Big Sundays

How long have you been a follower of Jesus for?

How long?

50 years.

If you've been a follower for 50 years, you would have come to 2,600 Sundays.

How long have you been a follower of Jesus for?

10 years.

10 years is 520.

Can we beat 50 years?

How long?

70, I don't even have maths for how many that is.

Probably 4,000.

4,000.

I have a privilege today of speaking to quite a diverse congregation.

I'm sitting here, standing here, preaching this message to someone who's been a Christian for 70 years.

4,000 Sundays.

And tonight we have a bunch of teenagers from the youth group coming to church, many of whom have never been to church before.

So there's the full gamut of 70 years of Sunday being a follower of Jesus and first time, and of course everywhere in between.

The video has just primed us for this concept of Sunday.

We meet on Sundays.

We've been meeting on Sundays for 2,000 years, 70 years.

I've been, I'm 22, I've probably gone to church most weeks of my life.

It is my contention that meeting together on a Sunday is a vitally important part of the rhythms of life that the Lord has ordained for believers.

We need to meet together on Sundays.

So this message is the C23 Big Sundays message.

Let me pray.

Father, I pray you would speak to us from your word in a fresh way.

I pray that I would get out of the way of what you want to do amongst us.

Would you manifest your spirit amongst us and be present, we pray.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

So our text is John 20 and verses 19 to 23.

If you have a Bible, it's always easy to follow on the page.

Thank you, Raylene, for reading it to us.

John 20 and verses 19 to 23.

The story we find here in John 20 comes at the end of an enormously significant and tumultuous week.

It has been seven days of significant events.

In fact, it's so significant, John spends over one-third of his gospel just to telling the story of this week.

On Sunday, Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey.

He's welcomed by the crowd, shouting, Hosanna, with a weight of expectation and anticipation that has been following Jesus for three years.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Jesus stirs up the city by clearing the temple, cursing the fig tree, pronouncing the woes on the Pharisees, and teaching in parables.

On Thursday night, Jesus has the last supper with his disciples.

He washes their feet.

He breaks the bread and pours out the cup, and he talks about his body and his blood, which will be shed for the forgiveness of sins.

After supper, Jesus and the disciples move to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is praying with blood pressure so high, by his dripping, his sweating drips of blood, until Judas comes with the soldiers to arrest Jesus and take him before the high priest to be questioned.

Friday morning, 6 a.m., Jesus is taken before the Roman governor, Pilate, to be charged.

And even though Pilate does not find a single charge against him, the Jews in Jerusalem shout, Crucify him.

So Pilate hands Jesus over to be mocked and flogged and spat on.

Friday, 9 a.m., Jesus is crucified.

Nails driven into his hands and a spear thrust into his side.

Darkness comes over the whole land until 3 p.m., when Jesus breathes his last.

Friday night, some of the loyal disciples take Jesus' body off the cross, and bury him in a tomb and seal the stone.

Saturday is the Sabbath day.

The disciples sit and wait.

Sunday morning, a woman called Mary goes to the tomb to anoint Jesus with spices and perfumes, and she finds the stone is rolled away and the tomb is empty.

So she runs to fetch the disciples, two of whom come to the tomb and they also find it empty.

The two return to the other disciples.

Mary, meanwhile, is sitting at the entrance of the tomb, crying when she has an encounter with the risen Lord Jesus, alive in glory and power.

She runs back to the disciples with the testimony, I have seen the Lord Sunday night.

John 20 verse 19.

Our passage says the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders.

It has been an incomprehensibly tumultuous and chaotic week in Jerusalem.

Politically, the city is in a stir and the Jewish leaders are persecuting anyone associated with Jesus.

Emotionally, the disciples are together and they have just witnessed their best friend who they've traveled around Palestine with for three years be brutally tortured and murdered before their eyes.

Spiritually, the disciples thought this man was God, the Messiah who would come to save them and deliver them and now is dead.

And paradoxically, the tomb has been found empty and Mary returns with news that she has seen the risen Lord.

So all that cloud is sitting in that room with the disciples on the night of the resurrection.

They're sitting together and they haven't seen the Lord yet.

Sunday night, then Jesus shows up.

He actually shows up in the room, in the middle of the disciples meeting with the chaos of the past week.

He shows up and everything changes.

He says, peace be with you.

