Encountering the Risen Christ #1 - Belief
Description
Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, kicks off a new series starting with Easter called Encountering the Risen Christ. He examines how the disciples' discovery of Jesus's empty tomb led to belief in the resurrection, highlighting the historical evidence and prophetic fulfillment that demands our attention and response to this transformative event.
Summary and Application
Easter reminds us of the most pivotal event in human history—the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Dr. Kurt Bjorklund's powerful sermon "Encountering the Risen Christ: #1 - Belief," we're invited to explore not just the historical significance of the empty tomb, but how this reality transforms our very identity.
The Journey to Belief
The sermon walks us through the events of Holy Week, from Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem on Sunday to His crucifixion on Friday. But the story doesn't end there. When the disciples discovered the empty tomb, they were confronted with a reality that demanded a response.
Many of us approach faith as a journey. Sometimes belief happens in an instant; for others, it unfolds gradually over time. But regardless of our path, the resurrection calls us to move beyond merely noticing or theorizing about this event to fully embracing it.
From Disciples to Beloved Apprentices
One of the most striking insights from Dr. Bjorklund's message is his focus on how John refers to himself in the Gospel—"the disciple whom Jesus loved." He uses this phrase five different times, revealing something profound about his identity.
Dr. Bjorklund challenges us to reframe our understanding of discipleship. Rather than seeing disciples as perfect "super believers," we should recognize them as apprentices—learners following in the footsteps of Jesus. What if we saw ourselves as "the apprentices whom Jesus loves"?
This perspective gives us both motivation (we are loved) and direction (we are apprentices). It fundamentally changes how we approach both life and death.
The Transformative Power of Resurrection
The resurrection isn't just a historical claim—it's the central event of the Christian faith that "changes everything." Jesus promised, "I am the resurrection and the life," and "I'll go and prepare a place for you."
Many of us struggle with a performance-based relationship with God, believing He only loves us when we measure up. Easter invites us to embrace a different truth: we are apprentices whom Jesus genuinely loves and celebrates, regardless of our performance.
The invitation is open to everyone. As Dr. Bjorklund reminds us, "Whosoever will may come." We come by acknowledging our sinfulness and believing that Jesus's death and resurrection paid our price. This step of faith opens the door to living in the joy and freedom of being truly loved by God.
Living as the Beloved
The resurrection empowers us to "live as people who are really loved." This identity transforms how we face both death and life. We no longer need to fear death because Jesus has conquered it. And we can approach life with the confidence that comes from being deeply loved by our Creator.
Easter calls us to stop merely observing or theorizing about the resurrection and instead allow this truth to "drive how we see ourselves and how we approach death and life."
Reflection Questions
In what ways have you been approaching your relationship with God as performance-based rather than resting in His unconditional love? How might embracing your identity as "the apprentice whom Jesus loves" change your daily life?
Dr. Bjorklund mentions that the resurrection impacts how we face death and how we live. How has the reality of the resurrection shaped your perspective on mortality and your approach to everyday living?
What step of faith might God be inviting you to take this Easter season? Is He calling you to move from merely noticing the resurrection to embracing it, or from theoretical belief to lived experience?
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Well, happy Easter. It's great to be together. Let's pray for a moment together. God, as we are gathered as Orchard Hill this weekend in Wexford, in the Chapel, in Bridgeville, Butler, the Strip District, online. And Lord, for those gathered in other churches around Pittsburgh that are proclaiming the resurrection of Jesus Christ and around the world, we ask that the message would be clear.
And God, specifically in this moment for those gathered in Orchard Hill, we ask that my words would reflect your words in content and in tone and in emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. So Easter is the culmination of what has been known as Holy Week. So on Sunday, the Sunday before, Palm Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem and what, many people have said is that that was the procession to kind of coronate a king, but the New York Times had an article this last week where they said it was more of a protest than a procession because the people wanted somebody to stand against the oppressive government that they were living under.
And so there was Sunday, and then on Monday Jesus goes into the temple and he flips over the tables and he drives the money changers out. On Tuesday, he teaches. And on Wednesday, there's a plot to take his life from some of the religious leaders, the political leaders, and he's anointed at Bethany. On Thursday, he celebrates Passover with His disciples in the upper room, and together as they're there, they have Jesus institute for them the Lord's Supper, communion for all time. On Friday, He's crucified.
