Why Do You Seek The Living One Among The Dead?

you know that we've been working our way through the gospel of Luke. And the Lord's worked it out such that we're working right. We haven't had to change our texts around for Good Friday or Palm Sunday or Easter even. We've gone right on through. And so we're still working through Luke. And today we're going to be studying Jesus' resurrection from the dead. And so if you've been here, you remember. Last week, I think it was, I talked about how hard. Palm Sunday and Easter, Good Friday, are for me to preach. And part of the reason is because we move through them so quickly. You don't really have the context of the weight or the gravity of what Jesus has gone through in the days and weeks and months leading up to his crucifixion and his resurrection. And so if you've been here recently and you've felt as I have, the clouds have been thick and they've been heavy. It's been very difficult to read week after week.

the pain and the agony and the torture and the misery that Jesus endured on our behalf. It all culminated in our worship service on Friday evening where we actually remembered his death. We studied his burial. And so to go back to the cloud analogy, it's been dark. It's been heavy. And yet this morning, my hope is that those clouds will clear. They ought to clear. And the weight that we've been feeling as we've worked through the end of Jesus' life and ministry will give way to the joy and peace that his resurrection has secured for us. This morning as we study his resurrection, I want to draw out the theme of faith. There's so much we could talk about when we consider his resurrection, but I want to look at the faith of the women who cared for him and the faith of the apostles. And I want us to end by examining the question that the angels asked.

the women at the tomb, which is really a question of faith. And my hope is that by the end of it, our faith is strengthened and we're emboldened and stronger in our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, in his resurrection, and in the hope that it provides for us. Would you please stand now for the reading of God's word from Luke chapter 24, verses 1 through 12. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, They came to the tomb, bringing the spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. But when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing. And as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, Why do you seek the living one among the dead? He's not here, but he is risen.

Remember how he spoke to you while he was still in Galilee, saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and the third day rise again. And they remembered his words and returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now they were Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary, the mother of James. Also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles, but these words appeared to them as nonsense and they would not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in. He saw the linen wrappings only, and he went away to his home, marveling at what had happened. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Our text starts off with saying they. They did this, they did that, they did the other. And the question might be, well, who are they? They are the women, Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Mary of James, mother of James, Joanna.

Salome, and many other women with them. These are the few who are named. These are the women that come to Jesus' tomb. So who were these women? Well, these were the women that had followed Jesus from Galilee. These were the women who had wept when Jesus was carrying his cross and that he had cautioned not to weep for him but to weep for themselves and for their children. These are the women who didn't abandon Jesus but stood at a distance when he was crucified. These are the women who followed Joseph when he went and asked Pilate for Jesus' body and then came and attended his burial. These are the women who prepared spices and perfumes for Jesus' body the day before the Sabbath. These women faithfully followed Jesus. You can see in all of these instances, if you were to trace them through, you can see their faith. The cost of being a disciple of Jesus at this time was very high. You'll remember Peter running away at the question of a servant girl.

because he was afraid of being associated with the Lord. And Peter was the last of the disciples to leave. And yet these women followed and stayed beside him and purposed to prepare spices even for his burial. And so these are the women who came to Jesus' tomb, and they found it empty. Now, it's worth noting when they came. They came at early dawn. Now, what is early dawn? Early dawn is like first light. If you're a hunter, or at least being a hunter, first light is something I'm aware of. You're supposed to be. where you need to be by then, which means you have to get up early. And one of the things that hunters face is the question of whether they want to get out of their warm beds at 4 o'clock in the morning or so. And really the question that they're answering at that time is, what are my priorities? Is it worth it to get up out of my nice, warm, cozy bed and go sit in nice, cold woods? And they answer the question. They determine their priorities by whether they get out of bed and whether they go.

And what you see here with these women is their priority. When they were with Joseph as he buried Jesus, it says that they intended to prepare spices and perfumes. But they had to wait for the Sabbath. And you remember that Joseph had to bury Jesus in haste. He only had a few hours until the Sabbath started in the evening. And so these women took that time and they went and they prepared their spices and their perfumes. And then they set aside the day of rest, the day of worship, the Sabbath. And they worshiped the Lord. Excuse me. And then as soon as there was light, the very next morning, they were at Jesus' tomb. You see their priority. You see their faith. You see what was important to them. Having prepared their spices and prepared their perfumes, they were there as soon as they could see. And isn't it true of all of us that the things that are important to us, we get up for in the morning. And the things that aren't important to us, we have a harder time getting out of bed for.

