Rev. Dr. Brent Russett Asbury Free Methodist
March 31, 2024 – John 20:1-31
I love a good story. I love a good novel or a good Netflix movie because I love a good story. A well-written novel will tell you the truth about the world without having to state the truth about the world. A well-crafted movie will show you truth about life not because it preaches to you but because it uncovers it in the life of its characters.
Of course, a well-written story can also craftily lie to you, so, one has to be discerning.
I think most of us gravitate towards a good story because, deep down, all of us know that we are authors of a sort.
Every day, we write the story of our lives. The choices we make, the things we do, and the people we meet dictate the storylines. Often, there are a number of subplots going on. What is happening with our extended family, what is happening at our work, what is happening amongst our friends. Then, there is our main storyline, which is what is happening in and around us.
You may not have thought about yourself as an author, but you are the author of your life. However, unlike a fiction writer, you don’t have complete control over the story. You can influence and direct it by the choices you make. But others are also writing into your story.
Your boss writes into your story. That person who ran a red light and caused a fender bender writes into your story. Your mom and dad write into your story, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. Your friends write into your story, which is why the people who choose to hang around matter. Your health, talent, and skills all affect your story.
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While you are writing your own story, there is another story being written. Your story is being written into the big story. God’s story. History is “His Story.” He has been writing his story into the fabric of the universe from the beginning of time. His story is a big story. It’s big enough to encompass everyone’s story. Yet God is such an incredible author that he is able to let everyone write their story and have His story end the way he wants it to.
God, being God, has more control over his story than we have over ours. But he doesn’t have complete control. He has given you the ability to make choices in your story. Those are real choices. You can choose to follow His way or reject him. You can choose to live in harmony with the Kingdom of God or oppose it. You can intentionally choose to have your story dovetail with his, or you can try your best to keep it separate from his. But that is a losing battle because all stories are encompassed in the story of God.
I have to say, though, that God loves it when we choose to write our story in harmony with His.
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I love it when we have a chance to share our testimonies with one another. Each testimony of people coming to Jesus is a choice to write our story into his.
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I don’t know about you, but there have been a lot of elements to my story that I wish weren’t there. There are some choices I made in the past that I would like to have over again. Then, there were some things that other people did to me that skewed my story somewhat. There are limitations that are written into my story.
But unlike the writer of fiction, I cannot go back and delete the parts of my life that were not well written. When a day is done, that part of the story is set in stone.
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I know the story of some of your lives. You live with fear and hope, with difficulties and challenges. What do you do with those parts of your story? Do you just go on, ignore them, work with them?
I have found that it is at those very points that God comes and invites us to write our story into his. More importantly, he comes to us and offers to write his story into ours. They become crucial moments in our story. How we respond to the invitation of God can pivot a whole story.
When those moments arrive, we want God to write his story into our story by answering our prayers. God, get me out of this place. God fix this problem. We would like him to drop in and do a miracle so that we could get on with life the way it was.
Sometimes he does that. But he doesn’t just want our stories to bump into each other. He wants our story to be a harmonious subplot of his big story.
If you have ever written a story and you want the characters in the story to meet – there needs to be a time and place.
The place where our stories truly meet with God’s story is on Easter Weekend. To truly be involved in God’s big story, our stories have to come through the story of Easter.
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Last Friday, Good Friday, we remembered how Jesus was crucified. On a hill called Golgotha, he was hung on a cross, and there he died.
His death shook up his disciples. After all, they had followed him for the last three years. When Jesus was being abandoned by the crowds, he asked his disciples if they were going to leave, too. Peter spoke up and answered for all the other disciples. Where else would we go? Only you have the words of eternal life.
They had not only come to follow him, but they had come to believe in him. All their hopes and dreams were wrapped up in Christ. Those dreams came to a screeching halt with his death. That isn’t the way the story was supposed to end. They had imagined a future, and this was not that.