Saturday is silent, and then Sunday comes, and Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, and when she's there she discovers that the stone is rolled away, and Easter for the Christian church from that day forward has become a day of incredible significance. Because every other religious leader who's ever lived has a date for their birth, a dash for their life, and a date for their death. But Jesus, if He had such a moniker, it would have a date for His birth, a dash for His life, a date for His death, another date for His resurrection, and then an ellipsis, dot dot dot that says he's alive today, and it just is going on and on and on. And the apostle Paul, in writing about this in first Corinthians 15, says that the resurrection is so central that if it did not happen, that people of faith would still be in their sins. That if it did not happen, people would have no guarantee of the future.
Their future would be worthless in a sense. He has said in first Corinthians 15 that the gathering of people all over the world would be pointless. In other words, this is one of those events that is right at the center of the Christian faith, if not the event at the center of the Christian faith, and it changes everything. But the truth for most of us is that we're a little bit suspicious of truth claims. We're suspicious of them because we are bombarded with claims all the time.
Sometimes it's a product that will do something amazing for us, or it's a place that will bring some kind of relief or enjoyment, or it's what people can do for us. And we're constantly hit with messages telling us that if we don't act on something, that crisis is around the corner. I had an email the other day, and it looked so legitimate, and I I started to go down that path only to see that it was one of those phishing spam things. And then I was having a conversation with some of our finance team here at the church, and they were telling me about how they had received an email that looked like it was from me, great fake, all the way around saying, in essence, pay this bill on behalf of the church. It was a scam.
I'm glad they talked to me. Our checks and balances work. But just on a side note, if you ever get an email from me that says I need gift cards immediately delivered to me privately, Just want you to know that's not from me. I'm not gonna ask you for a gift card. So what is it about this event that makes it trustworthy?
That makes it something that you can base your life upon? Well, in John 20, we get this encounter with the risen Christ. Mary Magdalene, verse one of John 20, goes to the tomb and Magdalene just means that she was from Magdala, And it says she went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been moved from the entrance. So she shows up, and at this point, she has no thought that Jesus would be risen from the dead. She was just going to honor the memory of Jesus by going to the tomb.
Verse two, so she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. Now, who's the disciple who Jesus loved? It's probably John who's the one writing this, so you gotta love this self designation. Yeah, I'm the disciple whom Jesus loved, and as he's telling the story, his way of telling it is to say, Mary came, she told Simon Peter and the disciple who Jesus loved. And she says to him, they've taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they've put him.
So her initial thought was somebody's stolen the body, moved the body, done something nefarious with the body. Verse three, so Peter and the other disciples started for the tomb, but both were running, and the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. So so far, what we have on John is he's the disciple that Jesus loved and he's faster than Peter. And then it says this, he bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there, but he didn't go in. Verse six, Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb and he saw the strips of linen lying there as well as the cloth, verse seven, that had been wrapped around Jesus' head and it was lying in its place separate from the linen.
Verse eight, finally, the other disciple who had reached the tomb first, in case you didn't get it, he's faster than Peter, also went inside, and it says he saw and believed. Now, when we read this, what we see is that Peter and John get there, and in verse five, John looks, we're told. In verse six, Peter sees. And then in verse eight, John sees and believes. And in the NIV, the ESV, the NASB, all of these have some combination of saw, looked, saw in combination here.
But there are three different Greek words, verse five, verse six, and verse eight for the word see. And the International Standard Version tries to pick this up by saying in verse five that he noticed, in verse six that he observed, and then in verse eight that he saw and believed, the amplified trying to pick up the same nuance, says that he saw and was convinced in verse eight. Now, it's true that these words can be used interchangeably, but when they're used together in close proximity, there's probably a reason why the author, John in this case, chose these different words and I believe that it gives us a clue as to how we can embrace faith today. The first word, verse five, is the Greek word blepo, and it means to notice, at least in this instance. And the way that it happened in that account was John gets there and he looks in and he says, yeah, there's no body.
There's linen, and okay, there's something here to notice about this. And today, when you look back on this event, you may just have a slight sense that there's something here to consider. Maybe you've been around the story for your whole life, but never moved past this idea of just saying, I guess there's a reason why people all over the world still celebrate this event, why they gather in churches all over the world today to do something with this. Or maybe there's just something from history that strikes you, how this has been believed throughout all time, and how Jesus stands alone as a historical figure. Russ Douthat, who was a writer at the Atlantic for the New York Times, has written a book recently called Believe about his journey from not believing to belief.
