Resurrection Power

Transcript

Alright thank you very much, and hello again radio friends. How in the world are you? Doing all right today? Oh, I’m fine, praise the Lord! I woke up early in the morning with Jesus in my mind. If you go to bed with a passage of Scripture in your heart and mind, you’ll wake up that way. If you go to bed quarreling with each other, you wake up angry. If you go to bed brooding over your own sorrows and feeling sorry for yourself, you wake up feeling sorry for yourself. But if you go to sleep with the Lord Jesus on your mind, you’ll wake up; that’s what the psalmist said, said, “And when I wake, I’m still with Thee”. Try that for yourself. You want to wake up happy? Go to sleep with Jesus on your mind.

Well, we’re looking at Philippians 3, sort of hitting the high spots on some verses in the book of Philippians, before we go back into the book of Mark. He says, ‘What things were gain, those I count as loss”. Everything that I used to prize, he says, I look at as though it were just garbage. He says, “In order that I may win Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness which is of the law”. Now you see anything you do, apart from the saving grace of God, isn’t good enough, it doesn’t reach far enough”.

You remember the old story of the Norwegian that was running to catch the Staten Island ferry? His friend was already on board, the ferry was just pulling away from the pier, and his friend shouted to him and said, “Jump Paulie, you can make it in two jumps”. Well, no you can’t do that. See, it didn’t reach far enough. Your efforts and mine, your efforts and mine, are not going to be good enough to satisfy the holiness of God. All the coin we offer at heaven’s treasury is counterfeit or foreign, you may say.

We were driving many years ago, from one country to another. We were on the border between, I think it was Germany and Switzerland, or one of those borders, and I had some, I had some currency in my pocket. You have to pay tax when you go across a border in some of these European countries, so I offered the currency I had in my pocket, and the official shook his and said, “No, no, no. You have to change the money. That’s not the right money”. So, then I had a go to the money changing window and change over the currency come back with the proper kind of money and pay the tax. You come to heaven’s window with good works currency, you see what I’m driving at, don’t you? You come to heaven with your good works currency.

“My own righteousness”, says Paul, “which is of the law”. Now he said, “Concerning the righteousness which is in the law, blameless”. He had a far better record than most of us, didn’t he? So you come to heaven’s window with a blameless record, humanly speaking. God says, that isn’t good enough “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”, it doesn’t reach, it doesn’t make, it isn’t in the right kind of currency. I’m changing the figure of speech so as to get the meaning across there.

Oh, he said, “I need the righteousness which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith”. Your first step in changing your value system is going to be to spend some time with your Lord, to realize that anything you can bring to God is tainted with the fact of your failure and sin, and to receive what God offers you freely, that is to say His righteousness, which comes when you commit yourself by faith of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul says, “The righteousness which is through the faith of Christ, God’s righteousness which comes by faith”. How do you do this? Faith is risking the situation on God. Faith is risking your life’s destiny on what God says. Faith is simply obeying what God says and He says, “When you receive Christ as your Lord and your Savior, by faith you open your heart to Him, He counts you, reckons you righteous. He gives you His righteousness”. He begins then to work not only the statement of that righteousness on your record, but the reality of that righteousness in your character.

So Paul says, “Oh, that I may really know Him. Oh, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings being made conformable unto His death”. The power of His resurrection. That’s our word dynamite again, dunamis. Dynamics. You get all these English words from that one Greek root, the dynamite of resurrection power working in my life. The fellowship, that’s our word koinonia, sharing of life experience, the fellowship of His sufferings, and then made conformable to His death, the marks of the cross, Christ likeness.

Well, let’s think about that just for a moment, shall we? Are you still with me? Now he said, remember now, Philippians 2:13 says, God works in you to take care of the want to, the motivation, and take care of the actual production of His will, to will and to do of His good pleasure.Now what happens? First He changes your value system. “What things were gain to me, those I now look at as just so much garbage, because I’ve got someone better, that I may win Christ and be found in Him”. He changes your enduring relationships, “Be found in Him”. He changes the offering of your life, “Not having my own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness of God by faith”.

Now what else? When God works in your life you really get to know Him and there are three areas where this becomes real. “That I may know Him, oh that I may know Him”. Someone has said this should have an exclamation in front of it, “Oh, that I may know Him”. First the power of His resurrection. Now, His resurrection and your life and mine, how do they get together? Well, when you receive the Lord Jesus Christ, you receive a real, living person. He died, He rose again, He’s seated now at the right hand of God, the Father and the blessed Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity makes this living Jesus real in your life. The power of His resurrection obviously then, is the presence of God in your life, suffusing it, filling it, saturating it in all of the ordinaries of life, as well as in those specially religious times.

What is the power of His resurrection mean? Well, for one thing it means that it will have an effect on your life and your lifestyle. He said, “Though our outward man perish yet our inward man is renewed, day by day. We having the same spirit of faith always bearing about in our body, the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.

There will be a reaction in your physical body. You can take the strength of God by faith because Jesus is alive and He lives in your heart and life, “They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength”.

What else happens? There’s a different shine in your life, “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts. We preach not ourselves with Christ Jesus as Lord”. There’s a different shine in your life, a different image, so to speak, to use the advertising man’s term, a different image presented to the world, “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.

Then you’ve got a different message, different something to say, “We preach not ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord and ourselves your servants”, that’s our word slave, “ourselves your slaves, for Jesus’ sake”. A different message and a different relationship with people. Oh, boy. All of this under the power of His resurrection. Why? Because the Lord Jesus Christ is alive. You and I have power to live in our physical bodies. We have a shine in our personalities that comes from God. We have a message that is eternally significant to give to the world because of His resurrection, He’s alive. Actually, that was all that the disciple said what they were, when they were questioned and when they responded to the crowds on the day of Pentecost. “This Jesus whom ye crucified, hath God raised up made be both Lord and Christ.” The man you murdered is alive again and now He’s your judge or if you’re willing, to become your Savior. That was the message, Jesus is alive.

I think that the average Christian doesn’t make near enough use of this blessed resource. To know that Jesus is alive at 10 o’clock of a Tuesday morning when the world falls in. To know that Jesus your blessed Lord is alive and available, and real, when you get the message that someone has passed away, someone very dear to you. To know that Jesus is alive when there’s been a merger in your corporation, your corporation with another and you’re being shuffled out and they tell you we’re eliminating your job, so we won’t need you and you’re out in the cold. You say to yourself bitterly, “I gave 25 years of my best service to that company and all they can do is to shove me out”. Oh, it hurts.

Is Jesus alive? Yes He is. Does He know about you? Yes He does. Does He have plans for you? Yes He has. Jesus is alive. Oh, one of the great privileges of being a Christian is that you can be in touch with Almighty God in the ordinary events of every day, the things that hurt and bump and scratch and lacerate you, the things that discourage you or that frighten you, or that threaten you, Jesus is alive, and you can pray your way through the day and worship Him and walk with Him and come back down to the end of the day a victor, not a victim. Thanks be unto God, which always cause us to triumph in Christ and maketh manifest the fragrance of His knowledge by us in every place. The power of His resurrection. When God begins to work in your life, there’ll be resurrection power, which is to say the living Christ of God, who rose from the dead, will be manifest real in your everyday living. May God grant that to be so for every one of us.

Dear Father today, work in our lives so that the knowledge of God, through the Lord Jesus, will be real to all who touch our lives, I ask in His name, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today and be a blessing!