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Lifelong Easter: How Understanding of the Resurrection Deepens Over Time
72 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Pastor Ridley Barron and Dan Sanchez talked about the the Easter story and its implications for faith and understanding of God's sacrifice. They delved into the impact of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, considering the perspectives of parents and individuals at different stages of life. By examining personal experiences, biblical correlations, and historical traditions, the sermon underscored the transformative power of the resurrection narrative. Pastor Barron and Sanchez explored the significance of Easter from childhood to adulthood, the gravity of sin, and the promise of eternal life, drawing from cultural references and their own faith journeys. Their message invited the congregation to reflect deeply on the meaning of Easter through time, embracing its transformative effects on personal conviction and spiritual growth.
Timestamps:
00:00 Struggling to find unique perspective on Easter.
04:33 Childhood fascination with Easter story and church.
06:39 Personal growth journey through faith into adulthood.
11:04 Challenged beliefs in college, deepened understanding in seminary.
14:37 Bible's divine nature, old testament, holy spirit.
16:25 Middle East offers compelling archaeology despite destruction.
20:57 Anticipation of reuniting with departed loved ones.
24:07 Empty tomb in Jerusalem is well-documented fact.
28:36 Christian fiction book challenges faith with discovery.
30:39 Reflect on how resurrection changes and transforms.
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Transcript
Record-breaking Easter attendance
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to the grove hill church podcast. Well, i'm here with ridley baron who preached just two days ago on easter sunday And it was such an exciting sunday because there's so many people packed into that that gym That was a first for our church maybe a first for our city Maybe a first for our county to get pretty close to a thousand people at least for that one service I know you said uh that with the sunrise service we hit what 1100
00:00:27
Speaker
1110 people. Yeah. 1110 people. You said 980 in the big service. Yeah. Which basically is double our average attendance on a normal Sunday. Goodness. Yeah. It was amazing. That was a lot of people. Yeah. And incredible testimony to our people and their enthusiasm for inviting people and having gospel conversations this year. I was incredibly proud of them. We were talking about that in staff today. Just their excitement about inviting people to be a part of what God's doing. Yeah.
00:00:54
Speaker
everybody shows up on Easter. And I think sometimes pastors get mad at congregations like, well, how come you always come for Easter and Christmas? And I'm like, there are, I'm sure, certainly there are some people only come on those holidays. I think it's a lot less. I think most Christians just don't go to church every Sunday. They come once a month, every other week. Some days you're like, I don't know if I feel the best today, so I'm not gonna go. So you're on your regular schedule and some people are faithful coming every Sunday.
00:01:23
Speaker
But, you know, and sometimes you're on vacation. Like, there's some Sundays I don't go because, I don't know, two weeks ago, Noah had a soccer tournament and it was a two day thing and we had to be there on Sunday. So, oh no, I was there. Nevermind. I just, I'm usually there for three services and I was only there for one that Sunday. You know, things like that happen. They usually go to 11 and they don't, they don't come. Right. But on Sunday, everybody puts it on their calendar to show up. Right. Even older people nowadays, even in this day and age will, weather's too cold.
00:01:52
Speaker
potentially raining, you know, there's all little factors that come into play and I get it. I mean, if you're, you get to be an older person and you're unstable and you're walking and things like that, being out slippery weather does not appeal to you. That's, that makes sense. So there's all kinds of reasons.
00:02:08
Speaker
So I'm coming up with questions for this particular podcast interview is like tricky because I'm like, just like it's hard for like to come up with a new unique angle on Easter every single year.
Easter's significance in Christian faith
00:02:17
Speaker
I'm like, what questions could I possibly add? I asked to like add, add some unique perspective here. I was struggling to come up with it, but it isn't kind of interesting because like it really is like the pinnacle of the faith right here. There's really nothing more important because if this one piece doesn't happen, like none of the other stuff.
00:02:34
Speaker
means anything. All the stuff before, all the stuff after, the whole thing's a farce. I mean, you remember Rob Bell from long ago, like he used to say things like, you know, I would still believe, I would still follow this book, even if it wasn't true. And you're like, really? Like all literally says in the Bible, like if he didn't, if, if there is no resurrection, this is all foolishness. This is dumb. We should do something else. There are definitely some high points in the Bible that I think have universal application.
