Thank you, it's so good to be here again. I'm going to read out of John's account of the resurrection, John chapter 20, verses 1 to 9, if you want to follow along in your Bibles. Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we don't know where they have put him. So Peter and the other disciples started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there, but did not go in. Then Simon Peter, who was behind him, arrived and went into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen laying there, and as he, in the burial cloth that had been around Jesus' head. The cloth was folded up by itself, separate from the linen. Finally, the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went inside. He saw and believed. They still did not understand from scripture that Jesus had to rise. from the dead. Now you should have an outline that was passed out to follow along with. And my title is Are You Running On Empty? Now I have a little object lesson here. I have three objects that I brought along. Gonna do a little show and tell here and see your powers of observation. One's tall, one's short, one's kind of square, the other two are round, but they all have something in common. Can you guess what they have in common? Pardon? Okay, they all hold something. Are they holding anything now? No, they're empty. They're all empty. We've got an empty container here that can hold food or leftovers. We have an empty medicine bottle. We have an empty bottle of water that we all like to drink. And they can all be very useful if they're filled. See, empty things generally aren't good. If you have an empty container, you can't fill your stomach. There's no food in it. If you have an empty jar of medicine, it's not going to help you any, because you don't have the prescription to take care of your health needs. And of course, no one can quench their thirst out of an empty bottle of water. Emptiness is generally not good, except when it comes to an empty tomb. Now we have a very different story. And I think of how the first 20 years of my life I ran on empty. I was brought up in a very different tradition from Baptist Church. I had Sunday school. I had confirmation. I had church behind me. But Jesus was nothing more than a historical figure to me. Christianity was a history lesson. Jesus' resurrection from the dead meant no more to me than George Washington crossed the Delaware Revolutionary War. And other that I don't speak with a British accent, it didn't have much impact on my life that he crossed the Delaware. We have a line in one of the choruses that goes like this, he came out of an empty tomb to fill our empty hearts. He came out of an empty tomb to fill our empty hearts. The resurrection is certainly historical, but it's not meant to be just something that happened in history. It is meant to be something that happens in present day in my heart. As we look at the text, this is Easter Sunday morning. Mary Magdalene and the other women are going to the tomb to finish the process of wrapping Jesus' body for burial. Back then they wrapped you in pieces of linen with the spices and ointments to keep the smell of decaying body away and you were wrapped up pretty much like a mummy and they put a face cloth over your face. And they got it started on Good Friday when Jesus was laid in the tomb, but of course they had the rest on the Sabbath on Saturday, so they couldn't finish the process. So they're coming first thing Sunday morning to finish the process of wrapping up the body for burial. But there's a major problem. The corpse seems to have gotten away. They can't find Jesus' body anywhere. How are we going to finish the job if somebody took the body? So Mary runs back to Peter and John, two of Jesus' disciples, with the news of the disappearance of the body. John and Peter run to the tomb, and sure enough, they find it is empty, just like Mary said. The strips of cloth are just laying there like a cocoon that somebody had just risen out of. The cloth is folded up nice and neatly. And if somebody stole the body, they did a very neat job of it, just folding up the cloth nice and neatly. And Peter is puzzled. John has an aha moment. Jesus said he was going to rise from the dead. And I'll bet he pulled it off. It says he saw and believed. And this lays the groundwork for, are you running on empty? Because we start with an empty tomb. We've got to start with the history. We don't want Christianity to be just some experiential thing. It's got to be rooted in history. But by the same token, we don't want Christianity just to be a history lesson. We want it to have experience for the present day. But first, the foundation. Where was Jesus' body? And over the years, people have come up with some alternate theories, not very convincing, but to explain away the resurrection. Some have tried to say that the soldiers guarded the wrong tomb. It was empty all along. They were at the wrong tomb. And of course, when they looked in, there was nobody there, because