Northside Church - Sydney
He Week 1: He is alive
We're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Well, six of us walked into this room, it was a small room, I remember it had big glass panels, six of us, and we were all starting to breathe pretty heavily and starting to sweat because what was about to happen was quite remarkable. This was 1982, I was at the Houston Medical Centre, part of a rotary exchange that I was on, and we were in the viewing room overlooking an operating table where we were about to see first hand the beginning of open heart surgery on this man. Mercifully, they'd already put the saw in to open up the chest cavity, but we were there, at least three of us were there. Very last and less than 10 seconds, just straight out. Graham Agnew was, "Who, hey, hey, if I can stand this, I'll get to tell about this one day. Tell me about it now." But we did see the chest cavity come back and there, of course, was a pulsating, pumping heart in the chest of this man, an amazing experience, one I will never, ever forget, an unforgettable moment viewing first hand the organ responsible for our very existence. We may be able to do without a spleen, they tell us we can. You may be able to forfeit a lung. Many of you have forfeited your adenoids and your tonsils and your appendix, but when the old ticker stops, we stop. At a physical level, we are no more when that heart stops. Friends, that's why the heart transplant industry has been thriving for so many years. Ever since Dr. Christian Barnard, the South African surgeon, pioneered this particular technology in, wait for it, 1967. You oldies, can you believe that? That's when that news broke around the world. Well, what does this have to do with Easter? And the fact that Jesus is alive, well, I'll tell you this, here it is. I believe Christ's resurrection means that anyone can receive a spiritual heart transplant with the Easter bit staying with us throughout the entire year. Friends, I mean, this is the weekend that should get the heart of every Christian really racing. I mean, this is what the faith is all about. Christ is risen. Now, anything is possible. If your heart's not racing this morning, maybe you need to stick it in the microwave for a while. You're just going to warm it up a little bit, get it, get it really pumping. My contention is it should be possible. No, look, it is possible. It's possible to have an Easter heart for 365 days a year, a heart, a mind, an attitude that reflects the essential meaning and the power of this beautiful season. You see, an Easter heart exhibits a number of special traits. First of all, it is full of new life. Jesus' last words on the cross were, "It is finished." But really, from a Christian perspective, he was saying, "It's just beginning. It's just begun." I mean, life begins anew with the resurrected rhythms of the Easter heart. It did for Peter. He looked in the empty tomb. He saw the grave clothes had been folded. They were empty. He believed that Jesus had risen in that instant. His Easter heart started beating. What about Mary Magdalene? She came to the garden. She heard Jesus, her beloved teacher speak her name, and her Easter heart started beating at that point. What about the two guys on the Emmaus Road? Traging along, they're joined by a stranger, a mysterious traveler. What was their comment afterwards, "Did not our hearts burn within us?" But because it wasn't until he broke the bread and shared the cup that their eyes were opened and they believed that Jesus had risen, that's when their Easter heart sort of had a bit of a kickstart. It was kind of a paddle treatment for those guys, and they were never the same again. Why is an Easter heart full of life? Because it's the heart of someone who believes in the One who once said, "I have come that you might have life, life in all its fullness." But there's something else about an Easter heart. It throws off the old grave clothes. Grave clothes may look fine. They may be, as they were in the first century, having all kinds of sweet smelling spices to make them look more attractive. They went to a lot of trouble, still do in parts of the Middle East, to kind of dress up dead bodies. But even the strongest spices and perfumes couldn't mask what was really happening beyond the rapping, the death, the decay. Friends, I've got a question for you this morning. How vital is your faith this morning? Is it an alive faith, or does it need a paddle treatment? How vital is your devotional life? How open are you to new ideas and fresh insights? Are you interacting with other believers? Are you doing life together with a group, or are you flat lining in your faith? Are you all wrapped in the same old ways of doing things, which are masking the fact that at a deeper level you are in need of some new life? You need an Easter heart. Well, here's something else. An Easter heart is the heart of a rock roller. Not a rock and roller. I know about some of your old rock and rollers out there. Not the heart of a rock and roller. The heart of a rock roller. We're talking about people and churches whose mission it is to help people get out of the tombs they find themselves in. Friends, let's remember the first sign of the resurrection, as noted by Mary, was that the stone had been rolled away. Everybody, even Jesus resurrected body, everybody needs to be offered a way out when they're trapped, when they're imprisoned. We both as individuals and as a church can roll away the rocks of fear, of discouragement, of disillusionment, of doubt, of sadness, of regret, and we can encourage tomb dwellers to come out into the light. It's a big part of our mission. We do this through our witness to friends, to family, to neighbors. We do it as a church through our various ministries that we offer to the people of this community. I don't think she'd mind me saying, "Emma, this young lady, I'm going to conduct the wedding for at Hong Kong." She's a lady who