Okay, and I think other than that, if you can turn your Bibles with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 15, and we're going to read this text, and I'm not going to be expositing this text, but we're going to be talking about the significance of the resurrection, but I want to start off with reading this.

1 Corinthians 15, 17-19, and then we're going to jump to verse 32. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

Verse 32, what do I gain if humanly speaking I fought with beasts at Ephesus, if the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we want to first thank you for giving us life. We want to thank you for the life, the suffering, the death, and resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Because of that, we're able to live and move and have our being. We thank you, Father God, for strengthening us, for persevering with us. We thank you for the Holy Spirit that you've deposited in us, interceding on our behalf, that we may enter the throne of grace with confidence.

So we come before you this morning to worship you, to honor you, especially on this day. We ask, Lord, that your grace would be sufficient in our approach, in our worship, in our honor. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. As some of you guys know, my family took a short trip to Korea and then we stopped by Japan for a couple of days and we came back.

I am known as the fob in our church. Most people here, even if you're Korean American, you've probably been either born or raised here, second or third generation. But even though I was born in Korea, there are certain things about the Korean culture that I really didn't understand. I noticed from a young age, and I'm not talking about those who are in their 50s and 60s, I'm talking about my parents' generation, like 80s and 90s and up.

And I noticed that that generation, especially when I started working in the Korean church, that they're not really good at planning ahead. They don't believe in insurance, life insurance or anything that, you know, retirement. They don't really think in that way. They're really good at just surviving, you know, whatever it takes.

And they're hard workers and I respect them for that. But for whatever the reason, they would never plan for the future. Another thing that I realized was that there's a lot of people who are in their 80s, 70s or 80s that don't know their age or maybe older than that.

So you ask them how old they are and say, "Oh, I think I'm 82 or 83 or say 90 or whatever." And they wouldn't know their age. And for years I was like, "Why would they not know their age?" And I realized later on that a lot of that was because they went through, that generation went through a severe war.

And so those of you guys who know the history of the Korean War, basically the war started between the North and the South and North came down and pushed the Korean population all the way to the tip in Pusan. And then MacArthur and his army came and pushed him all the way back to the border of China and North Korea.

And then the Chinese army came in and they pushed them all the way back and go back and forth. So during that process, there wasn't an inch of the Korean peninsula that wasn't affected by this war. And so during that period, some people were forced to, or not some people, most people had to flee from their homes.

They grabbed their bags and whatever that they had, whether they were rich or poor, educated or uneducated, every single person had to live on the road going back and forth. And so part of the reason why a lot of people didn't know their age was because they were pulled out.

And in Korea, they don't register their children at the hospital. They have to register at another center. So if you happen to be born right during that period and your parents didn't register you, later on when they went back to school, they just kind of put them back. So some people went back after two years, some people went back after four years.

So they have fellow classmates who are two years younger or four years older. And so it just kind of, imagine a country that was just kind of shaken up. And then some people were living in the South, had to flee, or North had to flee to the South and South up North.

And then one day in the middle of this fight, they didn't want to cause another world war. So they just came out of World War II. So they said, you know, we're not to prevent World War III. They decided we're going to stop this war. So it wasn't a peace settlement.

They just decided we're going to stop this war. And then they drew a line at the 38th parallel, which I call now like a DMZ area. And if you happen to get stuck in the North, you couldn't see whoever it was. It could have been your children, your grandparents.

If you happen to go up there for business and you got stuck up there, you got stuck up there for good. And so there's a lot of, if you talk to people who are from Korea, you ask them, are you South Korean, North Korean? Obviously, they're going to say South Korean.

But a lot of them have ancestors back in North Korea, because that's where they were born. That's where their family is. They were forced to come down. So imagine if you went through something like that in your life, whether you were in your early, you know, like 10 or pure teens or teens, and, or maybe you were a young married couple and you got separated from your wife or your husband, or maybe you were a young family and while in the middle of fleeing, you lost your child and you don't know if he or she survived.