And so these women's faith got them out of bed in the morning and got them to the tomb. One of the helpful things about preaching through the gospels, the synoptic gospels, the parallel accounts of Jesus' life, is that when one of the authors leaves something out, you can go and look and see what the details were in Matthew and Mark. And so one of the things that Luke leaves out that Mark records for us is the conversation that these women had on the way to the tomb. They're talking with each other. They're carrying their spices and their perfume. It's dark. They're getting there and they say, who's going to move the stone for us? We've set out to go do this thing, to anoint his body, to honor him, to prepare him for the resurrection, but who's going to remove this stone for us? And we can also wonder, what about the guards? The guards who were set by Pilate at the request of the Jews that no one would tamper with the body. What about them? And yet these women are on their way already before they even recognize their dilemma.

They had faith that God would make a way, similar to Abraham. When the Lord came to Abraham and said, I'm going to take you and I want you to go out into this land and I'll show you where that land is, what did Abraham do? Abraham got up and he went, but he didn't know where he was going yet. This was his faith that was credited to him as righteousness. The same could be said of Noah building a boat on dry land. The same could be said of Caleb and Joshua having gone into the promised land to spy it out. All of these believed that the Lord would make a way, even these women, that the stone would be removed, that the guards would be dealt with, and that they would be able to serve their master and their Lord Jesus without hindrance. Some of us may be inclined to call this foolishness. They set out to go do this thing and they didn't even have a plan. How were they going to get into the tomb? But our souls would be better served if we called this living by faith.

There are times in your life when living by faith is not going to make sense. You're going to set out on a path that you don't know with certainty where it ends. And if you think of it, this really is the story of our life, isn't it? We don't know what tomorrow brings. We don't know what tomorrow holds. We have plans, and we have expectations, and we certainly have desires. But we don't know what tomorrow will hold. James cautions us against this presumption when he says, You know, when they say, we're going to go to this city and we're going to spend a year there and we're going to do business. And he says, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. What you ought to say is if the Lord wills, we'll go and do those things. And so what I want us to see toward the beginning from these women is that we have opportunity and responsibility to exercise our faith every single day, even in the littlest things. And too often I think we take it for granted or we pass by it just presuming that the Lord is going to hold everything together just as he has.

without any change from day to day and week to week, year to year. And yet, which one of us can say that it's never changed? Our lives have never changed. We got up in the morning today and it was just like it was yesterday. Or it will be tomorrow. And so you and I, we need faith like these women to rise each morning early and to serve God, trusting him to guide us and to lead us and to direct our path. The faith of these women is commendable, and yet it's not a perfect faith. There are some strange things, some questions that arise with their behavior. The first is the stone. Why didn't they think about the stone or the guards? It wouldn't have been inappropriate for them to think about the stone. But moving past that, when they come to the grave, it says they look and there's no body. And it was perplexing to them. It was confusing. They weren't sure what to make of it.

So what should their conclusion have been? What should they have made of it? Should they not have said, praise the Lord, he is risen? But they didn't know what to make of it. And so their faith, you see, is not perfect. They'd forgotten Jesus' promise that he would rise from the dead. Consider for a minute, if they hadn't forgotten what Jesus has said, what they might have done differently. Would they have prepared spices and perfumes to anoint his dead body if they believed he was going to be raised from the dead? Well, probably not. Maybe. Maybe not. But it wouldn't have made a whole lot of sense. This was not without expense or cost or effort that they made these preparations. So they come to the grave. They find it empty. And yet they find two men there. Luke and Matthew and Mark differ in how they describe when these men appear and when they don't. Luke makes it seem like they showed up to an empty grave with no one there. And then, poof, these two men showed up. If you were to read Matthew and Mark,

They make it clear that the angels were already there, so Luke doesn't record it in chronological order. But then, having seen the grave empty, Luke records their interaction with these angels, described as men. And the angel declares to them that Jesus has risen from the dead. He's no longer here. You remember that he told you he had to be crucified and he had to be buried, and on the third day he was going to be raised from the dead. And the women went, yeah, that's right. They remembered. And I want you to see that their faith was strengthened. They were better equipped to do the Lord's will as they were reminded of what Jesus had already said. And there's something here for us to learn. When we go astray, when we forget the things the Lord has said, when we get off of his path, the way back onto that path is often being reminded of what he's said, being told of his ways that we've forgotten. This is one of the ways that we can help and support one another.