there had never been anybody there. The tomb was empty. Now in verse 41 of the previous chapter, it says the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden. This is Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. It's his own private mausoleum on his property. He's not going to be buried in a public cemetery somewhere because he's a well-off man and he has his own private burial plot. They couldn't have guarded the wrong tomb. There was only one tomb. This is not a huge cemetery that's covering acres and acres of land, and you've got to get a plot plan from the place on the cemetery lot to find out where your loved ones are buried. It's a single tomb. Now, Rome didn't get to be a world power by being stupid. Shortly after the crucifixion and other gospel account, the religious leaders come to Pilate and say, this guy claimed he was going to rise from the dead, and we want guards posted at his tomb so nobody could steal the body, and then say he rose from the dead, and then we got this whole mess on our hands. And of course, Pilate doesn't want a mess either. He's there to keep the peace, and he doesn't want a religious mess, and he doesn't want any kind of mess. saw a guard, sends them a guard, and it consists of 12 men, 12 crack Roman soldiers, and they couldn't have guarded the wrong tomb. Pilate knew which tomb to send them to, and the tomb was this private residence at Joseph of Arimathea. It was within sight of the crucifixion center. We went over to Israel, a church I retired out of, gave us, my wife and I, a once in a lifetime trip to Israel to see all the sites of the Holy Land. We went on a tour. And sure enough, where the site of the crucifixion is, there's Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, not far apart at all with a stone's throw of each other. So there was no other tomb to confuse it with. Some say, well, you know, Jesus merely fainted on the cross and he revived again in the coolness of the tomb and he came out and pretended to be alive. It doesn't say much for Jesus' character to do that kind of deception. This was a very popular story back in the probably mid-60s to late 60s, the Passover plot. Jewish author, Hugh Schoenfeld, I think was his name, and he came up with the swoon theory. Well, the soldiers knew Jesus was dead when he was on the cross. You know, they're public executioners. They are being paid to know when their clientele is deceased. And they spear Jesus' side under his heart because when you're dead and rigor mortis starts to set in in your body and your heart isn't pumping fluid anymore, fluid collects under the bottom of your heart. So if you spear somebody in there and fluid comes out, it's pretty obvious the heart isn't beating and the person is dead. Now the question becomes, how could Jesus have moved this stone and overpowered 12 armed guards? My parsonage, when I had landscaped it, I had some ornamental barberry bushes. I love the bright red barberry bushes. But every year I would have to get the leaves that collected in the winter under barberry bushes. And it doesn't matter how good a pair of gloves you have on, you're going to get a barberry thorn in your finger. Every year it would happen. And it would hurt to pick up a piece of paper with a thorn in my foot. Sometimes I'd wrap a Band-Aid on it and, you know, let it work it out on itself. Now, Jesus had nails driven through his hands, and he's going to push away a one and a half ton stone, and then he's going to overpower 12 armed guards. Resurrection's easier to believe than that. Someone comes up, well, someone stole his body. In fact, that was the official rumor that was spread. The soldiers come to the high priest and said, look, we lost the body. So they said, well, spread this rumor around that they stole the body while you were sleeping. And if it gets to the Roman governor, we'll cover you so you don't get in trouble. Can you imagine going to a court of law and saying, your honor, my next door neighbor stole my TV out of my house last night when I was sleeping. And the first thing he's going to ask you, did you have surveillance cameras on your property? No, your honor, I don't. Then how do you know he stole your TV when you were asleep? Stop and think of it. You don't know what's going on when you're asleep. How can you accuse somebody of doing something when you're asleep? How would you know they stole the body when you were asleep? That's kind of a bogus explanation. But you know, the Romans had a thing that if one of your men fell asleep on guard duty, all 12 of you would get executed. So you can be sure they were nudging each other all night long to stay awake. You can be sure they made a lot of Dunkin' Donut runs and were tanked up on coffee or whatever they had back then. They were wide awake. They weren't falling asleep. And the grave clothes were neatly in place. Thieves aren't a very neat lot. If you come home and you find your home all in shambles, you figure somebody ransacked and was looking