Do you remember when you had hope? What happened? Is there any hope for hope? Two disciples hung their hopeless heads as they walked along the road. But the risen Christ met them and changed everything. It could happen again. What if Jesus is alive? He is risen. He is risen indeed! Message based on Luke 24:13-32.
Quotes:
B. Simpson: Easter is the New Year’s Day of the Soul.
Jurgen Moltmann: Easter is a feast and is celebrated as a feast of freedom. It is the beginning of the laughter of the redeemed, and the dance of the liberated.
Lewis Smedes: Hope is to our spirits what oxygen is to our lungs. Your spirit dies when hope dies. They may not bury you for a while, but without hope you're already dead.
Dr. Carl F. H. Henry: Jesus planted the only durable rumor of hope amid the widespread despair of a hopeless world.
Rollo May: I was seized then by a moment of spiritual reality: what would it mean for our world if He had truly risen?
Pew’s research: survey of 11,201 respondents conducted in the summer of 2023, show that, at 28%, a 12 percentage point increase since 2007, the religiously unaffiliated cohort now makes up a sizable portion of the U.S. population.
Hemingway’s six word short story: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.
John Claypool: Every exit is an entrance.
John Stott: We live and die; Christ died and lived!
G. K. Chesterton: The point of an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid.
John Updike - Seven Stanzas on Easter:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
John Donne:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
Duane Brooks: If you have walked away, walk back.
G. K. Chesterton: Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it has a God who knew the way out of the grave.
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