And at one point in the book, he says that Jesus stands out among all the other religious leaders in such a way that he demands attention. And what he was talking about here is that noticing saying, I couldn't get away from the fact that there was just something about Jesus, about his life that made me have to pay attention. Maybe for some of us, it's about how the Bible predicted this event, how hundreds of years before there were predictions about the death of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus. And if you've ever tried to predict anything, you know how rare it is to get it right. We just finished the NCAA tournament, and maybe you filled out one of those brackets where you have fifty/fifty choices, at least on the first one, and then it kind of moves out.
Very few people can get very many of those games right. And those all happen in a three week period. This happened over hundreds of years with dozens and dozens of prophecies to say Jesus would be born, he would die, he would rise from the dead. There's something here to notice. Or maybe for you, it's just noticing people.
Maybe it's a mom, a dad, a brother, a sister, a friend, somebody in your life who has a faith and seems to have a relationship with this resurrected Jesus, and you've noticed it, and it is in some ways the first step of faith. But in verse six, there's a second Greek word that's used for see. And here, it's the word theoreo, and it's a word from which we get our word theorize and you could roughly say this means to observe, to consider, to think about it, not just to notice but to to say, what is going on here? And here, it's Peter who goes into the tomb, and he notices that the linens haven't been disturbed, and so the thought had to have crossed his mind. If somebody's gonna steal the body, are they gonna strip him first and steal the naked body?
Are they gonna fold the clothes up and put him back nicely, or are they just gonna drag the body out? And so he's thinking about it. And where we stand today, this idea of the empty tomb stands as one of the great verifiers of Christian faith. You may say, well, it's just from the gospel writers, it's just from a Christian perspective. Why is this so?
But if you look at the history of the time, it is unmistakable that people believe that Jesus' tomb was empty. The only real question is why or how did it happen? Now some people have said, as the Jewish leaders said right at the beginning, the disciples stole it. Matthew chapter 28 verse 15. And this is one idea, but what makes this idea not work very well is that most of these disciples went to their death believing that Jesus rose from the grave.
And what happens for most of us is the moment that a lie starts to cost us more than the truth, we give up the lie. So it's possible that the disciples stole the body, but it's highly unlikely. Here's what Charles Colson wrote years ago about the Watergate, scandal. He was one of the advisors to President Nixon during that whole time who became a person of faith, and he wrote this in his book Born Again that talks about his journey to faith. He said after a few weeks, he's talking about the Watergate scandal, the natural instinct of self preservation was so overwhelming that the conspirators, one by one, deserted their leader, turned their backs on power, prestige, and privileges.
The Watergate cover up reveals, I think, the true nature of humanity. If John Dean, who was one of the other prominent advisors, and the rest of us were so panic stricken, not by the prospect of beatings or execution, but by political disgrace and a possible prison term, one can only speculate about the emotions of the men like Jesus' disciples. Unlike the men in the White House, the disciples were powerless people abandoned by their leader, homeless in a conquered land, yet they clung tenaciously to their offensive story that Jesus was alive. So the disciples, as the thieves of the body, don't make a lot of sense. Having Mary as his first witness and testimony to this event doesn't make sense if it were a conspiracy because women's testimonies weren't allowed in court in the first century Roman Empire.
And so if you were going to fake this, the last thing you would do is have it be based on the testimony of a woman who was one who had been previously known to be filled with unclean spirits. In fact, when we think about this empty tomb, it is one of those things that that that you just have to keep coming back to and saying there is no explanation that makes sense for this other than Jesus rose from the dead. And this is where the observation becomes thinking and saying, if this is true, what does it mean? And it's almost like this resurrection. This event forces us to make a choice.
Have you ever been in a crowded space, a crowded street, when a car came down the street inching its way forward, honking its horn, trying to clear a path? And while you're there, you have a choice to make. Will you get to the side, on one side or the other? And the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a little bit like that. You can stand for a while looking at it, but sooner or later you're either going to say, I think it's a fable or I think that there's something to it.
And when you consider it, observe, theorize about it, what happens is you begin to say I think there's something here and that leads us to this third word that is used in this text. And this is in verse eight and this is the word or aidon. It's the same word, different forms. And I'm just going to say that this means to embrace. And again, there isn't necessarily something in that word that means it verbatim, but because it says he saw and believed, he's saying, now he's seeing fully.
In fact, the amplified version here again that that that uses that simple language of saying he he saw and was convinced It's saying that once you've thought about it, you become convinced, you move on. And what happens in all of our lives in different spheres is we notice, we observe, and then we embrace, we commit. I mean, think about how attraction works. If you're attracted to somebody, what happens is first you notice something. You say, oh, he's cute, or he's smart, she's funny, she's generous, she's kind, he's loyal.