for jewelry or electronics or whatever, and we're going to steal something out of your house. Now I tell you, if someone came into your house, ransacked everything, found the jewelry, then folded all the clothes, put it back in order, put all the drawers, dusted the place, vacuumed the place, washed your windows, he wouldn't be a thief for very long because you'd come back and you'd catch him. Now, burglars don't stay on the property very long. Why would somebody take the grave clothes off? This is a decomposing body, or so they think. Why do you unwrap the linen strips around it? And then why do you fold the face cloth in a nice, neat manner? That's the whole point of John's detailed description, to get away from the idea that somebody would have stolen his body. And the disciples were not expecting a resurrection. Why steal a body to concoct a story that you're clueless about? Verse 9 says, they did not understand from the scriptures that Jesus had to raise from the dead. They were cowering in the upper room, doors locked because of the Jews. They were afraid they were going to get arrested and crucified. They weren't doing suicide raids. on Roman guards. And then the last explanation, well, the whole story is just a hoax. You know, the biblical story is kind of like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster and things you don't take seriously, just interesting stories. Well, the resurrection of Jesus was always understood to be literal, not figurative. I can remember about a year before I came to Christ, and I was at Easter service in the chapel on the campus, Syracuse University campus, where I went to school. And the chaplain got up, and he said, if you had been in the upper room on Easter Sunday, and back then they didn't have digital cameras, but you had a Polaroid camera, and you took a picture, Jesus wouldn't show up on the film. Jesus was just alive in their hearts. Now, I wasn't saved yet, but that didn't sound right to me. And I thought, well, that's not what I got taught in Sunday school. I don't know if I believe that. You know, the soldiers weren't guarding the disciples' hearts. They were guarding an empty tomb. And they were guarding what they thought was a dead body. Pontius Pilate is a historical person. He's not a figment of the gospel writer's imagination. And the authorities never produced the body of Jesus. It was a public embarrassment. Twelve crack troops guarding a tomb and the corpse disappears. How do you explain that? You know, if you displayed the body of Jesus, you would have nipped Christianity in the bud. Because in Peter's sermon on Pentecost, 50 days later, the first words out of his mouth are the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You know, 10 of the 11 disciples met violent deaths for claiming that Jesus rose from the dead. You don't die for a hoax. How do you explain the boldness of the disciples without The resurrection. They are now hiding in the upper room. 50 days later at Pentecost, they're going to throw the whole city of Jerusalem into an uproar. They're going to preach that Jesus rose from the dead. They're going to see 3,000 people get converted on one day. Now either they took an assertiveness training course or something really happened that changed their whole perspective on life. That they saw the resurrection of Jesus and they could not hide that. That was the biggest story of the millennia. When something great happens, you can't keep a lid on it. You gotta tell it. But now, let's move to present day. Roman numeral two, an empty heart. Where is Jesus in relation to you? Now, empty hearts exist because of ignorance. Peter and John's situation, they had to see to believe. They did not understand from the scriptures that Jesus had to rise from the dead. Mary thought someone had taken him out of the tomb. There was ignorance on their part. Now, Jesus had told them very plainly, but it went in one ear and out the other, so to speak. And sometimes people will say, well, if I had a repeat performance, if Jesus rose from the dead in my day, then I would believe. No, you wouldn't. You'd come up with the same excuses. You have to go with a scriptural, historical eyewitness account. You have to see through their eyes and believe through what they saw. Most news is not repetitive. You don't have to go land on the moon yourself and look at the lunar lander to say that we landed on the moon. You don't have to go over to Afghanistan and say that the Taliban used to exist or they said there was such a thing and I got to go see for myself. No, you listen to the six o'clock news and you generally take it on fat. You do the same with the scriptural account of Jesus' resurrection. You know, I think of my personal experience with the risen Lord Jesus. There was a time in my life when I ran on empty. My heart was empty. I knew the gospel facts from my Sunday school upbringing, and for that I was thankful. But that's all they were, facts. I was a historian. I was not a Christian. Then