others were injured in the attempt to rescue the soldiers. They had to destroy six different aircraft as part of it. Those that were damaged, they had to destroy them so the Iranians wouldn’t be able to take them back and study them. Several of the rescue craft, they destroyed as part of the rescue mission. There was an incredible cost. But it was clear it was only with a much stronger power that this man was ever going to be safely brought home at all.
And we face a much stronger, more brutal enemy. We face sin and death.
Isaiah 53, verse 10: “Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and to cause him to suffer. When his soul is made a guilt offering, he will see his offspring. He will prolong his days, and the good pleasure of the Lord will prosper in his hand. After the anguish of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied. By his knowledge, my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities.”
Isaiah 53 is such a mystifying combination when you think about it. How do we get our minds around it? That the servant, the Lord’s chosen, the anointed one, would come and be crushed so that we, who weren’t on an honorable mission and he, as we were flying over hostile territory and brought down to the mountains—know, we basically went in ourselves and said, “I’m just going to act wildly. I’m going to ignore what I’m supposed to be doing,” and then we’re injured. What does God say? “I am going to rescue you anyway.”
And I’ll pay a much greater cost than a few aircraft. I actually take what should come to you. What should happen to you.
And if you think about the difference between those two points, Palm Sunday and Pentecost, with Easter in between them, what happens? Disciples go from thinking, “What can we do as human beings with this really amazing charismatic leader?” to saying, “Our Lord and God has sent us on a mission and we’re going to go do it because we know that he’s with us.”
That’s the transformation there.
Acts 2:37: “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and asked Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’”
People are hearing the apostles preaching, and some of them probably were the Palm Sunday people. You’re thinking, now what? Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise belongs to you and your children, and to all who are far off, to all whom the Lord our God will call to himself.” With many other words, he testified and urged them, “Be saved from this corrupt generation.” And those who embraced his message were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to the believers that day.
Talk about a difference.
What’s the difference between those two days? God’s sense of spirit. He says, “You can’t rescue yourself. Even when I was there walking with you, you thought you could rescue yourself. You thought you were doing it.”
And we see that with the disciples. When push comes to the shove, they can’t hold up because they’ve been putting it on themselves.
But just weeks later, they’re able to go out and proclaim boldly even in the face of opposition. Why? Because they’re no longer trying to rescue themselves; they realize they’re the ones who have been rescued. They’re not just excited.
It’s easy to be excited on Easter, right? We sing beautiful Easter songs, and we have all the beautiful Easter decorations and it’s a day like today; it’s also just a beautiful Easter day. I mean, it’s just a beautiful day. You can just feel the Easter excitement and joy, and it’s really easy to get excited.
The people on Palm Sunday were really excited. But the question is, do we have something more than excitement? Because excitement is not going to get us very far.
The airman that was rescued, I’m sure if when he joined the Air Force, he was excited to go serve and he’s excited about learning all the technology and reaching the pinnacle of ability and all that, I’m sure very excited. But all that excitement goes away when you’re injured, lying in a crevice in a hostile country.
We’re going to go out on Easter Sunday and into the week. And there’s hostile country. Sometimes, oftentimes, of our very own making.
Question is, how long can we run on excitement? Not very long. How do we hold on? How do we keep going?
Speaking of flights, I’ve been fascinated just watching the progression of the Artemis 2 mission. Anyone else following that? You can actually go live and see the updates online every day.
And yes, they’re not landing on the moon yet. And yes, they’ve done it before, not in my lifetime, so I’m really excited. But even the idea of just flying around the moon is really pretty incredible when you think about it.
But think what it took to get there. The project to return to spaceflight that was beyond just orbiting the Earth was announced back in 2005. We’ve had one, two, three; we’re on our fourth presidential administration since then. We’re on how many different NASA administrators since then? How many different astronauts since then?
They tested it in 2009, 4 years later. It’s hard to stay excited for 4 years. Four years. They tested the first part. They sent the first uncrewed mission 4 years ago, 13 years after that first test.
How do you keep excitement? How do you keep going? How do you get to the point where you’re actually going to go around the moon?
Well, you stay focused on the mission. You stay focused on what’s actually true about it, why you’re doing it, what’s important about it.
Everybody was excited on Palm Sunday because it’s really easy in the excitement. But what happens when it gets hard? What happens when the budgets are cut? What happens when you run into technical difficulties and it doesn’t work and you have to redo the rockets?
What happens? And we might not be rocket scientists. We all know what it’s like to be excited about something and start off on it. And then we hit some problem.
How do we keep going? How do we get going and stay going when it’s 21 years later?
Well, you need to keep on the mission guidelines, right? You need to actually go and find what is fueling it, what’s driving it.
And here’s the important thing we need to understand. The Christian life is about way, way more than emotion. Not a lack of emotion. Mary is overjoyed. The disciples are overjoyed. They have joy when they’re proclaiming that Jesus is risen, absolutely. But they’re not depending on their feeling of joy. You keep going depending on the Holy Spirit.