Can you imagine? Not just the small population, the whole population, all of Korea experienced something that dramatic. In fact, some of you guys may know what budae jjigae is. Some of you guys may know. Basically literally it means army base soup, basically. And that soup, which is popular dish now, basically was the Koreans who were starving during this period because they didn't have food.

They started hanging around the US army base and whatever trash came out, they picked out whatever was edible, put it into a soup and they start cooking it to make it sanitary. And I was talking to my mom about that and she said, "There isn't a single Korean during that period who didn't taste that." Today it became a dish, right?

They have whole stores opened up and that's the signature dish that they sell. But imagine the whole country went through all of that and how that would have affected them. So it helped me to understand that generation. The reason why they do certain things and why they're able to, they're very scrappy and they're hard workers, but they don't think long term, right?

They don't plan long term. You could imagine how that affected their psyche and how that affected the way that they live. So it helped me a lot to understand or to even get along with that generation because of that. Now, I say all of this because at the core of Christianity, if you want to understand what the church is about, what Christianity is about, and for what's been happening for the last 2,000 years, we have to go to the core.

We have to go to the core history of Christianity, which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The resurrection of Jesus Christ isn't one of many things that the Christians believe. All that we believe, all that we do, not just in our church, but all around the world, rises and falls upon the credibility of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul, again, in 1 Corinthians 15, 17, said, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins." Meaning, it is absolutely useless. If Christianity, all it is, is a worship or a veneration of a good moral teacher, if he hasn't truly been raised from the dead, basically everything that we do falls apart.

You don't have to argue about the validity of the scripture and about how the disciples came and did this and did that and how something contrary. You don't even have to argue any of that. All you have to do is disprove, without a shadow of a doubt, that the resurrection did not take place, then it crumbles all of Christianity.

In fact, Jesus himself says in Matthew 16, 4, because they kept on coming to him and asking for proof, "How can we possibly believe the things that you are saying?" And Jesus said to them, "A evil and wicked generation, I will give no sign except for the sign of Jonah." And he was referring to his death and resurrection.

So Jesus himself said that all that I am saying and all that I have said to you hinges upon and the proof that I'm going to give you is the resurrection. So we can't overstate the significance of this day. And we're not just talking about our church. We're talking about every human being who has confessed Jesus Christ.

Many people who gave their lives to share this message. Hundreds and thousands of churches who are trying to survive in the Middle East, risking their lives to get together to worship this Jesus. All of it hinges upon this physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now, you and I are all rational people, so we don't just believe anything.

And some people think that the church keeps saying that you need to believe Jesus Christ and just close your eyes and just take a leap of faith and say, "I'm going to believe. I'm going to believe." Despite all the facts that point otherwise. How can you possibly believe that?

If you're a scientific person and you went to a university and you're logical, reasonable intelligence, how can you possibly believe that a human being came back from the dead? Well, just like anything else, we have to ask ourselves, is it reasonable or is it unreasonable? There are people in our generation today, in certain parts of the world, that come out and they completely deny the Holocaust.

Six million Jews were killed. They have footages, they have films, they have eyewitnesses, they have people who survived. And yet they'll come out and say, "I don't believe it. I think all that stuff is made up." 9/11, some of you guys remember when that happened. Some of you guys are probably a little bit too young to remember, or maybe you didn't exist at that time.

But when 9/11 happened, we saw the footages. It was actually on live television. But there are people who will come out and say that that didn't happen. Or they have conspiracy theories and say, "Well, the Bush administration, they concocted this and they're the ones responsible for this." All because they wanted an excuse to get to the Middle East and get oil, forcefully take oil.

Now, when we hear things like this, any reasonable person will hear that and say, "Well, that's unreasonable, that's irrational because we have footages, we have eyewitnesses." Now we ourselves were not there. We weren't there, we didn't touch it, but we just know that it's credible. So when it comes to the resurrection, is it credible?

