1 Corinthians 15: Part 3 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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Transcript

Good morning.

Starting your day right means starting it with God.

And there’s no better way to start your day with God than to take some time with Him and just listen to what He has to say, to speak into your life, to shape your way of thinking, to set your mind for the day on the things that really matter. Well, that’s what we do each weekday at this time.

We stop and read from God’s word, the Bible, and listen to God. And this week I love the theme we’re looking at the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, because this is the heart of Christianity. This is the foundation on which everything else stands.

The apostle Paul has started off chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians that we’re looking at this week, talking about the Gospel, this simple message that Christ died for our sins. He took our place and faced God’s judgement for us so that we could come into His place and be sons and daughters of God, welcomed into God’s family, and that Jesus, risen from the dead, can come into our lives and change us completely and bring us into a living daily relationship with Him.

Paul goes on to say, while this message about the death and resurrection of Jesus, it’s the heart, it’s the foundation, and you need to understand it, he says, starting in verse 12.

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no such thing as resurrection from the dead? If there’s no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God because we testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise if it’s true that the dead are not raised, for if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins.

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Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ, that is, those Christians who have died, have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only. We are of all people most to be pitied.

Well,

There’s a lot of people who would say, well, that’s right, we do just pity Christians for believing in those things and using religion as a crutch to try and make them feel better about life. Well, I will say, yes, my faith is a crutch in a sense because my life is broken.

If you don’t feel like your life’s broken, if you feel like everything’s great and everything’s as it ought to be, you are definitely not ready to put your faith in Jesus Christ and become a follower of his. It’s when you come to the realisation that every person on this world is broken – and that brokenness is because of the distance between us and God who made us for Himself. Until you come to that realisation and you look at your own life and you say:

No matter what it looks like on the outside, there is a kind of desperation on the inside because I know life has to be so much more than this, and I know that death is not just the end of everything, but that my spirit will live on. And I need God.

Well, that’s the message of Christianity. Jesus didn’t stay dead. He rose from the dead.

This is one of the most faith inspiring things I ever did in my life. I said, OK, if that’s the case, I want to study the death and resurrection of Jesus and see what evidence there is for the resurrection of Jesus. I want you to know that when you look at the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus – it gives you such a firm foundation for your faith about everything else in the Bible. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the most solid historical events ever recorded in human history, testified to by countless eyewitnesses, people who were willing to die for their claim that he had risen from the dead, it was no advantage to them to make that claim at that point. And yet they lived and died on this basis.

Not only that.

But I can tell you that I have encountered the risen Lord Jesus, not in a physical sense, no, but He has changed my life like night and day, and He can change yours too. This is the heart of Christianity. Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and your faith is real when you put it in Him.

I’m John North.

To go deeper in your faith, visit AFCI.com.au.

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