He is alive.

It is true and their world is flips upside down.

Peace be with you, Jesus says.

I wonder how long he thought about that opening line.

If it was me, I'd overthink it for a long time and then probably something like, I am Buck.

Or told you so, maybe.

Or maybe just appear and do jazz hands with the nail wounds in his hands.

But I think Jesus saying peace be with you is actually a pretty cool thing to say.

Peace be with you is the English translation of the Greek Eirenei Humin, which is the Greek version of the Hebrew shalom.

Jews today still say shalom.

It means more than just hi, hey, how are you doing?

But it's a blessing of peace and well-being on the person who you're greeting.

So Jesus shows up in the room and he says, peace be with you.

And after the events of the past week in Jerusalem, his peace is something else.

This is not a customary greeting.

This is a world-shattering peace that meets them in that room that was full of chaos.

Twice Jesus says, peace be with you.

And the second time it's accompanied by a commission.

As the father has sent me, so I send you.

And in that moment, when Jesus says, peace be with you twice, they know it's going to be okay.

Because all the fear and guilt and shame and uncertainty and hope, and that cocktail of emotions that they were sitting in, is fully met in the person of Jesus when he showed up.

Jesus showed up.

What if he were to show up in your life?

You might be sitting here at the end of a chaotic and tumultuous week.

And so you read this story and you relate to the feeling of the disciples, anxious, afraid, uncertain, fearful.

What if Jesus were to fully and really show up in your life and change everything for you?

What would your response be?

What was the disciples' response?

The text says in verse 20, that after the tumultuous week that's happened, Jesus shows up, says, Peace be with you.

And verse 20 is the disciples' response.

After he, that's Jesus, said this, he showed them his hands and sighed.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

I love that line.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Overjoyed.

The King James Version and the English Standard Version say, the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.

If you have one of those translations, cross out glad and write overjoyed in all caps.

I don't think glad captures just the feeling of the disciples.

Overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

This brother, their friend, their saviour, their God, who was dead is alive again and standing among them and giving them peace.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

Imagine that room.

In the span of three seconds, the disciples go from living in the deepest valley of death and darkness and despair.

Jesus shows up, peace be with you, and they are lifted to the highest mountaintop of joy and praise.

In three seconds, that transition, I wish I could have been in that room.

Jesus showed up and the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

They saw the Lord.

They saw the Lord.

On that very first Sunday, the Sunday night of the resurrection, as the disciples gathered together, bringing with them whatever their week brought, and it was a chaotic week, when they brought their weeks together, they saw the Lord.

And in that sacred place of disciples meeting together in the presence of the Lord, I think our text tells us that three things happened.

First, they see His wounds, they hear His voice, and they receive His power.

In that place, disciples meeting together, the Lord shows up.

They see His wounds, they hear His voice, and they receive His power.

Firstly, they see His wounds.

I find it interesting that the text doesn't say, Jesus showed up and the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

It's sort of implied that they needed to know that this was Jesus.

So the text says in verse 20, He showed them His hands inside.

Then the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

In Jesus' crucifixion two days earlier, like I said before, nails were driven into His wrists and His ankles and a spear thrust into His side.

So He stands before the disciples now alive, but bearing the glorious wounds of the cross.

And when they see those wounds, they know it's Jesus, and I think they can't help but look back to the cross and think about how He got those wounds.

And they contemplate what Jesus was doing on that cross that seems like the symbol of defeat, but now He's alive.

They saw His hands and sighed.

They see His wounds.

Secondly, they hear His voice.

On that first Sunday of the resurrection, as the disciples gather together and Jesus shows up, they hear the voice of the risen Lord.

Peace be with you, He says.

The Lord's voice is timely and fitting and exactly what they needed to hear.

He shows up in the middle of what they're going through.

And with four words, peace be with you, twice, peace be with you, He calms what is going on in their life.

The disciples hear His voice.

Verse 21 says, again Jesus said, peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.

Twice, He says, peace be with you.

But the second time is accompanied by the commission.

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

So the disciples gather together to hear His timely voice of encouragement and comfort.

And then at the same time, they hear His voice which calls them to go out.

There's mission even there.

I find that quite compelling, that picture of disciples meeting together to sit under the voice of the Lord, who comforts them in whatever they're going through.

But then at the same time, there's a commission.