Now we're not saying it's scientific, we don't have video footages, we don't have Jesus here saying that, "Here I am." But is it credible? Scriptures tell us that when Jesus was resurrected, he didn't just disappear and give this message and showed himself to Peter, and then Peter had the responsibility to go around telling people, "Trust me." In fact, if any other religion that you'll see, you have an individual who has an encounter with a being and basically all of what they're saying hinges upon the credibility of that one person.

When Jesus was resurrected, he showed himself to over 500 people, stuck around for over 40 days to make sure that there was enough eyewitnesses who would say that Jesus was resurrected. Now if you're trying to create a religion and trying to get veneration and honor, that would be the worst way to go about doing that because they can easily test.

If you're going around saying, "Well, there were over 500 people," well, where are they? You could easily be able to identify or discredit them by saying that. Not only that, immediately, as soon as Jesus was resurrected, the Jews and the Gentiles all of a sudden are in a room together and they started calling each other brothers.

They started selling possessions and donating it to the church so that the Jews could share with the Gentiles and the Gentiles could share with the Jews. In our generation, that may not seem like much, but today if you look at how much the Republicans and the Democrats, I mean, they just despise each other.

Every little mistake they make, they'll harp on that and they'll jump on it and try to tear each other apart. So can you imagine if you fell asleep for a few days and all of a sudden you woke up and found that the Democrats and Republicans decided to create one party and then now they call each other brother and sister?

The hatred that the Jews had toward the Gentiles could not be exaggerated. In fact, when they would travel between Jerusalem and Galilee, where Jesus' hometown, where he did most of the ministry, they would deliberately travel around Samaria, which was a Gentile area, about an hour or about a half a day journey more, just so that they don't have to encounter a Gentile.

They would pray daily that they thank God that God didn't make them a Gentile. They considered themselves unclean. If they were walking on the road and Gentile would be coming on the other side, they would deliberately cross and go to the other side because they thought they would make them unclean so they wouldn't eat with them.

They wouldn't be in the same house with them, let alone live in the same city. So you imagine if the Gentiles were recipients of this kind of hatred from the Jews, you can imagine the kind of hatred the Gentiles had toward the Jews. Not in 30 years, not in 60 years, not in 100 years, but immediately, immediately in the first century, the Jews and the Gentiles got together and began to call each other brothers and sisters in Christ.

Runaway slaves would voluntarily go back to their masters. You have to understand a runaway slave going back to their master would mean capital punishment. And if the master chooses not to accept them, they would have died instantly. Runaway slaves would volunteer to come back. Pharisees, who were the religious leaders of that time, would sit under the teaching of tax collectors.

Again, if you know anything about the tax collectors and Pharisees of that time, there's another two groups who absolutely hated each other. Tax collectors were considered the worst of sinners and Pharisees were considered the most righteous. They started to say that because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the tax collectors became the teachers who were discipled by Jesus and the Pharisees would sit under their tutelage.

Fishermen became teachers over scribes. The very central message of the gospel that was being preached by the disciples centered around the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It would only make sense if you were an eyewitness of the resurrection of your Lord and Savior. I mean, the only reasonable thing that you would think is to proclaim his resurrection, kind of like what Pastor Mark talked about this morning.

We can dig into the theology and the significance and the adoption and regeneration, propitiation. We can talk about all of that stuff, but the simple reaction to the resurrection is, "Wow, he was resurrected." And that's all they could talk about. Whether it was in front of hostile crowd, whether they were at home, whether they were in front of the king.

When they were in front, all they could talk about was, "Jesus was resurrected from the dead." Now, does any of that prove that he was resurrected? Probably not. But is it reasonable? Are these things that cause us to at least dig deeper? Are there enough things that's there for us to at least ask honest questions and say, "Well, why did that happen?" Well, secular scholars who aren't Christians look upon all the evidence of what happened in the first century, universally agree that at least the first generation Christians, they believe it.