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That was Friday. But now it’s Sunday. Come with me to John 20. You heard the story read.
It was Sunday, the first day of the week. Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and found that it was empty. This was unexpected. When you go to someone’s grave, you expect to find the grace closed, but it wasn’t. You expect to find the remains of the person who was buried in a tomb. There were no remains.
So, Mary came roaring back to the disciples with the news, and Peter and John took off to the tomb. They get there, and they find out what they had been told. I like verse 8.
John 20:8 (NLT)
8 Then the disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in, and he saw and believed—
He believed what. He believed that the body was gone.
John 20:9 (NLT)
9 for until then they still hadn’t understood the Scriptures that said Jesus must rise from the dead.
The unexpected is one thing, but now that Peter and John had seen it, they were left scratching their head. What has happened has now moved from the unexpected to the unexplained. What do you do with the whole idea that a body was missing?
John 20:10 (NLT)
10 Then they went home.
When you hit the unexpected, and then it moves into the unexplained, you need to regroup. So, they went home.
Now, Mary hung around the grave, and she runs into two angels. But she is crying so hard she doesn’t care that she has seen angels. She has one question in mind. Where is the body of Jesus? She thought, “I have come to anoint him with oil, and I’m going to anoint him. I don’t care if you’re an angel or a king. I’m going to anoint Jesus.”
She is peering into the grave, and she hears this voice behind her.
John 20:15–16 (NLT)
15 “Dear woman, why are you crying?” Jesus asked her. “Who are you looking for?”
She thought he was the gardener. “Sir,” she said, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and get him.”
16 “Mary!” Jesus said.
She turned to him and cried out, “Rabboni!” (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”).
Now, she just freaks out. This is too good to be true. How is it true? I saw him crucified. I saw the spear go into his side. How can this be.
She talks with Jesus, and Jesus talks with her, and then he sends her off with a message for the disciples.
John 20:18 (NLT)
18 Mary Magdalene found the disciples and told them, “I have seen the Lord!” Then she gave them his message.
Now, what was the disciples’ take on this? Thomas gets labelled as the one with no faith because he doesn’t believe it when the rest of the disciples tell him that they have seen Jesus, but the rest didn’t believe it when Mary told them that she had seen Jesus.
After all, dead is dead. They had seen him die. They knew that no one escapes crucifixion. They knew that after he was dead that, a spear was driven in his side just to make sure. Dead is dead.
Now, what has happened has gone from unexpected to the unexplainable to unbelievable. It just doesn’t make sense.
John 20:19–20 (NLT)
19 That Sunday evening the disciples were meeting behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Suddenly, Jesus was standing there among them! “Peace be with you,” he said. 20 As he spoke, he showed them the wounds in his hands and his side. They were filled with joy when they saw the Lord!
He had to show them his hands and sides before they would believe him. But when he showed them undeniable proof that he had risen from the dead, when he showed him his nail-pierced hands and spear-pierced side, they believed, and then they were overjoyed.
Christ had indeed risen from the dead. It went from the unexplainable to the unbelievable to the undeniable. These disciples believed that Jesus rose from the dead. So strong was that belief that each one of them, except John, would killed for their faith.
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As I hear people writing the stories of their lives, often their story mirrors that of Easter. Elements of all our stories are not what we wish they were.
But it is often in these troublesome times that we feel the story needs to move in a different direction. It might be a sense of meaninglessness and spinning our wheels. It might be a sense of insecurity or fear. It might be a sense that there is something bigger than ourselves. It may be our lives spinning out of control.
But something happens to bring us to a place where we know the story that we are writing with our lives must move in a different direction than it is heading right now.
The great thing about God. He is already at work. He isn’t just at work in the lives of super saints. He is not just at work in the lives of Christians. He is at work in people’s lives who don’t even think he exists. He is at work in people who take no thought of him. Some of you know it, and some of you don’t, but God is actively involved in your life. He has been trying to write in a way to get your story to intersect with His.