in 1967, actually it was December 1st, 1967, I went to a InterVarsity Christian Fellowship meeting at the campus. A friend had invited me to it. And someone shared with me that I had to take these facts for myself. I had to ask the risen Lord Jesus to be my savior, to come and forgive my sins, and to be my Lord for the rest of my life. See, I thought, because I sit in a church pew somewhere, I must automatically be on the insurance policy. The idea that I had to make a personal decision for Christ, that had never been shared with me. That was totally new. But that was a time of my conversion. I went from knowing facts about Jesus to having a personal relationship with him. And it's going to come up on 50 years this December. And then empty hearts exist because of unbelief, a refusal to accept the facts. Suppose I got someone from the world's most primitive tribe living in a Stone Age culture. And I brought him to civilization. And I told him there were radio waves and TV waves going through the air. You can't see them. You can't hear them. You can't feel them. You can't taste them or smell them. But you can't experience them if you have a radio or you have a TV. Well, I'm sure that Aborigine would think I'm crazy and what do you mean waves going through the air? I don't see anything. I don't feel anything. There's nothing going through the air. He'd think I was crazy until I turned on a radio or turned on a TV. Interesting enough, I had heard from some missionaries back when they were doing cassette recordings and giving them to natives. They would make them out of clear plastic so you could see all the moving parts inside. Because some of the natives, when they saw it, they thought there was a little man trapped inside this thing speaking, and they'd smash the recorder to let the little man come outside. They couldn't understand the idea of a cassette recorder. It did not compute with the technology. Well, you know, it's the same with Jesus Christ. You can't know him by your five senses. You can't taste His glories. You can't hear His glories. You're probably not going to hear an audible voice. I've not. Maybe some have, but God generally doesn't work that way. I've not had a vision of seeing Christ. I've not smelled Him. I've not touched Him. But I've experienced a relationship with Him. Now take this same illustration of the radio or the TV and take the batteries out. And what happens? Nothing. You get no signal. Well, did the radio station stop broadcasting? Did those invisible waves stop? No, they're still flying through the air. The problem is the radio is unempty. It has no power. And if you can or don't experience Christ, it's not that he's not broadcasting. It's that your heart is empty because of unbelief. And you and I become the problem, not You know, it was said of Yuri Gagarin, but it was wrongly attributed to him, but he's the first man to orbit the Earth, Russian, and he said, well, I was in outer space and in the heavens and I didn't see God. To which one radio preacher replied, if he had gotten out of his space capsule without his suit, he would have seen God very quickly. It was really communist propaganda. Yuri Gagarin went on. I won't say he was a Christian in the sense that we would understand Christian, but he was an embarrassment to the Communist Party because he really frequently went to Russian Orthodox church services. invited his fellow astronauts along, which, again, the atheistic Communist Party didn't like, but they couldn't do that much about it. But we experience Christ by faith through trusting in him. You know, the disciples ran to the tomb. Unbelief runs the other way. Doubt simply needs more information. Unbelief says, my mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts. My daughter, when she was about four or five and we were on vacation up in Maine, and we were at this little clothing store in a mall up there, and they were getting rid of some of their advertising posters because they had put new ones up and you could have them for free if you wanted one. And there was this one picture of a model, it was a man, and he kind of was standing there with his hands crossed, but there was no face, no head, just the suit and the arms. And the movie Ghost Dad had come out at this time, and my daughter was convinced she had a movie poster of Ghost Dad. And I didn't like to bust her, you know, dreams, but I didn't like to, you know, of firmer fantasies either, and I tried to explain, Janna, this is just a model doing a clothing thing. This is really not a poster of Ghost Dad. This was a T.J. Maxx or a Gap store or whatever, and they weren't selling movie posters. These were clothing posters. And I said, now look, you know Bill Cosby starred in Ghost Dad, and you know Bill Cosby is black. She said, yeah, yeah, I understand that. Well, I said, look at the hands that the man has. I mean, you can't see his face, but you can see his hands. And those hands are white. That's not Bill Cosby. And she said, Dad, that