Now, some of us have good memories. We remember everything. I tend to remember a lot of stuff. I was talking to Taylor earlier this week, and he was relaying a conversation he'd had with Reza and his response to her when she said, do you think Dave forgot was, no, Dave never forgets anything. And Stephen would probably tell you the same thing when I was in a pastor's college and we were studying Greek. Dave remembers everything, except for when I don't. You know when I forget things? You know when you forget things? During times of grief and sorrow. These are particular times of forgetfulness. You forget the most basic things. And it's worth considering, you know, so that we don't look at these women and go, how could they forget that they were mourning and they were grieving, having seen Jesus hung on a tree until he breathed his last, crying out to his father, why, oh why have you forsaken me? And so I don't want us to look on them and to go, well, they should have remembered. I don't forget. Well,

Are you so sure you wouldn't forget? And so the encouragement from this is that when the angel comes to them and he says, don't you remember Jesus said these things, they did remember and they immediately sprung to action. And so when we get out of God's way, when we get off the path and we get off into the tall grass and someone comes to us and says, do you remember what the Lord has said? And we say, you're right. It ought to lead to action, corrective action, getting us back to the path. In verse 8, it says they remembered these words and they returned from the tomb and reported all of these things. It's as if their recollection of the truth led immediately to action. They were brought back to the path and they immediately carried on down it. Now, some of us may forget things regularly. We don't need grief or sorrow to forget things. And yet when grief and sorrow comes, we do forget things. And I want to go further and say this isn't just true of individuals. This is true of groups, of people.

Whole groups of people can forget things. And this is in fact what the women find when they go to tell the disciples, to tell the Jesus followers. It says that they came to them and these words appeared to them as nonsense and they would not believe them. So the women were perplexed at the grave and yet the angel speaks to them and says, don't you remember? And they say, we do remember. And one of the things Luke leaves out but Matthew records for us is Jesus meets with them on the way. back to the city and gives instructions as we read in Matthew, tell my disciples to come meet me on the mountain in Galilee. And so these women have seen the Lord with their own eyeballs raised from the dead. They come back and they tell the disciples and the disciples go, no, no way. This is nonsense. And so their news is dismissed. And so here we see the condition of not the women's faith, but the apostles' faith. Their fear, their grief.

Their despair has led them to dismiss these women's testimony. And yet these women have seen the empty tomb. They've been greeted by Jesus, and no one will believe them. So if you were these women, consider for a moment what would be going on. You've gotten up early. You've prepared spices. You've gone to the tomb. It's empty. You're scratching your head. The angels show up. You're scared and bowed down on the ground. The angel says, don't be afraid, but go tell them. You run and go tell them Jesus meets you on the way, and you get there to his disciples, and they go, this is it.

This is crazy. Discouragement, right? Start to wonder if you are crazy. Is this all a dream? One of the things I want us to see is that our lack of faith, the apostles' lack of faith, can often be the conduit of discouragement to other people's faith. You know, we think of it the other way often. We like to be around people who have faith, who look at things and they say, the Lord's going to provide, the Lord's going to take care of that. We trust God with this thing. We like being around people like that, right? I want to be around people like that. I need them in my life. But it works both ways. Lack of faith can often discourage those who do have faith. You ever think of little kids, they come up and they're all excited about something? I mean, they're just, you can't believe, Daddy. I'm going to tell you all about it. And you're like, oh, son, you don't know what you're talking about. That's not what's going to happen. He's not going to repent. You don't need to be hopeful about that.