As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

On that first Sunday, the disciples see His wounds, they hear His voice, and thirdly, they receive His power.

John 20 verse 22 says, with that He breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit.

If you forgive anyone's sins, their sins are forgiven.

If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.

Just before in verse 21, I think we get John's version of the great commission.

As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.

It's sort of John's version of the Matthew 28.

Here, I think we get John's version of Pentecost.

Jesus breathes on the disciples and gives them His presence, His power, and His authority.

If you'll indulge my Greek grammar nerd for half a minute, I find it fascinating that John breaks grammatical convention to make the point that the spirit is a person.

The Greek word for spirit is pnuma.

It's neuter, which means it's not gendered.

But John breaks the rules to use masculine pronouns to refer to the pnuma.

His point is the spirit is not an it, an impersonal force.

It is a person.

It is the very person of Jesus.

The presence and power and authority of Jesus.

That is what is breathed onto the disciples.

Power, the Holy Spirit of power and authority.

Authority to forgive sins.

This is crazy authority that he's giving them.

So three things.

Mark that meeting of the first believers on that very first Sunday.

They see his wounds, they hear his voice, and they receive his power.

The Sunday night of the resurrection.

The day those three things happen.

When Jesus shows up.

I just got back from two and a half weeks in Greece and Turkey.

And I was so fortunate to be able to see many of the cities where the very early Christians lived and met and gathered together.

And I got to see Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Colosseum, Smyrna, Philadelphia and many more cities.

And what I was so struck by is the continuity between the events of the gospel and these early churches.

We're not talking centuries of time.

We're talking decades, if that, between the events of the gospel in Palestine, southeast of Greece and Turkey, to when mostly the Apostle Paul, on his missionary journeys, carries the gospel into that part of the world.

I got to see streets and stand-in buildings where early Christians in the first century met together on Sunday and gathered together in Jesus' name.

And then I came home, and I came here to church, and it was a joy to gather with my family here again, but I realized I don't have nearly the same sense of continuity between the events of the gospel and our meeting right here, or more broadly in the Western Church in the 21st century.

And fair enough, there's 2,000 years separating the events of the gospel with our meeting here.

And so for a couple of weeks, I've been grappling with, like, how did we get where we are with the church?

It looks the way it does, and it's glorious and beautiful, and God is leading it and doing something with it.

But it looks very different to the way it did 2,000 years ago.

So I'm grappling with these kind of thoughts.

And then I was assigned this passage to preach on.

I open my Bible and the first words I read are on the evening of the first day of the week when the disciples were together.

And I think, well, hang on, what the first day, what day is this?

And I flip backwards a page, I realize this is Resurrection Sunday, not the week after, this is the night.

And so I'm like, hold on, this is Sunday, this is insane.

I look into it and I see, oh, they see his wounds, they hear his voice, they receive his power.

And suddenly I have this penny drop moment that says the continuity over 2,000 years, even though we are continents away, millennia away, is we have been meeting on Sundays for 2,000 years since that day.

John 20 verse 19 to 23, the believers met together on the Lord's Day, on the night of the resurrection, and they saw his wounds.

They heard his voice, and they received his power.

And suddenly I was excited for church again.

I couldn't wait to get back here.

This was this week.

I can't wait to be right here, gathering together with the brothers and sisters in the presence of the Lord.

That's the continuity.

2,000 years, we look back to the same gospel, the same cross, the same wounds, the same Lord, and we gather on Sundays.

Did you know there have been, I did the maths, just over 100,000 Sundays since AD 33 or 36, when Jesus was likely crucified and rose again.

I think that's kind of cool.

Just over 100,000 Sundays.

Believers have met on every one of those Sundays.

In the name of Jesus, they've met.

Our church has a vision this year called C23.

We're praying for eyes of faith that would, the Lord would show us the future he has for us, and the kinds of rhythms and weekly practices that he would lead us in to get us to that future.

And this message is the third of seven of our strategic keys.

These are the areas that mostly as a staff and leadership, but more broadly as a body, we want to focus on to really make sure we become the church the Lord is calling us to be.

The third key is big Sundays.

Sundays are big at NorthernLife.

We want to make a commitment to make Sundays big for your faith and my faith, for our faith.

Two thousand years, one hundred thousand years of Sundays that believers gather together on this day.