experienced the rock rolling ministry of Northside. She came to this church coming out of a shockingly abusive first marriage. She told her story up here one Sunday night, not telling you anything that hasn't been shared. Barely 30 years of age and already with a shockingly abusive marriage behind her. She came to this church and she struggled for a little bit to try to reconnect with God. Then she found a thing called divorce care and it dramatically changed her life. She made some significant friends here and was prepared fully to go to a new place to start a new life as a speech pathologist and now meeting this great new guy and a whole new fresh start for her. You see, rock rolling is generally not one person's job. We all play a part in it, but it's something that we do in community, get those rocks moving in the right direction, freeing people from the things that imprison them, that entomb them. So, guys, are we getting the message this morning? I mean, Easter is not intended to be just a concentrated period of time or weekend when we get all sentimental and a little bit extra enthusiastic about something that happened 2000 years ago, no Easter provides us with the opportunity to have a spiritual heart transplant. And for that experience to last for the whole year for it to become who we are, for it to become our beating heart in him. You see, an Easter heart frequently skips a beat. Now, I know from a medical standpoint that can be a problem. Well, they call it palpitation, that's the term to describe the phenomenon of a skipping heart. Now, that's in the medical world, but in the emotional world, of course, it's a different story because a heart skipping a beat refers to a surprise, a pleasurable moment, a moment of ecstasy. Let me use it in a sentence. My heart skipped a beat when I laid eyes for the first time I'm bev. You have for me with the movie The Masked, the Jim Carrey Seeing, Kuchung, Kuchung, Kuchung. That's what it was like, just like that. Regrettably it wasn't reciprocated, not at first, not at first, but eventually, hearts began beating in sync, took a little time. Hey, friends, look, there's not a, there's not a week goes by. There's not a week goes by in this church that my heart does not skip a beat. Spiritually speaking, as I see what God is doing, the answers to prayer, the breakthroughs that are happening in people's lives, the many expressions of service, of love, compassion, which take, they just take your breath away. They're happening this weekend. We've seen it over this Easter. We had one of our mums receive Christ on Friday morning after talking with Michael McQueen in the urban garden. I mean, it's just exciting stuff. People with an Easter heart need a setting like this church. We need a setting like this church to express our love and our devotion and our ministry and to receive the things that are happening as a way of giving our hearts just that bit more injection of blood, spiritual blood and fervor. We need to experience those moments of joy and fulfillment and the reference to joy provides me with the perfect segue to the next point, which is this, an Easter heart is pumping with joy, of course. And of course, a few weeks ago, we looked at the nature of, of Christian joy and we compared it to mere happiness. And do you remember the way we described the two? Me a happiness. And this is a grand agony original. You can't Google this. Not yet. Me a happiness is dependent on outward circumstances at the time, but Christian joy is dependent on inner convictions for all time, just transcends the circumstances that we're facing. And then there's a final characteristic of an Easter heart beat. It is a broken heart and Easter heart is a broken heart. The promise of Easter Sunday is not that your heart won't break. In fact, it's quite the opposite because when we love, and that's essentially what Easter is all about, when we love our hearts will break, that's the price of love. For God so loved the world, God's heart broke and the cross is the symbol of His broken heart. A broken heart is the price of love because people who love deeply feel deeply. They develop a heightened awareness of the pain, the suffering, the tragedy all around them. I mean, look at Jesus. I mean, love personified. Look at the number of times He was moved deeply by what He saw around Him. While overlooking the city of Jerusalem, just wondering why they'd rejected Him, move deeply. When told of the death of Lazarus broke down. When faced with various people needing healing, the Bible says Jesus was moved with compassion. What about Father forgive? In the moment of His greatest need, He's thinking of others, move with compassion. The price of love is a broken heart. And friends, I wouldn't suggest for one moment that Christians have exclusive rights to deep love and compassion. That's just not true. But I do know this. In my experience, mixing in various circles of life as I have, in my experience, the level of care and genuine love within the body of Christ when there's harmony and unity, gotta be, gotta qualify that, when there's harmony and unity, the level of care and love expressed in the body of Christ is breathtaking in its impact and in its scope. There's nothing like it. And some of you experience that all the time and you have experienced it. You know what I'm talking about because we've been there for you. We as a church have been there for you in your dark times, in your struggles. You know what we're talking about. And it's more than, hey, well, you'll be okay, just, no worries, have another drink. It's like it's deeper than that. It's, it's, it's, it's soul to soul stuff, it's, it's weeping in the night stuff. It's armed around the shoulder stuff. It's caused at any time to be there. That's what it's all about. It happens at Northside every week, every day of every week. And the motivation, the motivation is simply 1 John 4 19. We love. Why? Because he first loved us.