What kind of discouragement is that to a child's faith? Do you understand? What kind of discouragement is that to us? And yet this is what the apostles unintentionally, I believe, have done to these women. That's nonsense. Now there's one who doesn't dismiss the news, right? They come to the apostles and the apostles go, ah. But Peter, good old Peter, gets up and runs to the tomb to see if it was true. He goes and he looks and he sees the linen wrappings laid in the empty tomb and he returns home marveling, amazed, not perplexed, not confused, comforted by what he'd seen. Now why did Peter, you might want to ask the question, I want to ask the question, why did Peter respond differently than the rest of them? Is it because Peter was a better man than the rest of them? No. I'd submit to you it's because Peter was worse than the rest of them.

That Peter had gone away and wept bitterly because of his denials of the Lord. And that he still, just a few days later, was in grief about his own sin. And when someone came to him and said, he's not dead anymore, Peter had a particular interest in seeing that this was true. If you had been Peter in the high priest's court, questioned three times, you know him. No, I don't know him. A little later, no, you're one of them. No, I'm not. The third time, yeah, you're one of them. Listen to his accent. He sounds just like him. No, I'm not, with curses. And then the rooster crows. And the reality of what's just happened breaks over you. And you go out and you weep because Jesus told you this is what you would do when you said, never, never would I do such a thing. Do you not think that Peter felt in some way responsible for Jesus' death? Or at least that he should have done something more than lie and run away. This was good news to Peter.

So Peter runs to the tomb. He, more than anyone else, wanted to confirm the truth of what these women had said. And what you'll find in your own life is this correlation that you see in Peter. That the more in touch you are with your sinfulness, the more in touch you are with the nails you drove into Jesus, the more invigorated and the more excited you will be to hear of his victory over the grave. Another way of saying it is that the worst offenders make the best disciples. The most notorious sinners become the most sincere followers of Christ. You see this with Peter. You see it also with Paul. How's Paul describe himself? He says, I don't even deserve to be called an apostle. I'm the least of these men. What place do I even have? And yet by the grace of God, I am what I am. So here's an interesting question. Did Peter need to go to the tomb?

You understand the desire to go to the tomb. We would share the same desire if we were in Peter's place. But did he need to go to the tomb? And the answer is no. He didn't need to go to the tomb. In this way, he's similar to Thomas. Doubting Thomas. Unless I see with my own hands and put my finger in the holes, I will not believe. And so I hope at some point throughout this, you're feeling sort of the back and forth of... It's like, well, the women's faith is commendable and we want to look at it, we want to admire it and say yes and amen and I need to be like that. And then you see, well, but it wasn't perfect. They did some strange things. They didn't understand. And then you look at Peter's faith and you say, Peter, look at this man. He was the only one who believed. He went and he saw. But then he marveled afterward. Don't you think Peter should have been there with the women? Don't you? If you were there, don't you think you should have been there with the women instead of back at home discouraged and depressed?

Fearful? When I was reading commentary on this, you know, one of the things we like to talk about is male headship and men being pastors and all of these things. And one of the things that the commentators, multiple commentators say is that this, the fact that it was women who went to go see this demonstrate the weakness of faith of the apostles. That they actually, in this moment, became the apostles' teachers. That they came and proclaimed the good news to the apostles. Because the apostles didn't have faith. Not that this is normative or regular, but this is extraordinary. But Luke makes a point through and through the end of his gospel that it's the women and not the men who stick by Jesus. And the women are commended and the men are kind of shamed. So would it be? One of the things we ought to learn is that you men, you don't want to be like these men laying back and waiting for someone else to go do the hard work, for someone else to go put their necks out on the line, for someone else to go confirm the difficult truths, to observe the painful things, his crucifixion.

This is a good place for men to be. Not that it's a bad place for women to be. But we as men ought to be there as well. And so I say, Peter is like Thomas, wanting to see with his own eyes. Is it possible that he could have believed without seeing himself? And if you're like me, you go, yes, but I don't know how. I don't know how I wouldn't have gone to the tomb just like he did. And what I want us to see at this point is the centurion's faith. Remember, we're tracing faith through all of this. Consider the centurion's faith. What did he do? Well, he had a servant that was sick. The Roman centurion, not a believer. And he comes to Jesus and he says, I have a servant of mine that I love when he's sick. And if you'll just say the word, he'll be made better. And Jesus is amazed. And he says, have I found faith like this?

anywhere in all of Israel? Has anyone believed like this? Has anyone seen the level or the amount or the breadth of my authority that I simply could speak and raise the dead to life? And so Jesus commends this centurion's faith over and above Peter's, Thomas's, even these women's faith. He believed at hearing. And so is it possible that Peter could have believed having heard without seeing? Yes. And what we find here is the room for growth. Some of us may be sitting here going, well, I'm not like those women and I'm not like Peter. I'm more like the apostles. My faith is down here in the basement. There's room to grow. You say, well, sometimes I feel like Peter and sometimes I feel like the women. And sometimes by faith, I've borne the cross of Jesus and I haven't been ashamed of him. And I say, praise God and amen. There's still room for growth.