00:03:04
Speaker
any good person would want to follow them. But as a whole, the 66 books don't mean anything without Jesus's resurrection, for sure. And we'd be foolish to spend a whole lot of time pursuing it. So it's worthy of a holiday every single year, reviewing it again and asking yourself, like, do I really believe? Do I really cling to this truth? Am I really empowered by this to live my utmost for his highest on a regular basis? It's always worth reviewing in a specific way.
00:03:34
Speaker
But today, I thought I'd give it as interesting perspective as I was thinking about this. And I realized, you know, I've grown up in church, I've grown up hearing this message from a young age to, you know, I'm 36 now.
00:03:46
Speaker
I don't know what you call that middle aged adult parent. I don't know. Like 40 is your middle age, right? So I'm like, I don't know. We're getting close to that. Um, and I realized my purse, like my perception of Easter has changed over time as I've grown to learn more about it and understand the nuances of it and feel different things about it. So I thought it'd be fun to kind of like review, like what, what.
00:04:10
Speaker
This event in history what the resurrection means to different age groups starting with a child Do you remember what your first impression of easter was like how far back can you go into remembering hearing this message? Oh, I definitely remember as a kid because I like you grew up in church On my life and I don't know if you're old enough to remember flannel boards Remember those teaching tools when I was a kid and they would do the little flannel board images of an empty tomb and a rock being moved and those kinds of things and
00:04:38
Speaker
Man, it's a fantastic story in itself, just this idea that God would raise Jesus from the dead. And I remember how it caught my fascination and it wasn't long before, you said this before we came online, but it wasn't long before as a kid, I had the ability just to recite to you everything that happened about the Easter story because it was just such an incredible thing.
00:05:04
Speaker
We had some friends over a year ago or a year or so ago around this time and we kind of asked what the resurrection meant to each of their daughters.
Understanding sacrifice through media
00:05:15
Speaker
And they all kind of, they all got audit. They all understood it. I mean, it's enough that children can understand it, but they all kind of rattled it off in a way that was like, like wrote memory, like they had heard it so many times, you know, like, Oh, Jesus died for my sins. And without, without that, I, I, I wouldn't be able to go to heaven, you know? Right. Right. He died on the cross for me. You're like, yeah, that's it anymore. And they're kind of like, ah, there's a simplicity to it. You can get it. Yeah. And to be sure that's a great place to start for a kid. Yeah.
00:05:46
Speaker
You want them to get the basic truths. You want them to understand exactly what the story conveys to us. And that's a great place to get them launched.
00:05:54
Speaker
As you start to get older and a teenage hood, it starts to change though. I know for me it changed in that you start to really, you start to really get an account for your own sinfulness. I think by the time you're becoming a teenager and all of a sudden that price actually starts to look different. Because when you're a kid, just kind of like, yeah, my sin, but the sin doesn't really like, it doesn't hit you the same as when you know you were starting to do bad things.
00:06:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of interesting and I think it probably depends on your personal story or your testimony of how you grew because for me, my early teen years, Easter became, I hate to say this, I still understood the importance of it, but it became ho-hum. It was, oh yeah, that story.
00:06:36
Speaker
But by my senior year, exactly what you're talking about, it's when I really began to start growing again in my faith, became painfully aware of my need for Jesus on a daily basis, a moment by moment basis. And that's when the story started to come back to life for me. It was kind of like the dawning of awareness of, okay, what does this story really mean for me? And my college years, it really kind of took off. I began to understand it in a significantly different way.
00:07:04
Speaker
I think something that coincided with my high school years is it happened to just be the, I think the exact time that that movie came out, The Passion of the Christ. That's when I was in high school. So a lot of people saw that and I saw that and you can't not see that and be like,
00:07:23
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Coinciding with like, I live the way I should, I shouldn't live, but I'm still doing it yet. And you're watching this, you're like, Oh my gosh, this really happened. This is painful. Like, when's the last time you've watched, like, I think we all watched that when it came out. And then every once in a while, I'll see it scrolling through Amazon nowadays. And I'm like, like, I kind of want to watch it, but I kind of, yeah, I don't know if I'm ready for it. Just so people can begin to figure out the age gap between you and Dan, I was actually pastoring my first church plant when that came out. And, um,
00:07:53
Speaker
We took our church over there to see it and it's impossible to see that played out probably in the most graphic portrayal of it that I've ever seen. It's kind of like the first 15 minutes of the movie, Saving Private Ryan. Veterans who sat and watched that movie wept because it was so realistic for them.