Because their actions doesn't give credibility to something false. So whether that actually happened or not, at least they all agree, at least they agreed. Every single one of the disciples gave their life testifying that they were eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So some of the theories that have come up is because they can't discredit the eyewitnesses, so they'll say that Jesus was a mass hypnotist.

So he hypnotized everybody and then, and so it caused them to believe. So mass number of people caused them to believe, even to the point of death. Another theory that came up was the swoon theory, that Jesus didn't actually die, that he actually passed out for three days. You know, he got tired and he's passed out.

And the third day, he kind of came back up and he's like, "Oh my gosh, he's resurrected." But he never died in the first place. And then the third theory that came out was that Jesus had a twin brother. And so one brother died and the other twin brother was hiding out behind the temple, all of a sudden came out and said, "Here I am, you know, I'm Jesus." As strange as those theories may be, these three theories, and these are coming from scholars of the New Testament, they're coming up because they refuse to believe that this could possibly happen.

See, understandably, that it is not just our generation, but even the early generation, even the disciples themselves had a hard time believing this. Jesus made it very clear to his disciples what was going to happen. But after he was crucified, the disciples didn't go looking for him. It was the women.

It was women who were following him. And they didn't go to see if he was resurrected, even though Jesus clearly prophesied that he would. They went to anoint his body, which was a common ritual in the Jewish community. And the story that we read this morning in John chapter 20 basically chronicles these women who went to anoint Jesus' body, and then they encountered Jesus.

This morning, quickly, I want to go over three things that Jesus claimed, and why the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so significant. One, Jesus claimed to be God. Jesus claimed to be God. And this resurrection of Jesus Christ proved what he said. Second, Jesus claimed to be able to forgive sins.

And thirdly, Jesus claimed to have power to give new life. First, Jesus himself claimed to be God. They didn't want to crucify him because Jesus came and said, "I'm the Messiah, and I'm going to help you to be delivered from the Romans." Remember in John chapter 6, after Jesus feeds the 5,000, they were so enamored with Jesus, they were forcefully trying to make him king.

And Jesus, knowing what they were planning to do, he deliberately walks away from them. They didn't try to kill him because Jesus said he was the king of Israel, or he was the Messiah that they were prophesying. In John chapter 5, 18, it says, "This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own father, making himself equal with God." I want you to let that sink in for a minute.

If the resurrection of Jesus Christ clearly declares that Jesus is God, what does that mean for us? If God himself came and walked on this earth, and he died and was resurrected to prove his deity, what does that mean for us? Romans chapter 1, 3-4 says, "Concerning his son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God, in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord." First and foremost, it says the resurrection proves what Jesus said about himself.

That he wasn't just a moral teacher, he wasn't just a good man, he wasn't just a good example to follow, he wasn't just the last of the prophets, but he was God himself. I'm going to read you a quote from C.S. Lewis. I think they're going to put it up here.

It's a little bit long quote, so I'm just going to read it and just follow along as I read it. This is a quote from C.S. Lewis. He's the author of Chronicles of Narnia, so you may be familiar with him, and he also wrote Mere Christianity, where this is the quote coming out from that book.

He says, "I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him. I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things that Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

He would either be a lunatic on the level with the man who says he's a poached egg, or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.

But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. Now it seems to me obvious that he was neither a lunatic nor a fiend, and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that he was and is God." There is no middle ground.

Either Jesus was a lunatic and he's deceived millions and hundreds of millions of people in the last 2,000 years, or he is who he claimed to be, the son of God. Now we know that even the disciples, when they encountered the resurrected Christ, in Matthew 28 verse 9, the women fell at his feet and it says they worshipped him.

The word that is used here for worship is the word proskuneo, which is the most common word used for worship, and it literally means to prostrate oneself. You know, there's a kind of worship that we give because you're supposed to, right? A lot of times on Sunday we come, "Oh, we're supposed to do this.

