I Am With You In the Dark | I AM... The God Who Gets Close | Menlo Church Live Stream

I want you to know that Jesus didn't come back from the dead to give you more to do. As a matter of fact, he came back from the dead to tell you that all the work has already been done, that your story isn't over, that what he accomplished is still available to you. It's life now and life forever with God. That what looks like the end is not the end. That the tomb being empty then means the weight you're carrying now is not the final word on who you are forever. [00:53:18] (24 seconds)  #GraceNotWork

Here's the one thing I want you to leave with today. Stop looking for a religion you can control and will give you confidence that you've earned your way into something. Stop looking for a religion that's trying to make the same point you wanna make culturally. Jesus didn't come back to make a point. He came back to say your name. And because he came back to say your name, he invites you into a relationship that starts now and lasts forever. [00:55:52] (26 seconds)  #RelationshipNotReligion

And here's what I need you to hear, and I really mean this. The resurrection is not primarily a theological proposition. It's not primarily a historic argument, although I think a very strong one can be made. It's not primarily a church tradition, a cultural artifact, or sorry to disappoint you, a holiday about eggs, ham, and bunnies. The resurrection is a person, a person who knows your name. He's always known your name. And he came back to find you in the place where you are grieving, in the dark, before the sunrise, before you even know where to find hope, when you were expecting nothing. [00:51:29] (36 seconds)  #HeKnowsYourName

After all the miraculous moments of the stone rolled away and the angels talking and the disciples there and a gardener she doesn't recognize, after all of that, she just hears, Mary. It's the whole moment. The resurrection becomes real to her not when she sees an empty tomb, not when she sees the folded burial clause, not when two angels appear and speak to her. It becomes real when she hears her name spoken by a familiar voice. She turns with one word back to him and she says, Rabboni, teacher, master. She grabs onto him, but he has weeks of work ahead before he would ultimately ascend to heaven after his resurrection. [00:50:12] (42 seconds)  #SheHeardHerName

If you're here and you're not a Christian, you're not a follower of Jesus, you're not a believer, but something is pulling at you. Something's been pulling at you for a while, if you're honest. You don't know what to do with that. I would just suggest that maybe you're feeling your name, that it might be getting whispered by the God who created you. It sounds more familiar than you realize because it's the same whisper that made you in the first place. Not loud, not dramatic, just quietly. The voice you almost recognize in the garden asking you why you're weeping even if nobody else can see the tears, and who you're looking for even if nobody else knows you're searching. [00:55:15] (37 seconds)  #WhisperedName

I think the version of Christianity that many people have walked away from in our moment might generally deserve to be walked away from. That's a real thing, and I'm not gonna brush past it. But I do wanna show you something with a few minutes together today. I'm not gonna argue about it with you. I just wanna show you. Because if what we believe happened in this story that we celebrate today is true, then everything changes. There really is hope in a moment like this that has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with institutions and everything to do with you, specifically you by name. The first Easter, it might have been thousands of years ago, but it happened with you in mind. [00:41:06] (36 seconds)  #HopeChangesEverything

Notice exactly what happens in this moment. The God of the universe, freshly raised from the dead, the most significant moment in human history, and his first act is to find a grieving woman in a garden and say her name. Not to the crowds, not to the powerful, not to the connected, not to the Romans, not to the Pharisees, and not to the disciples who he'd been with for three years, to Mary alone in a garden. In the dark, weeping, he says her name. [00:50:56] (33 seconds)  #HeCalledHerName

And I'm not trying to defend that. But what I'm trying to invite you to consider is to separate Jesus from what has been done in his name. Look at Jesus this Easter. Listen to Jesus this Easter. Look at what his life actually did. The first person he appeared to after the resurrection was a woman in a culture where the testimony of women was not admissible in court. They weren't considered reliable witnesses. And then he asks her to be his first eyewitnesses back to his closest friends. Jesus consistently and persistently went toward the people that the religious institutions of his day pushed away. That's Jesus. If the church that you walked away from looked like a cold dead institution, I understand, but Jesus didn't. [00:54:24] (51 seconds)  #JesusNotInstitutions

You're not looking for a product. You're looking for a person. And that person is standing right in front of you, even if you just think he's the gardener. The man says to her in the story, woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking? And remember, she's had this question come to her already in the text. She's exacerbated. Right? She says, like listening to this gardener, sir, if you carried him away, tell me where you've laid him, and I will take him away. She's saying, just just tell me where you put the body. That's all I want. Just just let me be near what's left. [00:49:28] (42 seconds)  #PersonNotProduct

But we keep looking past it. We keep trying to solve it in a way that lets us be the master of our own universe. We are looking for salvation in the next product launch, in the next relationship, in the next perfect optimization of our diet, our sleep, our productivity stack, AGI. Right? We we always miss it. The next promised thing is always the thing that's gonna do the thing it was never designed to do when the answer is standing right in front of you. We think it's a gardener. [00:48:11] (28 seconds)  #StopChasingProducts