00:08:13
Speaker
For me sitting there watching that movie, obviously I wasn't there, so I don't know what it was like, but after reading the descriptions in the Bible for years and then seeing it portrayed in such a realistic way, it was hard not to go, okay, wow. This is literally worth reworking your life around this reality.
Parental perspective on sacrifice
00:08:34
Speaker
you compare that to the price that was paid. And that was like a small price. Like you watched a movie and you're like, you have to realize like, it's just a small, a small price. Like it's so hard to watch someone being tortured physically, but you got to remember like on the cross, once he was dangling up there after the beatings and the torture. Yeah.
00:08:53
Speaker
He had to bear the weight of all the sin. Like if you ever had to like sit and feel the shame and guilt of sin because you did something and you know you did it and it was heavy. It's heavy. That's just one person. Yeah.
00:09:06
Speaker
Imagine trying to think of how many people there are. I mean, there's seven billion alive today. There's seven billion living. I've heard there's more people alive today than ever were that are in the grave. Oh, really? Have you ever heard that before? Yeah. I've not heard that. Wow. I'll have to look that up again. Yeah. But if that's true, then that puts us at around, let's say, 15 billion people. Yeah. That's pretty crazy. And then I got including future people. Yeah. Way more. Right. Every day it gets added. That's a lot of sin. That's a lot of weight. I know the thing I think about, too,
00:09:37
Speaker
along those lines as he's on that cross is the number of times I have been falsely accused of something I know I didn't do. And even how that feels. And here's Jesus carrying weight of sin, the guilt of sin for something he knows he didn't do. And that's all on him. Again, not just once, but 15 billion times that weight. It's crazy.
00:10:01
Speaker
Thinking about that from a teenager perspective, I remember feeling the weight of it when I was like that and feeling guilty, but also just feeling conviction. Like, hey, like a heavy price was paid. Like you need to take this really seriously. And that's a good thing to feel at some point.
00:10:19
Speaker
When you move into the young adult years, how did you start to respond to it differently as you start to, you start to feel the weight of it, but then you start to, I feel like understand the nuances and you went through like, we're going through seminary. So like, you probably got different perspective. Well, an interesting hat thing happened in my college and seminary years, because I went to a college, it was a Christian college, but Christian pretty much in name only.
00:10:40
Speaker
instantly got challenged by a lot of liberal progressive theology, even to the point of questioning whether or not Jesus really died, whether or not he was really resurrected, whether or not the Easter story was true. And what that instantly did, because of my nature, was it forced me to dig even deeper into the story of Easter. Not just, hey, was there an empty tomb, but why did Jesus do what he did? Why did he have to do what he did? Was it really necessary?
00:11:05
Speaker
And then even to dig into 1 Corinthians 15, which you referenced a minute ago, where Paul says, here's where all this matters to you. And so when I got to seminary, it was good because I got around a bunch of others who affirmed the resurrection of Christ and the necessity of his atonement for us. And man, it was an eye-opening time, little areas of the story, little areas of the transaction that took place opened up to me and I began to understand
00:11:34
Speaker
even greater now, the level of intense pain that Christ felt, and even the level of incredible joy and stuff that people felt that day when they found that empty too.
00:11:51
Speaker
I remember in my early adulthood, I went, I didn't go to
Easter and Old Testament connections
00:11:54
Speaker
seminary. I haven't even gone to Bible school, but I went through a discipleship program, but they started studying some of the basic things that we've even covered here at Grove Hill around the setup for everything. Like you start going back into the Old Testament, you're like, Hey, like Passover was a setup for this. Yes. So that people could understand, Hey, the tabernacle, all a setup for this. Yes. Hey, like.
