The Resurrection Life

John 11:1-45

Have you ever experienced difficulty or hardship (maybe an illness, troubled relationship, or financial crisis) and in the midst of it turned to Jesus hoping for deliverance only to be disappointed? In spite of your petitions to the Lord, the financial pinch became bankruptcy, the troubled marriage became the bitter divorce, or the illness did not end until the loved one died. As most of us know painfully well, life can not only be very disappointing – our disappointments can be compounded by wondering why God did not rescue us when we seemed to need Him most. We can be left wondering where was God? Why did not He come when we called? Have we upset Him? Have we lost His favor? If He loves us so and He is all-knowing and powerful, why did He let this happen? Those who don’t believe don’t have this problem. Life stinks then you die, but those who know God need answers. Thankfully, our text has some.

First, let's look at God's big-picture timing. In an outtake from the movie Bruce Almighty, God (Morgan Freeman) calls Bruce's (Jim Carey's) attention to a painting. He compares the dark tones in the painting to the painful life experiences needed to create an overall masterpiece. From Mary's and Martha's perspective, it looked like Jesus arrived painfully late. God was painting a dark stroke in their part of life's big picture. They sent word to the Christ that their brother, His friend, was deathly ill, but Jesus did not show up until four days after his death. It gets worse before it gets better. Our text reveals that Jesus intentionally delayed His arrival in order to let Lazarus die. Why? The answer is that He was up to a greater (more God-glorifying, more faith-building, and more life-saving) good. He not only intended to save Lazarus' life. He meant to glorify God in a mighty way and save many others in the process. God, who did not even spare His only begotten Son the agony of suffering for other's good and God's glory, does not promise to spare us life's dark tones either. He does promise that He is always up to the greatest good and that He works all things, the painful and the pleasant, together for good to those who love Him. We also need to never forget that it is never too late for God. We need to remember time does not control God. God controls time and always uses it for the greatest good. So, when God's painful delays compound our painful experiences, we need to trust the reality that God, who has the whole picture in mind, is up to a greater good that we cannot see. Just as Mary's disappointment gave way to extravagant worship when she anointed Jesus with her expensive perfume, our disappointments give us a way to worship God with expectations of faith in the midst of His apparent delays. If we will seize these disguised opportunities to worship God, He will turn our dark days into beautiful displays for His glory, others good and our best.

Next, let's look at God's heart-rending love. Our text emphasizes Jesus' love for Lazarus and his sisters. His intentional delay had nothing to do with a lack of love, and we don't need to doubt God's love in the midst of our difficulties. God loves us with an everlasting, perfect, continuous love that never lets us go no matter what we are going through. Often times, we shut down and block out our emotions in order to cope with difficulty. We are too weak to emotionally deal with the toughest stuff otherwise. Notice Jesus does not protect Himself in this way in our text. He leaves His heart wide open. He fully experiences their pain, grief, loss and suffering with them. In the midst of the record of Him doing so, we find the shortest verse in the Bible - Jesus wept. Jesus does not isolate Himself from our pain. Instead of saving Himself, He saves us and loves us enough to go through the worst with us. He empathizes with His people so completely that at the Judgment He will say what people did to or for the least of His people they did to or for Him. He says that He will say that He experienced our hunger with us and He experienced our thirst with us and our loneliness with us and our illnesses and our grief with us! So, how else can we worship God in the midst of difficult disappointments? We can worship Him by trusting His unfailing love and by loving His hurting people. We can worship God by not sheltering ourselves from other's pain. Like Mary irrevocably sacrificed the vessel that held her perfume to show her love for Christ, we can be irrevocably sacrificed vessels that unleash a fragrant offering of love for Christ as we allow our hearts to break with others. We can also be living sacrifices whose hands and feet and ears and shoulders become instruments God uses to bring relief and comfort to others. As we worship God this way, He will grow us more and more into the likeness of Christ.

Finally, let's look at God's life-giving power. Again, it is never too late for God! When things look over and utterly beyond recovery, God can still show up and change everything. He is God! Nothing is too big for Him to do or too small for Him to care about. God tells dead people to live, and they live! I'm drawn to the point in our text just after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. He told the others to help Lazarus get his grave clothes off so that he could go free. I mentioned Morgan Freeman playing God in Bruce Almighty. He also played a prisoner in Shawshank Redemption. In that role, he was concerned about becoming 'an institutional man'- that is someone so accustomed to life in prison that they come to prefer it to a life of liberty. In probably the most famous line in the movie Tim Robbins' character scolds Freeman's for giving into that pull and says, "I guess that it's then - Either get busy living or get busy dying." God declares that before He gave us eternal life, we were spiritually dead and buried. Like Lazarus, it was over for us until Jesus called our name and raised us from death into life everlasting. This resurrection life is not just for then and there. It is meant to be abundantly lived right here and now! The problem for too many Christians is that we have been 'institutionalized' by the dead lives we knew in sin's penitentiary. We still have our grave clothes (that is our old rotten ways of living) on, and so we still look half-dead to the world around us. We need to worship God by helping each other get our grave clothes off so that we can all live transformed lives of freedom clothed in the righteousness of Christ. When people see God's people living genuinely transformed lives of increasing freedom from the death-grip of sin and fear and isolation, they see the life they are missing and find good reason to put their faith in the One who is the Resurrection Life.