The Resurrection Redeems Your Past and Shame

Not the God who judges, not the God who catalogs your failures and keeps a record of your wrongs, the God who sees, the God who finds you in the wilderness where everyone else has moved on, the God who knows your name and speaks it in the place when you were certain you had become invisible. And this is the God we've been talking about all morning. He's not waiting for you to find your way back to him. He's already in the wilderness looking for you. He has already seen everything, every chapter you wish didn't exist, every wound that you've been hiding, every year you spent in the dark and he has not looked away. [01:15:20] (34 seconds)  #GodSeesYou

Guilt is actually a good thing and I know that may sound strange but bear with me for a little bit. I think guilt is actually part of God's design. It's our alarm system. It's our conscience doing exactly what it was created to do. Alarming us the moment that we went wrong and pointing us back to the one who can make it right. Paul will talk about this in second Corinthians seven. He calls it a godly grief and he says it produces repentance. Guilt says you did something wrong and that acknowledgment as painful and as uncomfortable as it is sometimes is the beginning of the road back. Guilt was always meant to be a door. You walk through it and on the other side you find forgiveness and reconciliation. [00:49:10] (42 seconds)  #GuiltToGrace

A few months ago, we celebrated Easter and Easter rightly so causes us to look forward, forward in hope for it's the day when God brings the work of the resurrection to its completion where every wrong is made right and where every wound is finally healed. That's the promise of Easter and it's truly amazing we have such a blessed future to look forward to. But this morning I wanna do something a little bit different. I wanna take the resurrection and aim it backward. I wanna ask a question that I don't think we wrestle with often enough. What does the resurrection say about the parts of your past you wish didn't exist? What does God actually do with the weight of what we've done in the past and with the weight of what's been done to us? [00:45:27] (45 seconds)  #ResurrectionHealsPast

But let's pause here because this is what I expected the resurrection to look like if I am being honest. You know, I expected Jesus to rise from the dead completely transformed, no evidence of what happened in the crucifixion. I mean, glorified, radiant, every mark of the crucifixion gone. A clean slate with nothing to show for what he had been through. But that's not exactly what happened. John twenty twenty says, and when he had so said, he showed unto them his hands and his side, then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord. After the resurrection, Mary had seen the empty tomb. Peter and John have run to it and they found only grave clothes. And then Jesus appears first to Mary in the garden then to the disciples gathered behind locked doors out of fear. And look what he does when he enters the room, he showed them his hands and his side and the scars are still there. [01:03:26] (51 seconds)  #ScarsOfResurrection

The wounds are not gone, they are displayed. And that's not an accident, that's not an oversight in the resurrection body. The scars remain because the scars are now saying something completely different than they used to say. On Friday evening, those wounds were the marks of defeat, of suffering, of what sin and death do to the innocent. And on Sunday, those same wounds in the same body and the same risen flesh are the proof of victory. They are the evidence that Christ went all the way into death and came back out the other side. They are not marks of shame. They are marks of glory. The wounds did not disappear. They were given new meaning. The risen Christ is not pretending Friday didn't happen. He is standing in the full weight of it and declaring that it no longer has a power it used to have. [01:04:50] (50 seconds)  #WoundsToGlory

Shame says your past must stay hidden to stay safe. Jesus says your past can be carried openly because in his hands what it means has permanently changed. And here's what we see God do over and over again. This is the template. He does not delete your past. He does not pretend it didn't happen. He does not give you a clean slate with no memory of where you came from. He redeems your past. The very thing that was meant to mark you, to define you, to disqualify you, to keep you in hiding forever, and the hands of a risen savior becomes something else entirely. What the enemy designed as your shame becomes your testimony. What was meant to silence you becomes your voice and the wound becomes proof that God brought you to the other side and that the God we serve brings beauty out of the ashes and is not limited by our sin and mistakes. [01:05:53] (51 seconds)  #ShameToTestimony

We don't serve a God who is managing his exposure to you. We serve a God who has already seen everything and chose to love you anyway. Which brings us back to Psalm one thirty nine. If I say, surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee but the night shineth as a day. The darkness and the light are both alike to thee. The psalmist here describes the foundation of all hiding. Something we've all known since we were little kids playing hide and go seek. To essentially go into the room and turn the lights off and pray that nobody sees anything. And this is the same logic of every person who has ever thought, if I just keep it buried long enough, if I keep it hidden long enough, [00:57:42] (40 seconds)  #NoPlaceToHide

He touched lepers and he remained undefiled. He ate with tax collectors and prostitutes and was criticized for it. He let a sinful woman weep on his feet in public. And the Pharisees noticed this and it offended them deeply. In Luke 15 it says that this man receives sinners and eats with them and they meant it as an accusation but I think they were accidentally making astute theological observation. And here is that observation, when humans encounter sin we must keep our distance to stay clean. We all understand that sin can have a gravitational pull toward it and one bad apple can spoil the entire lot. But Jesus in his divinity stands so far above the gravitational pull of sin that he can reach into the deepest darkness without being drawn in. He doesn't stay clean by keeping his distance. He reaches in and the thing that he touches becomes clean. [00:56:33] (56 seconds)  #JesusReachesIn