00:12:14
Speaker
like the prophets, like are just a setup for all this thing, which is why it's the pinnacle, right? But you start, I think as you're in a young adult, you start to go back through and study a little bit more deeply, like the history and the nuances of the crucifixion and resurrection. And it starts to become a deeper part of your faith as you start to really study it from a different perspective. Yeah.
00:12:39
Speaker
I started too about your age because by the time I was 33, I had all three of my children started beginning to understand the power of the story from the father's perspective too, you know, giving up my son. I'd fight you to my death for any one of my children. So for me to turn around and say, you know what, you don't deserve this, Dan, but I'm gonna let my child die for you. I mean, that's mind boggling. Now again, here's Jesus saying, not just for Dan, not just for Ridley,
00:13:08
Speaker
But for 15 billion people, most of who will reject this gift. And that just, man, that humbles you. And that's the parenthood thing. I think it hit me later on now. I think it became apparent. I'm like, when did I become a parent? I think I was 25, 25 when we had our first kid. And it probably didn't hit me until my early thirties when I started thinking about like offering up a child as a sacrifice, which is a terrifying thing. I'm like, yeah, I mean, historically, like
00:13:37
Speaker
pagans. It's like something the Jews used to fight against all the time, right? Or God would say, don't do this because pagan people would do that all the time. But thinking about God having to do that, even when you're holding your own son or your daughter in your arms, that's a terrifying thought. It definitely starts to sink in how big of a sacrifice this is. And going back to, if you want further evidence of the divine nature of the
00:14:00
Speaker
the Bible that you and I read, going back to the stories of the Old Testament, which were written thousands of years before Paul and Luke, and these guys sat down and recorded this stuff, and how it all came together at the cross and at the tomb with this story. It's just further affirmation. This whole thing was Holy Spirit inspired. I mean, go back to the story in Genesis of Abraham taking Isaac to offer him up. A lot of Christians don't realize
00:14:30
Speaker
that the mountain that Abraham took Isaac to sacrifice him on would later be the very place that Jesus would be sacrificed for humanity. I mean, how do you coordinate that over 2,000 years except for the hand of God?
00:14:42
Speaker
I've been, I've been to the spot where they think it happened. Of course, there's all kinds of theories about where it is and where he resurrected from. There's two major, major, major resurrection sites. Yep. One, they built the massive church over. Cause it's like, it's kind of in the middle of Jerusalem or at least the old Jerusalem. Yep. And it's a math, like massive Catholic church. And I think it went through a fire at one time. So it's all dark and because it's been burned like hundreds of years ago, but it's still there. And you go down to the basement where you can see a rock and you think this is the rock where he
00:15:11
Speaker
Like there was used to be a tomb here. Yep. And you go to the new site, which the evangelicals kind of claim to a little, not a little bit down the street called the garden tomb. Right. And there's a tomb there. You're like, Oh, that's what it looks like. It looks like the picture books that we all see. I'm not convinced that that's the place. I actually have no idea, but they dressed it up to look like an English, English garden a little bit with flowers and stuff. I'm like the Western mind, this connects to the Western mind, but I'm like, this is not anything like a tomb would have looked like back then. Right. Right. Yeah.
00:15:41
Speaker
You know, that's the tragedy of the Middle East. It offers such and compelling stories and incredible realities and facts that just literally jump out of the earth at us as we dig around over there in the Middle East. I mean, it's like almost on a, I would even argue a weekly basis. Archaeologists are finding, you know, other stuff over there. It's incredible. But what's sad is, and I hope this doesn't offend any of my Catholic friends, but the Catholic church has ruined so much of those sites because anytime they find something holy, they build a church on top of it.
00:16:11
Speaker
That's gosh, that was the first thing I noticed touring around over there. Every site literally, they build churches right on top of stuff.
Holy sites and historical presentation
00:16:20
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. There's the thing they find, there's a church on top. Right. You have to go into the church to see the thing. Right. First time it struck me when I was over there several years ago was by the Sea of Galilee, the place where in Capernaum where Peter's mother was in, you know, had the fever in the New Testament story, Jesus goes to heal her and
00:16:39
Speaker
that they found the spot that's supposed to be Peter's house? Well, there's a building over the top of it. You have to go into the building and look through the glass floor to see this thing. And I'm like, why would you do something like that?