The goal of me bringing up the apostles and their weakness of faith and these women and Peter and the centurion is not to beat up on you and to say, you terrible people who don't trust Jesus the way you ought to. You already knew that was true. You didn't need me to tell you that. My point is to say to you, I want you to see how the angel interacted with these women. There was a couple of things that went on. We focused on one of them. He reminded them kindly after he told them, don't be afraid and get up. He reminded them, said, you know that Jesus said this is what had to happen. But before that, he asks them this question. Why do you seek the living one among the dead? And this is a question of faith, all right? The question makes sense in its context. Jesus has risen from the dead, right? We don't go have family reunions at the cemetery. We don't go seek the living among the dead. What the angel asks them is, if you knew that Jesus was going to be raised from the dead,

Why are you looking for him here? Did you believe him? We know they forgot. But the angel asked them, essentially, did you believe what he said? And how else can we understand that except there being some sort of undercurrent or undertone of discipline? You should have believed. You should have known. Jesus told you multiple times you've been following with him. Why are you seeking the living one among the dead? And so it's a helpful question to them. They don't take umbrage at it. They're not offended by it. He reminds them, having asked them this question, having checked their lack of faith, he says, you remember Jesus told you he wasn't going to be here, that he was going to be raised from the dead. And they said, that's right. And with great joy, they go and they tell the good news. But this question has benefit outside of this context. The question to you and to me is, where do you look for Jesus? Do you look for the living one among the dead?

You might go, I don't know what that means. What do you mean? Where do I look for Jesus? Well, assuming that you want to find Jesus and all that he promises to us, to those who find him, rest, peace, joy, forgiveness, mercy, strength, healing, boldness, all of those things and more. Assuming you want to find Jesus in those things, where do you look for him? Where do you look for those things? Where do you look for joy? Where do you look for peace? Where do you look for comfort? Where do you look for protection? Where do you look for the Lord? You have to consider for a minute, where else could you look for those things? Where else could you look for comfort and peace and protection and happiness and peace and all the rest? Is there any other place other than the Lord where we seek those things? And we all say, uh-huh. And I say, okay, so where? And we all kind of put our heads down and we go, well, in my lusts and in my sins.

It's really kind of the bedrock foundation underneath most of what I do. I'm seeking those things. And I spend a lot of time seeking those things in my flesh. I want joy. I want peace. I want ease. I want comfort. I want healing. I want rest. And Jesus says, come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and you'll find rest for your souls. Come and learn from me, for my burden is light and my yoke is easy. And the reason he had to say that is because we're all wandering astray looking for these things in other places. Where do we look for the living one? When we look for these things in our lusts and in our sins, we're looking among the dead. And each one of us could speak from our own experience saying, I haven't found it there yet, at least not in any lasting way. You know, when I became a Christian, later on in life, I was 21 or so, I'd been looking for these things. Peace and joy, contentment, meaning.

satisfaction. We're all looking for them. And the reason that the gospel became sweet to me and was attractive to me, and I understood very well at the beginning that it meant my life had to change and I had to stop doing the stuff I had been doing. But I was willing to because I sought my peace and my rest in those things and I'd never found it. You go out and you party and you drink and you go out and you fornicate. You go out and do all kinds of wickedness and you wake up in the morning and a hangover is just a good practical picture of you of the misery that sin produces. It doesn't produce anything good in you. It makes you feel terrible. The same is true of the rest of the sins that we go after. We look for peace and joy and satisfaction, but Jesus is the source of those things and we won't find him if we look for these things in our sin. When we look for these things in our sin, we're looking for life in the cemetery.