In the midst of whatever our week has brought, I don't think any of us have had a week like the disciples had on that first Sunday.

But we bring with us whatever has happened.

We come together, we share, and we see the Lord together.

The Lord shows up.

I love what Mike said in his announcement, where two or three gather, the Lord is there with them.

So we hold on to that promise.

He is with us right now in this room.

Two thousand years, a hundred thousand Sundays later, at NorthernLife, we see his wounds together.

The lyrics of our songs that we sing, the content of our prayers, the subject of our messages, we see his wounds.

We contemplate what the Lord did on the cross for us.

We don't get tired of the gospel.

One of my favorite things to think about and say as I'm leading worship is something along the lines of, we're gonna lift up the name of Jesus again, like we've been doing for 120 years on this corner.

That might not mean much to you, but I think it's amazing to stand in the 120 year legacy of lifting up the name of Jesus every week on this street corner.

I think that's awesome.

We see his wounds together.

At NorthernLife, we hear his voice together.

Every week, we come under this.

We hear his word to us through scripture.

We pray and discern what is the Lord's voice to us now.

We pray and we read scripture for a timely and a contextual word that would speak to our season.

Multiple times, even this year, Jonathan has changed the sermon series to what had been planned months out in response to what he felt the Lord was saying to him.

And I think that's blessed us as we have had a word from scripture from the Lord, which is directly fitted to where we are as a church.

We hear his voice together at NorthernLife, and we receive his power.

We gather together and we pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our lives, that we may, as Hebrews 10.25 says, spur one another on, encourage each other as we see the day approaching.

We receive his power together, and as we hear his voice, which comforts us, it also sends us out.

The Lord said in John 20, somewhere between 19 and 23, as the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.

As we hear his voice, he sends us out, but he doesn't send us out unempowered.

We gather together to receive power from the Lord that we may go and fulfill his mission outside of those doors.

That's what Big Sundays is all about.

That we may see his wounds, hear his voice and receive his power together on a Sunday in this room and for all those joining us online.

That's what Big Sundays is about.

We believe that it is a vitally important part of your personal faith to gather together with the believers.

And Sunday is when you're going to find most people here.

So you should come on a Sunday.

It's probably going to be locked on Thursday.

Come on a Sunday and gather together, see his wounds, hear his voice and receive his power.

The last thing I want to leave you with is this.

I preached the message a couple of months ago on Philippians 4, talking about rejoicing and anxiety.

And as it happened, well, I discerned through study and the commentaries kind of suggested the Lord is near is the crux of that passage of scripture.

And as it happened, the words the Lord is near fit in the dead middle of the passage on the screen.

And I thought that was a powerful way.

So I looked at the same thing.

And the words, the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord sit in the dead middle of the passage again.

And I got to thinking about it.

That is the essence of the passage.

That is the umbrella that holds it all together.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

So we gather here today, the disciples.

Are we overjoyed when we see the Lord?

When two or three gather, he is present amongst us.

We see his wounds.

We hear his voice.

We receive his power.

Are we overjoyed when we see the Lord?

We gather together that we might see him.

And I pray that we would increasingly become a church that is marked by joy in the presence of the Lord.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

If you take nothing else away, that's the one-liner.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

The last thing I want to say is in probably seven or eight or nine minutes, we're going to say, Amen, have a good week, see you next week.

Don't think that that's when Sunday stops.

That's the end of our formal service.

But when we go out there to have tea and coffee and meet together, have lunch, dinner tonight, that's when church really happens as well.

We minister to each other.

We encourage one another.

So don't shut off as soon as the last Amen is heard.

But stay awake, alive, be in joy in the presence of the Lord.

That's the last thing.

Would you please stand?

I'm going to invite the band up.

I thought it would be fitting.

Really, there's nothing I would rather do but pray together.

I don't want to pray over you, but this whole message has been about what we can do when we're together.

So believers have been reciting the Lord's Prayer together for 2,000 years.

So I'm going to have Steph lead us just line by line.

We're going to say the words together to the Lord's Prayer.

And then we're going to sing some songs and our voices come together in one melody together.

And it's just an opportunity to bless each other, to encourage each other with the gusto that you bring when you sing.

At NorthernLife, let's make Sundays big.

Let's see his wounds, hear his voice and receive his power.

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