They’ve tried the joy road before. They’ve tried that with Palm Sunday, and it didn’t even last a week.
Sometimes we think, “I have joy. I have joy, joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart,” and you go out and you can’t even get out of the parking lot before someone cuts you off as you’re pulling out of the parking lot, and it’s not feeling very joyful anymore, right?
How do we stay on the mission? We stay focused on Him, His strength, not ours.
Are we ready to say, “God, don’t just fill me with this Easter emotion of joy”? Yeah, it’s good to have that. God gave us emotions. But Lord, will you fill me with your Spirit? Because that’s the only way I’m going to keep going.
That’s what the disciples—what changes over Holy Week? When they encounter the risen Lord, what changes? They realize it’s not them anymore. And when they’re sent out with the power of the Holy Spirit, what enables them to go do that is not them, it’s Him.
The commander of the Artemis 2 mission, Captain Victor Glover, said this: He said in the military, there’s a saying that there are no atheists in a foxhole. He said, “There aren’t any on top of rockets either, I would think.”
And he has spoken very openly about his faith in Jesus, and it’s beautiful to see him testifying to that. I heard him reflecting on Easter last night and talking about how he’s looking down at this world that God has given us and the incredible spaceship, as it were, that preserves us out in this otherwise harsh universe.
And the question is, what are you really going to depend on? Because we’re all on the rocket of life. We’re gonna depend on our own ingenuity, try to fix the rocket as it’s flying and it fails. We’re all going to reach that “now what” point.
And over that weekend between Good Friday and Easter morning, the disciples were having that “now what” point. They’ve been on the rocket of this Messiah ship. Now what? And all of us are on rockets. We’re being sent somewhere, and the question is, what are we trusting in while we’re on that rocket? Because it’s going to sometimes fizzle out.
If you’ve never believed in Jesus, if maybe you’re only tuning in tonight, you’re on the live stream and you’re only doing it because somehow you remember that your parents, years ago, always made you be in church on Easter and you thought, “I guess I’ll turn it on so that I can do that.” Well, I’m glad you’re here. It’s okay that you’re there, but don’t stay there. Don’t stay on the rocket with no hope. Don’t stay in the foxhole with no hope.
Because maybe you’ll feel encouraged and nostalgic after an Easter service, and you say, “I feel better, that was nice.” But tomorrow or the next day or the next day, it won’t feel that way. Then what? We’re always going to reach that “now what”? And what we’re encouraged on Easter is to say what the disciples ultimately said: “Now what? Now we actually trust in Jesus. Now we actually recognize we can’t do it on our own.”
If you’re thinking about that for the first time, well, let me say also, you’re not alone. Those of us who even have been believers for a very long time, we struggle with this too. You’re not weird. We do it. We have those doubting Thomas moments, as Jill was reminding us of earlier during the time of confession. We have those moments.
Now what?
Disciples didn’t always get everything right the rest of their lives. They weren’t suddenly perfect and always focused exactly where they needed to be. We know that Peter and Paul, for example, had arguments, and Paul and Barnabas, there were these different less than ideal times. But here’s the thing that kept them going. It was that they weren’t focused on how they got things right; they were focused on Jesus.
And so when they didn’t get things right, well, Jesus still had things right. We need to come back to Him over and over and over again.
Because every Easter brunch tradition is going to fail. Every monument we build is going to fail. Every career we piece together painstakingly will end—our health, no matter how much we dedicate ourselves to it, will at some point deteriorate. Even our best-planned day will something go wrong.
We need hope. We want hope. But here’s the thing that the disciples recognized on Easter morning. Here’s the thing that Mary knew the moment she heard Jesus call her name. In Jesus, we find hope. Would you pray with me, please?
Lord, all too often we trust in ourselves. We trust in what we can do. We build up the monuments, and they come crashing down. Sometimes we’re the ones that pull the bricks out and cause them to fall, thinking somehow we can do even better. We find ourselves in need of rescue. We find ourselves lost in a land that’s hostile, and we need someone to bring us home.
Lord, when we have those now what moments, would you always turn our eyes towards you? We need your Spirit. We need your strength, because the thing that we see profoundly is that our efforts do turn to ash. We are dumb oxes that can’t figure out where we’re supposed to be going.
But you are the one who can actually take the ash and bring it to life. You’re the one who can take our rubble and construct it into something beautiful, to take our lives that are failures, that are bumbling, that aren’t going in the right direction, and bring them to exactly where they’re supposed to be in your presence.
And as we move from this Easter Sunday into this week, let us carry that Easter hope, not just as some wonderful experience, not just as joy, but would you help us to have that joy fueled by the strength we find only in the true rescuer, the perfect rescuer? For in him we find hope.
We pray this in the precious name of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
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