We read earlier in our assurance of pardon, Romans 6. I want to read to you another portion of it, same portion of it again. It says, If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again. Death no longer is master over him. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all. But the life that he lives, he lives to God. And in the instruction, even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to Christ. What else is Paul telling us except that the life that we seek, the life that we want, we can't go look for it in our sins. Consider yourselves dead to sin. Don't go look for life in the graveyard. Sometimes we look for our life or our joy. You remember the glory days, the good old days when things were wonderful. And one of the things that we face or one of the temptations that we face when we look back to those days is to consider what our joy came from in those days.

It would be easy for me to say life was easier back when, but where am I going to look for ease and comfort? Do I go to my past and do I say, well, it was easier before I had all this trouble. It was easier before I had all this responsibility. It was easier before my body started to break down. Philippians 3, 8 to 14 says this. Paul says, I count all things to be lost in viewing of the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ. And so Paul says, basically, of his past, I had it all. I didn't read it in this section. If we were to study back earlier in Philippians, you'd see it. He had it all. He had the life that everyone would have aspired to and thought, man, you've got it made. And he says of all of that, it was worthless. And I consider it all as garbage. Because what I value now and what is supreme is knowing Christ and being found in him. That I'd be joined with him in his death.

that I might be raised with him in his resurrection. He goes on, he says, not that I've already obtained it or that I've already become perfect, but I press on so that I may take hold, that I may lay hold of that for which I was also laid hold of by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I do not regard myself as laying hold of it yet, but one thing I do, I forget what lies behind. And in reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ. Do you look for life in the glory days?

of your past when things were easier. You won't find Jesus there. You won't find the living one among the dead. Christians are to push on and to press forward. And Satan would often bring up your past and bring up all the stuff that's gone on and say, well, you remember and you know and you know. And Paul says, I lay all of that beside. And which one of us can say we've done the things Paul did? That chief of sinners who stood and held cloaks while Stephen was stoned. who vigorously oppressed the church and persecuted her, going into different cities to find Christians so that he could drag them off to jail, forgetting what's behind. I press on. I go forward. And so when we look for Jesus, we ought not to look for him in the grave because that's not where he's at. We ought to look for him where he is. And where he is is in heaven, seated at the right hand of his Father, interceding for us,

gone to prepare a place for us, subduing his enemies and ours under his feet so that he can return and receive us into glory. This is the fruit of his resurrection. None of it's possible apart from his resurrection. Where would we be if he was still in the grave? Then we could go look for him there, and indeed we would go there and have no hope of rising from it to life. But he's been raised from the grave. He's overcome it. And he's seated at the right hand of his Father in heaven. And so when we go to look for him, we look forward and we look up. We don't look down and we don't look back. And you say, what about when it gets really hard? And I say, could you think of something harder than when he died? What his people would have gone through at that time. Their Lord had been hung on a tree and killed. They sought him out. These women sought him out. Peter sought him out. And he revealed himself to them. There's some interesting questions around his resurrection. We're not actually told how long he was in the grave, how he got out.

where he went in the meantime. There's lots of things that are hidden from us. Wouldn't it have been awful if his ascension had been hidden? His resurrection had been hidden. If he'd just gone back up to heaven and we had to take his word for it that that's what happened. That's what the Jews were afraid of. That's why they set the guard out front. That's why they put the seal on the stone. They were afraid that someone was going to come snitch his body by night and say, he was raised, even though no one saw him. And yet what Paul records for us in 1 Corinthians 15 is, that God revealed himself. Jesus revealed himself, showed himself to those who sought him. When they looked for him, they found him. And if you look for him, you'll find him. If you don't look for him, you won't find him. And if you look for him among the dead, you won't find him. But if you look for him where he is, you will find him. And with him, all of the joys that come with knowing him. So seek the Lord while he may be found. Seek the Lord where he may be found. And you'll find strength to bear up under the griefs and the toils of this world.

This is the message of the gospel, that you'll be born up through this life and you'll be saved in the end of it. You'll be brought into his presence and everything you've endured and everything you've gone through and all of the hardships and pains that have plagued you will be no more. That's the benefit that we receive from him coming to earth, from him dying and him being buried and him being raised from the dead. This is how he's chosen to glorify himself, to demonstrate his glory. And so it's our place to take part in it, to participate in it by faith. Let's pray.