And then you observe a little bit and you say, oh, I, I, I, I see it and what I'm thinking about is really true. But until you embrace it or move forward with it, it stays as just an observation. And, and the point here is that faith moves us from noticing and observing, theorizing into a place where we say, this is true, I embrace this as part of my life. And this is exactly what happened not just to John and Peter, but it happened to Mary. In fact, in verse one, we see this because it says early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw.
First word, blepo, she noticed. It happens in verse 12 where we see this for Mary and it says, well, that she saw two angels, theoreo. So, so here she's observing something and then it happens in verse 18 where she says, I have seen the Lord. This is the third word. So she embraced and it's the word that's used in verse 24 and verse 29 for the disciples who came to see and embrace.
Now, let me just say, okay, so there's a journey toward faith, maybe, for some of us. Sometimes it can happen very quickly, sometimes over time. But what does embracing this really mean? And I wanna go back to a phrase I mentioned earlier. It's in verse two where it says that John, he doesn't use his name, but the disciple whom Jesus loved.
And the reason I want to come back to this is because what if coming to embrace the message of Jesus Christ let you take that moniker, that that phrase, and say, that's me. I'm the disciple whom Jesus loves. See, John wrote this years after the events. He was kind of collecting and thinking about it, so he had time to think about how to write this, and he wrote it and said, I'm the disciple whom Jesus loved. And he uses this phrase five different times in the gospel of John, that he describes himself, the disciple whom Jesus loves.
And he uses a word four different times that is the most common word for God's divine love toward us, agape. And what he's doing is he's saying, yes, God loves me, but here in John chapter 20 verse two, he uses a different Greek word for love. He uses the word phileo. And the word phileo means an affection for, to like, to enjoy, to have a fondness for somebody. Do you know what he's doing here in a way?
He said in different times, yes, God loves me because God loves everybody. God has to love people. I'm the disciple whom God loves. But here, when he's talking about it, he says, I'm the disciple who Jesus likes. Here here's my guess.
Many of us who are gathered here, we believe that God loves us because we believe theologically that God has to love us, but down deep we don't really believe that God likes us very much. We don't believe that he likes the way that we are, who we are, and that maybe if we clean some things up, did some things better, that maybe God would like us a little more. But what if the message of the resurrection helped you, helped me to be able to say God loves me, he likes me, he is for me, not as I can be, but as I am today. Do you think that would give you a motivation and change how you live? I think it would change a lot for many of us if we were able to say, I am the disciple whom Jesus loves.
The other night, I was searching for a movie to watch with my wife and one of my sons, and we ended up watching an old movie called Notting Hill. I don't know if you remember this old movie, but it's about this woman who is a star, and she falls in love with this guy, and they have a hard time making their relationship work because of their different lives. And in the culminating scene, she comes and she stands in front of them and she says, hey, despite all of, you know, the, the surroundings to my life, I'm just a woman who's standing here in front of a boy. She says a girl, a boy. I'm just a girl in front of a boy asking him to love her.
You know, that's the longing of our heart to be loved. But no boy, no girl can meet the depth of that need the way that the God of the universe can. And if the risen Christ loves you, loves me, likes you, likes me. It can change the way that we live. And here's the other piece of that, a disciple whom Jesus loved.
When you hear the word disciple, when I hear the word disciple, what we hear is a church word. We hear a church word that says, oh, yeah, the disciple of Jesus, and they were these super, like, believers who had it all together, but what a disciple was was really just an apprentice. I mean, what if we thought of ourselves as the apprentices who Jesus loved? You see, the love part gives us motivation, the apprentice gives us direction, and it impacts us in at least two areas of our lives. It'll impact us in terms of our how we face death and how we live.
And I say how we face death because throughout the gospel of John and the other scriptures that we have, we get an account where Jesus talks not just about living, but he talks about this idea in John 11. He says, I am the resurrection and the life. If you come to me, you'll never die. In John 14, he says, I'll go and prepare a place for you, and then I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna take you to be with me so where I am you can be also.
And then he says that famous phrase, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but through me. He says, I have something for you on the other side. So if we are apprentices who know that we're loved, what it means is is that we can say with the apostle Paul in Romans eight, there's nothing that I have to fear in essence because nothing can separate me from the love of God. It means that that I can be certain what first Peter three eighteen says, that Jesus died for the sins of each of us.