We're supposed to give. We're supposed to sing." But the word proskuneo is a word that describes something that happens when you encounter something magnificent. It is a natural response, and that's the word that is used when the women who went to see, to anoint his body, when they saw the resurrected body of Christ, their immediate knee-jerk reaction was to get on the floor, prostrate themselves in worship.

That's exactly what happens in Matthew 28 verse 16. When the 11 disciples who are remaining, they catch up with Jesus, it says this in verse 16, "Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him, they proskuneo," prostrated themselves, "and worshiped him." You have to understand, a Jew who worships any other being, any other thing other than God would have been guilty of capital punishment.

The first and the most important commandment of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." It would be the blasphemy among blasphemy if they weren't absolutely convinced that Jesus Christ was God, for them to kneel down and worship him. Now you have to understand, these are people who ate with him, who walked with him.

In fact, when Jesus was going to the cross, they were so confused. Peter denied him. And yet, when they saw the resurrected Christ, it hit them all at once. He is who he said he is. Can you imagine? It wasn't just any human being that resurrected. Because they saw Lazarus come back from the dead by Jesus' power.

They realized that it wasn't just their master who died and then got resuscitated and came back. They realized what Jesus said all along. He is God. What does that mean for us as Christians? That we didn't come to worship or to venerate or honor a good man? He's God.

Our relationship with him ultimately, that we worship him and we obey him. But beyond that, the reason why he declared himself to be God and the reason why they needed to know that he was God, because the second thing that he said was he had the authority to forgive sins.

In fact, in the scriptures, there's a scene where Jesus is preaching and he's talking about the kingdom and a group of friends had this man, a paralytic man who was lame all his life. They heard about Jesus' miraculous power to heal people. They break into his house and lower him and instead of healing him, Jesus says, "Your sins are forgiven." And they get angry.

Like, "Who are you to say that?" Because they understood what it meant for Jesus to say, "Your sins are forgiven." He said, "That's blasphemy." As long as Jesus was healing people and feeding people, walking on water, all of that stuff was great. But for Jesus to say, "Your sins are forgiven." Who can forgive sins but God?

How can you, a mere man, say your sins are forgiven? Only God, the creator of the universe who created our souls and our flesh, has the authority to forgive sins. And they were absolutely right. And Jesus says, "What is harder to do? To say your sins are forgiven or to get up and walk?" Now you have to understand, Jesus was the creator of the universe.

For him to say, "Get up and walk," was nothing. He can pull money out of fish's mouth. He can walk on the water. He can calm the storm. To say to this young man, "Get up and walk," is nothing to him. But in order to say, "Your sins are forgiven," the Son of God had to empty himself, take on human form, walk and live a sinless life, give himself as a ransom for our sins, absorb our sins upon himself, that you and I may become the righteousness of God.

They were absolutely right. Jesus Christ was declaring to be God. That the ultimate reason why he came was for our sins. He didn't come because he saw them starving and decided, "You know what? I want to go and feed some of these hungry people." He didn't see mankind because they were limping around and some of them were living difficult lives.

He didn't have compassion on them because the Romans were suppressing them and he felt bad for his people. He saw the world and in their sin, he had compassion. See, the scripture says in Romans 5.12, "Just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned." In fact, in verse 14, it goes even deeper than that.

It's that all human experience reigns under sin and death. Sin and death reign. You know, the word reign basically means that every aspect of human experience, human history, is clouded under the umbrella of sin and death. That may sound kind of dark and morbid, but let's take a step back and examine human history.

We don't even have to look far. We don't need to dig through human history. We don't need to dig through history of mankind. Just look at ourselves. How difficult it is for you and I just to even maintain relationships. You know, one of the first things that we talk about in marriage counseling is biblical communication because communication is so difficult, right?

Even between husband and wife, we live together, we eat together, we sleep together, and you make every effort to understand each other, and even then, you have fights. You have fights because you have a hard time understanding because everything that we say, every communication that we have comes through a sinful filter.

