Welcome to Day 2224 of Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me. This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom The Death of Death - Ressurection Day! – Daily Wisdom Putnam Church Message – 04/09/2023 The Death of Death – Resurrection Day! Last week, we continued our Ressurection messages with “When The Stones Burst Into Cheers” from Luke 19:35-42. We learned three essential points last week:
- God is worthy of loud and joyful praise.
- Our praise should focus on the person and work of Jesus.
- God must and will be praised through Jesus Christ.
On this Easter morning, this resurrection day, our focus is on The Death of Death because the Resurrection is real and changes everything. Throughout the message, we will look at the last few verses in Matthew 27 and most of Matthew 28, found on pages 1549-1550 of your pew Bibles. There are moments when, all of a sudden, something happens, and everything changes. There are so many examples of this that it’s almost hard to pick. So, I chose a personal story that impacted our lives. On Easter weekend of 2017, we received the news that Hazel had leukemia. When Elizabeth called me, I was planting seedling trees in the yard, and our son Barney was helping me. Paula was on her way to visit some friends in North Carolina and had just crossed the North Carolina border when I called her. She drove off the first exit, turned around, and headed home. All of our lives were turned upside down. For the next 2.5 years, it was recurring treatments, hospital stays, and continual tears and prayers. By God’s grace, Hazel came through all, and today is a healthy, feisty, nearly eight-year-old flaming redhead. While her semi-annual checkups have been very positive for the past three years, our heart skips a beat or two whenever she gets a fever or a cough. I suspect it will be that way for years, because everything changed on that day six years ago. When all of a sudden, in a moment, everything changes, that’s a powerful reality. It was the same over 2,000 years ago, but with an impact that changed our lives and the world. The empty tomb of Jesus changes everything. The fact that that tomb is empty changes everything. Not only for us as individuals /but for who we are, /how we live,/ and why we live the way we live. God’s work can’t be stopped. Jesus, the Pharisees, and the chief priests had issues. They’re like the Democrats and the Republicans today. They don’t get along. Jesus offended the chief priests and Pharisees because he undermined their authority. He was subversive to their power. To use a modern phrase, they thought Jesus was a royal pain. Everything about his ministry bothered them. The fact that Jesus associated with tax collectors, the immoral harlots, and the uneducated, ordinary people who all flocked to Jesus bothered the religious people. Those people were blemishes to them. So they were tired of Jesus. They wanted this whole Jesus thing to be over. They remember when he was still alive; he said he would be resurrected from the grave. So they go to Pilate. Interestingly, the Jewish priests were not allowed to use their palace guards. They had been under Roman rule for many decades at this point. Listen to Matthew 27:62-66 to understand their thinking: 62 The next day, on the Sabbath,[