Therefore, it isn't about my performance. I have nothing to prove, nothing to fear, because Jesus Christ has done for me what I can do. And as an apprentice to the teaching of Jesus, what I do is I affirm what Jesus has affirmed. And as one who's loved, I can say that is a way that I can approach the future. Brennan Manning once wrote it this way.
He said, my deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ, and I've done nothing to deserve it. But this also impacts how we approach life. You see, these disciples did not have it in their way of thinking that Jesus was going to rise from the dead initially. And so they huddle into this room, this the this space where they basically say, now that I'm here and Jesus is dead, we we aren't sure what's going to become of us because what usually happened when the leader of a revolution was killed, all of the followers, the disciples, the apprentices of such a person were rounded up and killed. So here they are living in fear, and all of a sudden, they take this this idea that Jesus had risen from the dead, and they become bold to say, I have a life to live, but my life isn't just about what's here and now.
It's about something much bigger than that. Jim Elliot, who was martyred as a missionary in the nineteen fifties, had written in his journal just a few years before he went to a mission field where he was killed. He said, he is no fool who gives the things he cannot keep to gain what he can never lose. See, if you and I become convinced that Jesus rose from the dead, if we see it and believe it, we embrace it, what will happen is we'll see our life for what it is, something to be savored and enjoyed, but invested for something much greater. The other night, I was, sitting around with my family.
Again, I guess I've had some family time here recently. And we ended up playing the game Catan, Settlers of Catan. I don't know if you've ever played this game, but, you know, you get this moving board and you try to get these resources and get to victory points. And what happens in Catan, usually, is whoever gets out in front is obvious to everybody else who's playing the game. And so, they will gang up and make sure that person doesn't get resources.
They'll put the little robber guy on their resource thing, and the person won't get resources. Well, I was that guy in this game. I was the one who was out front, everything was going my way, and everybody kept putting the robber on me, and the turns would come around, and I couldn't get what I needed. And I ended up losing at the end. I know you feel for me.
And here's what happens when you're done with a game like Settlers of Catan. You pack everything up, you put it in a box, and you put it away, and you move on with your life. But you know how some of us live? We live as if our life is like the game of Catan. We take the stress and the pressure of every decision and we put it into the moment that we're living in and say, I have to get everything out of here and now.
There is nothing that I can send ahead. But what if we were able to live knowing that Jesus has really conquered death, that he's alive, that there is a future? Do you think it would change how we live when we're in the game of life? Though instead, we'd be able to say, I can enjoy everything that's here now, because this isn't the end of the story. So if things don't go my way, I know that there's another day coming.
When things are good, I know that there's something that God is doing in what's ahead. And if we apprentice ourselves to the God who is alive, then we start to align our lives to his ways. And it isn't because we're just trying to get something from him, but because we say he is good and his ways are best. Therefore why would I want to do anything different? See, if Jesus is alive, and I believe He is, then you and I can say I am the apprentice whom Jesus loves, who He likes, who he enjoys.
And it'll change how we approach death, how we approach life. And I don't know how you come here today. Some of you come in a place where you've just been noticing things about Jesus. Maybe you came because somebody invited you to dinner and you said, okay, I guess I need to come to church in order to get the meal later. Felt like it was the thing to do, but maybe there's something here.
I just want to encourage you to take a step toward observing, theorizing, thinking about, considering whether or not this is true, because if it is true, it changes everything. Some of you have been kind of on the fence of theorizing for a long time. You haven't taken the step to commitment, and maybe the reason you haven't taken the step isn't that you haven't believed that it's true, but you're afraid of the implication. And you're afraid of the implication because you're not convinced Jesus loves you or that being his apprentice is worthwhile, maybe this is the day that you take this step and say God, I'm going to see and believe. I'm going to embrace Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
I will apprentice myself to him. Or maybe you're here and you've believed in a way that is unto faith for your entire life or what feels like it. Decades. But you really, at the core of your being, believe that Jesus only loves you when you perform well. Maybe this Easter, the freedom for you will be to say I am the apprentice whom Jesus likes, who he loves, who he celebrates.
And because of that, everything will be different in my life. You know, anybody can come to Jesus today. It's the great invitation of the Bible. Whosoever will may come, and you come by simply saying, God, I know that I'm a sinful person, and Jesus' death and resurrection paid my price. And I believe that it's so, and I count on him on my behalf.
And doing that is that step. And then living in the reality of it is the joy and the freedom. God, help us today to not just notice or even theorize about this event, but to embrace it and to let it drive how we see ourselves and how we approach death and life. Let us live as people who are really loved, And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