There's a part of us that are insecure, and so we don't just say what we mean. We say it with the thought of, "If I say this, how is she going to interpret this? If I say this, are people going to think that I'm proud? Oh, they said this to me, so let me say this to them." So much of our communication comes through a sinful filter, so by the time we hear what they're saying, we're not hearing exactly what needs to be said.

Now, I'm saying all of this just to give you an example. When the scripture says, "Sin and death reigns over mankind," everything that you and I experience is tainted in some level with sin. Husband and wife relationship, raising children, our coworkers, our friends, lifelong friends, politics, your boss, grandparents, everything that you and I experience is in some way tainted with sin.

The scripture says, "All have sin and fall short of the glory of God." Every single human being is born with that inclination. Look at our politics. The whole government of the United States is based upon power crops and absolute power crops absolutely. Meaning, if you give a sinful man power, he's going to be corrupted, but if you give a sinful man absolute power, he's going to be absolutely corrupted.

So the base of the United States government is an understanding that we're all sinful. Look at capitalism. I remember in 1993, the first time I went to China where communism was, well, you can actually visually see communism. Today you can't see it. You go to Beijing or Shanghai, they're more capitalistic than they are here.

But at that time, almost everybody wore the same thing and they are all paid from the government. And so the ideology about communism is, if you give the common man an opportunity to be good to his brothers, he will work harder. And that's the basis of communism. So I remember visiting China for the first time and every time we would walk into a restaurant, we would be met with anger.

And the reason why they would be angry is because we showed up, they have to work. Usually they would have the lights turned off and then as soon as we walked in, they're like, that was their response. It was like, "Welcome." It's like, and then they would walk into the kitchen.

Like, "I got to cook now." So you imagine what kind of food was going to come out with that attitude. Remember everywhere we went, whether it was shops or markets, they had these things for foreigners to come in. Everywhere they went, our presence meant that they had to work.

Capitalism on the other hand, is founded upon people work harder when they're selfishly motivated, if it's personally beneficial to you. Now which works? It's pretty obvious. People work harder when there's personal benefit, not out of benevolence toward mankind. I'm not saying that some of that is not there, but basically speaking, capitalism is founded upon the ideology that all have sin and fall short of the glory of God.

Everything that you and I experience is tainted under this curse of sin. And that is why when Jesus came in Matthew 121, the angel announced to him by saying, "He will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins." We can change the government, we can change the finances, we can change our outward circumstance, but God saw us and saw that our primary problem was not finance.

It wasn't human relationships. That what was causing all this heartache was internal, and it was our sins. And that's why Jesus Christ came and he said he came to deliver us from our sins. In Isaiah 53, 5, it says, "But he was wounded for our transgression, he was crushed for our iniquities.

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with his strife we are healed, and all we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." The invitation that Christ made 2,000 years ago is the same invitation he makes today.

Jesus does not promise a better life, that your business is going to get better if you follow Jesus, that somehow if you're sick you're going to find health, that if you're lonely that somehow you're going to have friends all of a sudden around you. Jesus came to deal with the primary problem of mankind, which is sin.

He says he has the authority to forgive sins. Every single one of us, we sin because we've been sinned against. The typical human experience, a husband goes to work, I mean it doesn't have to be a husband but just for illustration, my husband goes to work, he feels the pressure from his boss and they're being unfair, he should have gotten a promotion but the next guy got it and the guy who's maneuvering and lying and slandering, somehow he gets the promotion and he thinks life is unfair.

He comes home and his wife says, "Hey, how come you don't share?" He's like, "You don't know what I'm going through at work, get off of me. It's hard enough as it is and you come home and you make it difficult for me at home." And the wife is bitter and angry because she's been waiting to serve him all day and all of a sudden all he gets is the leftovers from work and she's bitter and angry.