00:16:49
Speaker
You know, I actually appreciated that one in particular because that one, that one's a recent one they built. You could tell us it looks like modern architecture. Yeah, that's a newer one for sure. But it was at least, it was literally, it's literally suspended up on four major pillars so it doesn't actually really touch the ground. Right. Where the archaeological dig is underneath and they have this big glass so you could look down into it without actually touching anything so that it gets preserved. I appreciated that. It's like somebody put some thought into how do we preserve this without making it better? Yeah.
00:17:16
Speaker
instead of just building a big cement building on top of it. Right, right. Yeah, so you know, it's cool. I mean, again, as you're growing older, your perspective change, you go from being a child with the innocence and then a teenager who's learning to grow in his faith and maybe begin to question things a little more. For me, parenthood was the next step after college so that I began to understand as a dad and then
00:17:40
Speaker
Honestly, here I am 56 years old and now I'm thinking of the perspective, you know heaven's closer for me than it's ever been. Someday, hopefully not too soon, hopefully 30 or 40 years from now, but someday
00:17:52
Speaker
Because I'm on the backside of life, I will literally be placed in my entire life's bet on the idea that resurrection is going to occur and I'll get to see Jesus. And so, and that begins to make you think a whole lot about, okay, do I really believe that this story is factual and true to the very nth degree?
00:18:12
Speaker
To me, there's like this every once in a while, I think the devil takes a swing and makes me like, ask the question, like, is this, is this legit? Yeah. But there's, I don't know. There's like a breadcrumb trail of logic that I always follow. And one of, one of the pieces of it is like just following Pascal's way. I think it's Pascal, right? And I mean, I forget, I think it's Pascal's wager or. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, I always forget it's Mike. Is that the guy who talked about the, like,
00:18:36
Speaker
that when the rings the bell, the dog's mouth waters. I'm like, there's another guy. I'm like similar name, but anyway, the wager, there's a guy who had a wager saying like, Hey, if my, if you're talking with an atheist and you say like, Hey, if one of us is right, one of us is wrong, right? Okay. If, if I'm the Christian am right, then, uh, or let's just say that the atheist is right. Then like me as the Christian, like, what have I, what have I lost?
00:19:01
Speaker
Nothing really, because it's meaningless anyway. I just go and I'm dead with everybody else. Maybe I lived a better life because I walked in an upright way and trusted me. I was kinder to people. I lived well. I lived well. I think some modern atheists would probably disagree with that and said I lived a hateful life, but they're crazy.
Pascal's Wager and faith
00:19:24
Speaker
The wager might go differently with some atheists these days, but if you look at the other way around, you're like,
00:19:32
Speaker
If I'm right and they're wrong, then eternity is a very long time to be wagering. So that always makes me feel much more comfortable about the choice because you're like, the flip side is that it's all farce and, you know, I just don't, I go to, you die, close your eyes and you don't wake up again. Right. Okay. Right. I won't know. Of course I have a lot more reason than that. There's a breadcrumb of trails I've left behind, but that's, that's a reassuring one.
00:20:03
Speaker
I think there's one more aspect too that changes your perspective on this too, as all of us naturally grow older is the number of friends and loved ones we send on ahead. The anticipation of being able to see them again causes us to even think differently about this story because at this point in my life, just as a Christian man, but also as a pastor, I've had the responsibility of doing funerals for my grandfather, my grandmother, my dad, my mom,
00:20:32
Speaker
my wife, my son, very good friends, my first cousin who was like a brother to me. And in all of those situations every single time, it's like I was making a deposit into heaven and I look forward to someday getting to be there to enjoy that deposit and catch up with old times. Those are incredible moments and look forward to and anticipate. And literally I'm betting my life on the idea that Jesus will be there to meet me.