doesn't matter. Everybody knows ghosts are white. So it became, don't confuse me with the facts. My mind is made up. Probably when she got to be five or six, she realized she didn't have a picture or a movie poster of Ghost Dad and took it down. All the convincing in the world wouldn't work with her. Well, if you don't want to believe, there is no convincing. There is nothing that can be said. Because the evidence for the resurrection is overwhelming. You know, we have the eyewitness accounts. God has never stopped broadcasting. The question is when we would start listening. And then empty hearts exist because of sin. We read in John's gospel in chapter 11, when he's really making headway and the authorities are, you know, just last week on earth and they don't know what they're going to do. He's getting too big a following. And it says, if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. So from that day on, they plotted to take his life. Well, you can kill Jesus. Or actually, you can't kill Jesus, but you can kill his entry into your heart. You know, if I let him come into the heart, he's going to take away my fun. No, when you receive Christ, the fun begins for the first time in your life. If I let him come into my heart, I won't be able to run my life anymore the way I want. If you're honest, you're probably not doing that great a job of it on your own anyway. Why not turn it over him for guidance? If I let him come, I'll see myself as I really am. And I'll see my sin too clearly. That's all true. But you're going to see him and you're going to see his love and you're going to see his forgiveness all the more clearly. You know, God wants no one running on empty. Jesus' death, his burial, his resurrection are facts of history. Faith is no more valid than the facts it rests on. It is facts, not feelings that undergird Christianity. We have a, it's probably in your hymnal, it's not a bad hymn, but it's a little off the mark in that it says, you ask me how I know he lives. Well, he lives within my heart. Well, that is certainly true for a believer, and that is certainly true experience. But that's not what makes it true. What makes it true is that Jesus rose from the dead in history. I can't have any relationship with a dead person. What I feel in my heart is not a measure of reality. What has happened in actual history and evidence, that's the reality. And God wants Jesus to be a fact in our lives as well. That he wants that personal relationship with each one of us. May it not be said in Isaiah 42.20 where Isaiah is prophesying to his people and he's going in one ear and out the other and he says, you have seen many things but have paid no attention Your ears are open, but you hear nothing. That's a picture of an empty radio, of a radio without any batteries, and it's not receiving what's going on out there. God asks us to surrender our life to repent of sin and trust his son's death, resurrection for the forgiveness of our sins, and a relationship with him personally. You know, we want the risen Christ to rise in our hearts as savior from sin and as Lord to run my life for now and for eternity. You know, in a conclusion, are you running on empty? You don't need to be. Jesus rose from the dead to fill the highest heavens and the lowest heart. The resurrection of Jesus is one of the best proved facts of history. But God wants us to be more than historians. Surrender your life and will to the risen Christ. Ask him to be your Savior and Lord from sin. And you will never, ever run on empty again. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you. We thank you for your entry into the world. For your willingness to die for our sins, such a painful and shameful death. And then Lord, most of all, for your resurrection from the dead. Lord, for overturning something that has never been overturned for millennia. That Lord, the wage of sin has been death for everyone except you. And Father, we bless and thank you for Jesus' resurrection. And then we thank you that he didn't just rise from the dead that we could gape at something in history, that he rose from the dead to be Lord and King of our hearts. That it shows that you were satisfied with your son's payment for our sin. You offer full and free forgiveness based on that payment if we will but come to Christ and ask it. to be our Savior and Lord. Father, may we not miss it. May we not be historians and miss out on the resurrection of Jesus and what he's done for us in present day. Father, may history intersect with our present time, and Lord, change us, not into historians, but into true Christians that love and worship Jesus Christ with all our heart. And Father, for those of us who have experienced that, may this day and every day be a resurrection day to us, that we share that hope we have with others, that we don't keep it stuffed inside our heart, but Father, that we let it come out of our mouths so that other people may have a relationship with them as well. In Jesus' name, amen.