And then the son comes home from school and he was supposed to do the dishes and he doesn't do the dishes. And then all of a sudden she snaps in, "Why don't you do the dishes? You never do the dishes." And he's like, "What? I just came home." And he's angry and then his sister comes home and says, "Hey, get out of my room.

Pick up your socks." I'm like, "What's wrong with him? Every time I'm in the room he's yelling at me." She's angry. She goes out. She kicks the dog. Dog bites the cat. Cat goes out looking for mice. And the cycle continues. As silly as that might be, and it may not happen exactly like that, but I think every single one of us who've lived for a while can understand the experience of living in a sinful world that we've been sinned against in various ways.

And as a result, our natural tendency is to snap when something goes wrong. Why do we get so angry when somebody cuts us off on the freeway? We're already on the edge. Christ came and he's the only human being who lived a sinless life that when he was sinned against, he absorbed it upon himself.

He who knew no sin became sin that we might become the righteousness of God. Not only did he react to the sins against him, for the very people that he came to love, he absorbs it on the cross and in his resurrection he pushes back. And he gives us new life.

And that's the third thing that he claimed. He claimed to have the power to give life. And that's what the resurrection ultimately really is. It's the sin curse of mankind being reversed in resurrection so that we don't sin because we've been sinned against. The scripture says we love because he first loved us.

And he's the only being in the universe who was able to absorb our sins. And not only did he absorb it, he pushed back in his resurrection and gave us new life so that those who are under the condemnation of sin and this cycle of sin, now that curse is broken and he pushes us back.

And he says now I've come to give life and to give this life abundantly. And that's ultimately what the resurrection is about, is rescuing mankind from the reign of sin and death. John 5 24 says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life.

He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life." Ultimately the resurrection isn't about, well, let's see who Jesus is. Is it real or not? All of these things are true, but the reason why it's important is because the only hope for sin is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I want to end with a song that came to my mind as I was preparing this sermon. And I know probably 90% of you probably don't know this song. It's because it's written in the 70s and it is a country song. So for both reasons, right? Looking for love in all the wrong places.

Anybody know this song? Okay. I know who you are. The song says this, looking for love in all the wrong places. I spent a lifetime looking for you, single bars and good time lovers, never true. Playing a fool's game, hoping to win, telling those sweet lies and losing again.

I was looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many faces. Searching your eyes, looking for traces of what I'm dreaming of. Hoping to find a friend and a lover. God bless the day that I discover another heart looking for love. When I was alone then, no love in sight, and I did everything I could to get me through the night.

Don't know where it started or where it might end. I turned to a stranger just like a friend. I was looking for love in all the wrong places, looking for love in too many faces. Searching your eyes, looking for traces of what I'm dreaming of. If you look at some of the most popular songs in human history and even modern history, some of the most popular songs are songs of suffering.

Songs of pain, hurt. The reason why is because we can relate. We can relate to the loneliness. We can relate to the searching in the dark. We can relate to the suffering. Why are we able to relate? Why are mankind able to relate? Because this is human experience. No matter how much we try to disguise this, sin has tainted everything that we do.

Some of us come from very difficult backgrounds at home, and you go to counseling and the first thing that they tell you is, "What did your mom do? What did your dad do?" And the way they sinned against you. We have children and we determined that we're never going to do this to our kids, but we can't turn off our sin.

We can't turn off our anger. We can't turn off our bitterness. And so the cycle keeps going. And so we hurt each other. And so the older you get, the more bitter we become because we experience more and more sin. And this cycle doesn't end with you. No matter how much you're determined that you're not going to do this to your kids, you can't just turn this off.

Your grandparents, great-grandparents, your parents, and you. Now if you've raised your kid to a certain age, I'll bet you every single parent who has children of a certain age wish they could do it over. Because we can't just turn it off. The only hope that we have is in the blood of Jesus Christ.

That because He absorbed our sins and He was resurrected and He became the first fruit among many who will be raised again, Jesus says, "Come to me all who are weary and heavenly laden." He said, "I will give you rest." This turmoil that you feel in your heart, I understand now.