00:20:59
Speaker
something I've been meditating on a lot lately is the fact that this life is like a shadow compared to the next life. Yes. Like we'll look back at that life and been like, that was like, I don't know, like you're about to play a baseball game and you were just in, you were just in the dugout. Like you didn't even know you're in a dugout where you couldn't even watch the game. Yeah. And then we get to go play the game. Like it's, it's nothing like we're talking about eternity. It's going to be forever. It's going to be glorious. We'll look back and being like, man,
00:21:28
Speaker
It was such a short amount of time in order to make a decision. And I'm, I'm glad I made the choice in there somewhere because it like went by like that and it was gone like a vapor. And it's going to be like, I don't know. CS Lewis calls it shadow lands. Like we're, we're walking around as shadows. Like it's like, it'll look, the colors will be brighter. Everything will be more glorious in every way. The whole experience. I wish I could remember, but that last, last paragraph of one of his books talks about that. I think about that whole idea of.
00:21:56
Speaker
just thinking of your reality here and how long you thought it was, but then you realize when you step into the edge of the borderland or whatever he calls it, you know, that you look back and go, oh, that was like a flicker of time compared to what I'm about to have here.
Promise of eternal life
00:22:12
Speaker
And just the concept of living forever in a place where you don't have to
00:22:17
Speaker
You don't have to hurt ever again, physically, spiritually, emotionally, relationally, a place where you get to live in the daily presence of the one who created you, the one who died for you, the one who has been indwelling you ever since you accepted Christ, the three parts of the, you know, the Godhead. Man, it's just a, it boggles your mind just to sit here and conceive of that.
00:22:39
Speaker
because of the resurrection, we can think about eternity and it puts life into perspective. It makes the pains, the aches, the troubles, the circumstances, the shortcomings, the everything. All of a sudden you're like, everything changes. When you think of this moment, this life is just a blip, you're like, why am I grumbling so much? I do think it's important that we go back and say this because I don't think that skeptics and cynics realize this.
00:23:07
Speaker
But the empty tomb in Jerusalem, even though we don't know for sure which one it is, but the empty tomb in Jerusalem is the most well-documented fact in ancient human history. There really isn't even skeptics who question it anymore because they realize, okay, if it's not true, then we should be able to pull a body out of a tomb over there that matches up to who Jesus is, but we can't do that.
00:23:33
Speaker
The people who were alive at that point, the Roman authorities who had the most to gain from producing a body and putting an end to all this rebellion talk, they couldn't do it. I mean, it's been documented a thousand different ways how the story is true and nobody denies it. The question is, how do you interpret it for your life?
00:23:52
Speaker
What message does it have for you? It's pretty well documented historical fact that there was a man named Jesus that made the claims he claimed and that all the disciples went down to death for holding onto it. None of them recanted. So you're like, well, I've heard, they've talked about the liar lunatic or Lord. I've had a few people throw out another hypothetical situation that's like, well,
00:24:20
Speaker
There's one more option where he really did believe, but he wasn't, but he wasn't crazy. He just, he really got to the point mentally where he thought he believed. I'm like, yeah, it's borderline crazy. But for me, the story of Peter is the absolute, to me, the only evidence I really need. Because if you think about Peter, the night that Jesus was being tried, a scary, a schoolgirl, basically school aged girl scared him to death to the point where he denied Jesus.
00:24:46
Speaker
He wasn't even willing to acknowledge he had been with him, much less that he was his follower. And then, just 40 days later, he's standing in the streets of Jerusalem in front of Roman soldiers, in front of the Roman Empire, in front of every skeptic that existed, including the Sadducees and Pharisees, probably proclaiming Jesus and him resurrected. Nothing changes a man like that except for him knowing for a fact.
00:25:08
Speaker
that Jesus was alive like he had seen. It's huge. I wish more people would actually ask the question like, cause a lot of people believe that Jesus was a man and he had good things to teach. Yeah.
00:25:18
Speaker
Even Joe Rogan, somebody came onto a show and they read the book of Proverbs to him and then talked about it a little bit. And he's like, yeah. Oh no. You know what? Interestingly, it was an episode with Chris Rock.
Skepticism and cultural Christianity
00:25:28
Speaker
I don't know how much of a Christian Chris Rock is, but he was challenging Joe Rogan to believe in Jesus. I was like, well, at least somebody is. And he was, the headline caught my eye on YouTube. So I saw this clip.