Mary came to the tomb expecting a corpse, bringing actually the spices to preserve the corpse even further. She comes expecting death, that it had won, that it was over, and all she could do now was to be near what was left, the carcass of what was. And here's why this matters. This is exactly what a lot of people come into this room thinking religion offers. You came in expecting a corpse. You come expecting to find a dead ritual, a cold institution, a set of rules managed by people you aren't sure even believe it themselves. [00:45:19] (42 seconds)  #ExpectingDeadReligion

And so she gets there and the stone is rolled away, and her first thought is not, he's alive. Her first thought is somebody took the body. Isn't that true for what grief does in all of us? When you've lost everything, your your brain doesn't leap to hope. Your your brain leaps to more heartbreak, more chaos, more things being taken from you that you can't get back, can't fix, can't put back into order. That's where we're starting today. Not with trumpets, not with an empty cross lit from behind with white light, with a woman in the dark crying outside of an empty tomb, who came expecting nothing and has just found what looks like one more thing having gone wrong. [00:43:57] (45 seconds)  #GriefAssumesWorse

The Bay Area is one of the most spiritually hungry places on the planet right now. I know this because of what I see people looking for right now, meaning, purpose, connection. In an age of AI, people are asking, what does it really mean to be human? We're looking for something that goes deeper than our utility, something that outlasts the current hype cycle, and that has always been Jesus. Right now, people are doing Ayahasca ceremonies and breathwork retreats and microdosing and reading stoic philosophy at 6AM, and they're doing all of it because they're reaching for something that the market cannot provide for them. [00:48:47] (41 seconds)  #SpiritualHunger

Thank you that no matter where we've been, no matter what we've done, no matter what's been done to us, no matter how long it's been since we've been willing to have a conversation about faith or talk to you, God, you haven't gone anywhere. You've just been standing there whispering our name, waiting for us to listen and respond, that your love extended two thousand years ago through your perfect life, death, and resurrection. All those same promises are still available today. So wherever people are today, would you remind them, God, they're made in your image no matter what they believe about you, no matter what they think about this. And that, God, by your grace, through faith, we can be adopted into your family forever. Thanks for the gift of Easter and the promise it comes with. [00:57:46] (46 seconds)  #PromisesStillAvailable

back to the hospital room, back to the house that you used to share, back to the last text message or voice mail you have from that person, back to the last place that felt like them before everything went wrong. She's not going because she thinks something good is waiting for her. She had no expectation that anything good was waiting for her there. There was nobody on that very first Easter with a banner that said, like, welcome back, counting down before sunrise. There was there's, like, a preacher line that on the first Easter, nobody expected nobody. If you think about it, it's funny. You're welcome. She's going because she doesn't know where else to go. [00:43:18] (39 seconds)  #WhereElseToGo

Now here's what we walk into two thousand years ago on that very first Easter morning. Not Sunday afternoon when everything's kind of resolved. No. No. No. Early enough in the day when the sky is still kind of blue, you're not sure if it's nighttime or daytime, the city is still asleep, the streets are still empty, and a woman named Mary is walking toward a tomb. She's not walking toward the tomb with hope. All of her hope ran out a couple days earlier. She's walking toward the last place that she saw the person she loved the most because that's what grief does to us. It pulls us back, [00:42:42] (36 seconds)  #WalkingTowardTheTomb

She literally did not have a grid for be this being possible, so her brain just found another way to explain this stranger in the morning in the garden. She is standing three feet from the resurrected son of God, the creator of the universe, her savior and lord, the answer to every question she's ever had, the only thing that could actually explain the emptiness she's feeling and give her a reason to keep living, and she thinks he's the gardener. Now this is us, isn't it? We're surrounded by evidence that something transcendent is real, that we are created and designed. [00:47:33] (37 seconds)  #MistakingTheGardener

that you're here sincerely. Easter is one of a handful of Sundays in the year where things look and feel different in a room like this, and we consider it such an honor to be with you. There are people who are here today who aren't sure they believe any of this. There are people who used to believe it, and somewhere along the way, something broke about it in them or it stopped fixing the problems that started to flow into their life. There are people who maybe they were hurt by a church or hurt by a Christian or they were hurt by someone who said that they represented Jesus, but they did not act like it. I see you. And I'm not gonna pretend that you're not here or I'm not gonna speak over your experience. But I do wanna say something at the top of our time together before I go anywhere else, which is your skepticism is reasonable. I think your exhaustion with religion is understandable. And to be honest, sometimes I share it with you. [00:40:12] (54 seconds)  #SkepticismIsReasonable

Well, good morning, Menlo Church, and welcome. Happy Easter. I'm so glad you're here. And I know what you're thinking. No. It is not normally this difficult to find seat. So thanks for navigating whatever you navigated to get here. We really do consider it an honor that you would take part of your Easter weekend and choose to celebrate what we believe to be the most significant day in human history and helping to commemorate with us together. [00:38:45] (25 seconds)  #WelcomeToMenlo

This happens to me pretty regularly around this time of the year. Someone will say to me, some version of it literally happened twice between services, hey. My mom, my daughter, my neighbor, my friend who's not a Christian or hasn't been in church in decades is coming. And you don't say this out loud, but what you're really is like, Phil, please don't be terrible. Like, actually try. [00:39:10] (24 seconds)  #BringAFriendSunday