Now that I'm hitting 50, the crisis of middle age, I get it now. I don't think I'm going through it, but I get it. I have friends who were living a perfectly peaceful life and all of a sudden they come back with a tattoo. They're riding a Harley around.

I'm like, "Dude, you're 50. You're scaring your kids." But I get it. When you're in your 20s, you live to think that I'm going to invest and then 30s come around and your 30s, you work hard to get ahead, to become a CEO, to get a better job, to make right investments.

You make it to your 40s, you become middle management, then you work hard. But by the time you get to your 50s, you're not looking forward to your 60s because 60s is your retirement. And so if by the time you reach 50, you examine your life and you're not where you want to be and you start to think, "Was this it?

Everything that I've invested in, everything that I've sacrificed, everything that I was looking forward to, is this it?" And so you have a life crisis because every single human being born into this earth has a slow march toward the end of our life. That is not just a few of us.

That's every single human being that is born has an expiration date and we all know it. But there's this innate desire to live. As soon as you're born, our baby comes out sucking, looking for food. Every single human being. They're not taught that. They're born with this innate desire to live.

And ever since we're an infant until the day we die, there's this survival mode. We need to live. But we don't know how. Because we've been disconnected with the author of life. And as a result of this disconnection, we're trying to make the most of this life. So some people will say it's about traveling.

Some people will say it's about food. Some people say it's about getting the most. Some people will say it's about family. But we don't really know. You're just trying to make the most of what you have. But deep inside you know there's an emptiness. There's a disconnection. See, Jesus when he was coming into Jerusalem, they were all so elated.

Because they said, "Finally the Messiah is going to come. He must be the Messiah. He's riding on a donkey. He's a fulfillment of prophecy." So they were so elated and excited because it meant that possibly he's going to overthrow the Roman government. Maybe the hungry will be fed. The lame will walk.

Even if you die, Lazarus is raised from the dead. Who wouldn't want this as their king? And yet, Jesus as he's walking in, we see him weeping. He's weeping. And the reason why he was weeping, he says, "Only if you knew this day what would truly bring peace." It wasn't government.

It wasn't finance. It wasn't health care. The Son of God came, stepped off of his throne, lived a humble life, a perfect life, and he gave himself to sinners to be crucified. He absorbed sins of man, past, present, and future. And he reconciled us to his Father. And then he resurrects as the first fruit among many to be born again.

That's what Christianity at the core is about. It's not ultimately about being a good person, although God commands us to do so. It's not about being faithful to church, although God commands us to do so. But at the core of Christianity, the core of his death and resurrection is this life that we lost at the fall.

That this life that we so eagerly desire and are looking for in all the wrong places, in too many faces, can only be found in Christ. Jesus said in John chapter 4 that the water that this world gives you, you may drink of it and you may quench your thirst for a period, but Jesus says, "I am the living water.

The water I give you will well up into eternal life, and whoever drinks of it will never thirst." I pray that this morning, as some of you have come and may have heard the gospel for the first time, maybe you heard it many times, but you haven't thought too seriously about the meaning and significance of it.

I pray that at least, at the minimum, that you wouldn't simply dismiss the resurrection just as a prejudice. I can't imagine this happening. There was a period of time when they thought that grain of sand was the smallest particle, and then they found the atom, and then they split the atom, and they found the neutrons and electrons, and then I found out that they actually found out there's actually three smaller particles even beneath that.

And then you start studying the universe, and they thought that the earth and the solar system, that was it, and the more and more they studied, they found out just how gigantic the universe is. But there was a period of time when people rejected all of that because they couldn't see it.

I pray with all my heart that at the minimum, that you would examine carefully, if Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, could he really be the answer to man's problems, to your longing, to your emptiness, to the question of what is the meaning of life? If you can take a minute to pray with me as I invite the praise team to come up.