00:25:41
Speaker
And he's like, yeah, I don't think so. He was just a man. I'm like, man, if he would just like, like, how was it not worth it? Like a day or a weekend or a week sometime to actually just go and dig into the, dig into the facts about that. Was he just a man? There's so much that's documented. It's everywhere, but we'll lead them where they're going to, where he's going to lead them. Yeah. Speaking of interesting headlines. I just saw one today where Richard Dawkins, who is a well-known atheist has come out and claimed himself a cultural Christian, not a
00:26:10
Speaker
necessarily a Christian, but a cultural Christian, which I don't know what that means, but that's a big step for him to even go that far. Seriously. Cause he's, I mean, I've heard him called like one of the four horsemen or like one of the four major atheists that have turned a lot of Christians into atheists. Absolutely. Like him. There's, I don't know. There's a few others. I forget their other names, but there's like a few prominent atheists and he's one of them. Yeah. To turn somebody like that from skepticism to being a true follower of Jesus Christ would be a huge victory for the kingdom.
00:26:38
Speaker
Yeah, they would. It'd be cool. Yep. One, as we've been talking about the resurrection, there is one really fun movie that if you haven't watched it, it's called Risen. Have you ever heard of this movie? I've heard of it. I don't know if I've ever seen it.
00:26:51
Speaker
It's kind of a, I'm pretty confident it's a made up story, but it's a movie about this centurion who's hunting for the body of Jesus to prove that he's dead. It's a fun movie.
Movie recommendation: 'Risen'
00:27:02
Speaker
If it's alongside Easter time, it's a little intense. It's not a kid movie, but it is a fun movie to go and watch as they try to grapple with this question of like, where's the body? Go find it. It's a big body if you have to, like, we're going to find a body because if we don't find a body, this is not going to be good for us.
00:27:18
Speaker
Years ago when I was still in the student ministry, there was a book that was written. It was a Christian fiction book. I can't remember the name or the author, but it was an interesting perspective because it was based on the precept or the idea that somebody, an archaeologist in the Middle East found the bones of Jesus. And what it did for the characters is Christians, how it challenged their faith and
00:27:41
Speaker
You know, some of them said it doesn't make any difference. It's still the same, which obviously doesn't make sense. But one said, you know what, if this changes everything, if there's bones of Jesus, and that at the end of the book ultimately was that they did DNA testing. I don't know how they did it, but somehow they did some DNA testing and found out it was not the Jesus. It was just another person named Jesus, which was a very common name actually in that day and time. And so obviously the reality of a resurrection was restored to truth, so.
00:28:09
Speaker
There you go. Wish I had that DNA test though. Because we know the blood comes, the DNA for your, the blood comes from the, from the dad. So I'm like, huh, I wonder where God's DNA looks like. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's pretty interesting concept. Yeah. That's why, I don't know, they have all these relics and like the Holy Shroud and all that kind of stuff. Right. But those are all kind of funny little things. Yeah. Christians have held onto for a long time. Yep. Good conversation though. I loved it.
00:28:36
Speaker
So resurrection, we'll see what you come up with next year, it'll be fun. What angle? If you have any ideas, throw them away. Like I said, before we started recording, I'm like, I think the historical angle of like what this holidays look like throughout history, because it's changed, you know, it's been added onto. How did we get to eggs and bunnies and what did we, how did we celebrate it at first and how did we pick the day? You know, like a lot of this has been added onto over time as most of these holidays have, but.
00:29:04
Speaker
That would be, that would be my vote. If not, if not a resurrection Sunday, then a podcast episode sometime would be fun to dig into. I'm pretty sure the bunny part of it came from the Mars candy company. They wanted chocolate sales. Oh man. I'm going to Google that after this.
00:29:20
Speaker
Well, if you've been listening to this, thanks for joining along. Hopefully you got some insights as we talked about how the resurrection has, I don't know, changes throughout time as you grow older from young into older age and how it morphs and your perspective grows with it. So as you're hearing the story again, or you heard the story again just recently, consider how it's changed for you. What have you learned about it throughout time and how is it changing you and transforming you to become more like Christ's son, God's son, Christ?