Evidence for the Resurrection He is Risen!

It's inconceivable that Paul the apostle and James, the brother of Jesus, and the other apostles would have given up everything, their homes, their families. It's believed that Paul's own wife left him because he became a Christian. There's no way they would have spent the rest of their lives proclaiming a lie. Some of them burned at a stake, burned alive, nails driven in their arms and legs for proclaiming Jesus Christ. They would you, oh, I I I give it up. Was just kidding. I just made it up. But they never retracted it, never denied it. [01:13:27] (39 seconds)  #ApostlesSacrifice

Now if that was the end, if the story of Jesus ended there, why are we here this morning? Why should we even bother coming to a church ever ever again? We might as well just eat, drink, and be merry because that's all there is. But if Jesus did not rise from that tomb, and he was just another martyr who wasted his life for no reason, who gave his his life for a lost cause, if Jesus did not rise from that tomb, then everything he proclaimed was a lie from the pits of hell. [00:41:55] (37 seconds)  #ResurrectionOrNothing

But can you imagine that meeting when Jesus risen from the dead came and met his brother James? Can you imagine the tears falling down? Can you imagine the hug? Can you imagine what they talked about? James is saying, I I didn't know. I didn't see it. Oh, my big brother, I I love you. I'm so sorry. And James continued for the rest of his life to proclaim Jesus Christ, his half brother, as the Messiah that had been proclaimed for hundreds of years in the Old Testament and now have lived and walked and died and now risen from the dead. [01:10:00] (45 seconds)  #JamesConverted

It was preached within the city of Jerusalem that Jesus rose out of that grave. The very place where he's crucified, was so easy, so easy for anyone who've gone to check that tomb for Pilate in the room. Pull that thing back. Let's see that body in there. And if they were fabricating that story that Jesus rose from the dead, the last place they would have told it was down in Jerusalem where it was so easily to be verified. [00:53:36] (27 seconds)  #ProclaimedInJerusalem

This is so important that all the Roman or Jewish authorities would have had to do to quench this rumor of a resurrected resurrected Christ as could have on that Sunday, and that stone was still been there, rolled back that that stone, and look. Here's the body. You all know what he looks like. He's walked around here for three years. You know what he looks like. But no one saw a dead Jesus after the third day, did they? [01:00:35] (34 seconds)  #NoDeadBodyFound

There are people who make a living studying historical events, and there's a strong majority, Christian and non Christian contemporary scholars, that accept that the tomb on the third day was empty. And when doctor Gary Haverness' books, he cites there are over a 100 scholars, some of them that are even atheistic, affirm that that tomb was empty. There is no other explanation. You cannot make up this stuff. [01:01:12] (27 seconds)  #EmptyTombConsensus

So sad when we read in the news of someone who straps a bomb to themselves and commits suicide, and then they take out others and believe that they're doing a great deed for god. And there's some people that had given up their lives. I know when I was a younger student growing up in the Vietnam War, there's some people lit themselves on fire to to to protest the Vietnam War. But you'll never see someone like that strapping a bomb onto themselves for something that they know to be false. These suicide bombers did not go through with it knowing for a fact that what they were doing was a lie. [01:12:42] (45 seconds)  #MartyrsWouldntLie

But in Christianity, this very foundation is the person of Jesus Christ who claimed to be god, and he claimed I am going to rise from the dead from that tomb and whose followers indeed said, indeed, you did. But to be clear, compared to all these world religions, if the if the author of Christianity, Christ, had died and did not walk out of that tomb, his followers would have just faded away in just days. [00:49:17] (32 seconds)  #ResurrectionIsCore