Do you want to see the fingerprints of God in your life, start looking for the unexpected. —– Someone who you thought most unlikely starts talking about God. Things start to happen that in and of themselves could be ruled as coincidence, but they start to accumulate. You go to a movie, and it is like God is talking to you. The unexpected happens, the equivalent of hearing stories of the empty tomb happens. God’s trying to get your attention.
But things will start to move from the unexpected to the unexplained. There are things that just don’t seem to have a good explanation to them. After all, if you haven’t given God much thought, and all of a sudden, he is trying to get your attention, it is pretty easy to write him off. If you start with the premise that God is either nonexistent or afar off and doesn’t come near, then when he does come near, it just seems unexplainable.
There are a lot of unexplainable things in our world. It is easy just to ignore them and walk away. But if God is trying to get your attention, it would be good to pay attention to what is happening around you. Why did I just overhear that conversation about God? Why am I starting to think about spiritual things? Pay attention.
Here is what I know about God. It is his desire; it is his will to bring you into a personal relationship with himself. What we are celebrating this Easter weekend is about God making a way for us to know him and walk in relationship to him.
Maybe you have started to grasp hold of the good news that we find in Jesus Christ. He is the bridge between us and God. He made a way that we can know God.
The problem is, if you really grasp the gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s unbelievable. That the God of the universe knows me by name, and more than that, loves me, and more than that, wants a relationship with me. More than that, he has cleared out all the obstacles between Him and me by the work of His Son Jesus. All that I have to do is receive the free gift of life that is offered in Christ. That is mind-blowing. That is unbelievable.
Things have moved from the unexpected, to the unexplained, to the unbelievable.
Here is where people need to make a decision. Are they going to keep moving towards God, or are they going to walk away and leave it there? Everyone needs to make that decision.
Jesus’ disciples could have done that. Peter had a family. He could have moved back with his wife rather than hanging around the disciples. John and Andrew had a fishing business with their father. They could have immersed themselves in their father’s business.
But they didn’t. When they saw the empty tomb, they could have said, “This is too much. I am going home.” But they stayed to see what would happen. There are some of you who have been confronted with the unbelievable, and you are thinking you might just move on.
After all, if you let you start allowing God to write into your story, you will not have the same literary freedom. You will be a co-author with God. You will be writing your story, but it will need to be consistent with another story. But it will be a better story because God is a better author.
And if you think God is a difficult co-author, you should try sin. It is brutal to write your storyline with it as a co-author.
Some of you are right at that unbelievable stage. You can walk away. But the other option is to stay there and actively wait for God to break through. — And there will be a time when God breaks through. It may even be after you take that leap of faith. But there will be a time when God walks into the room of your heart, and it is undeniable.
The question is, will you put yourself in a place to encounter God? Will you invite him into your life and invite him to write your story with you?
If you want to do that tell him that. Lord, come into my life. Come into my story. Forgive me for trying to write my story without you. You know, there are a number of places in my story that aren’t good. Please forgive me. I invite you to come and write the story of Easter into my story. I am going to write my story into yours.
There are a number of you who have already chosen to co-author your story with God. You have chosen to write in harmony with his big story.
You have understood that you were afar off from God. There were things in your life that didn’t allow you to come close. But God came close to you. On the cross that first Easter, Jesus did what he had to do so that you could have peace with God. You have invited Jesus to come into your life, and you have chosen to follow him. He has done exactly that.
I want you to know that God wants your story to become more profound. And it is the same process.
Unexpected – Ministry opportunity
– Suffering
– A community spurring you on
– Some new truth about God
Unexplained – Is this really God
– I don’t understand everything I see.
Unbelievable – Now you know you are to live in faith, but
– Does God really want to take me deeper
– Does God really want an intimate relationship
– Does God really want me to abandon myself to him
Undeniable – You take a step of faith and watch what God does.