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CURRENT RADIO SERIES Dare to Believe   CURRENT TV SERIES All Things New

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. --Romans 6:23 If you’re a professional baseball player these days, you can get into the Hall of Fame by hitting about three out of ten balls successfully. And sadly, this is how a lot of people think about their sin. They think everything’s fine as long as they’re hitting a good batting average with God. But God doesn’t look at our sin through human eyes. Otherwise, there would be no need for Good Friday or Easter. Sin is a big deal to God because it violates his holiness. It requires a righteous judgment. It demands a payment because as today’s verse says, “the wages of sin is death.” When you look at the cross, you see what God thinks about sin. And God said that sin is so tragic, so terrible, and so wrong that it demands a payment. It’s a payment he sent in the form of his Son, Jesus Christ, who was put to death on the cross for your sin and mine. But here’s the good news of the cross, and the good news of Easter: Jesus Christ died on the cross on Good Friday, but he rose again on Easter Sunday! Jesus went to the cross to die, but now you and I go the cross to live. The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord! Have you accepted his gift?

The Certainty of the Resurrection

by Dr. Paul Chappell

“The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and teach, Until the day in which he was taken up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen: To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God:”
Acts 1:1–3

The most important doctrinal truth of all is the resurrection. The fact that Jesus truly died and then came back to life is essential, because without that, there is no salvation. Paul wrote, “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). The Christian faith is utterly and completely reliant on the resurrection—if that were false the rest would fall apart. But it is not false, and we have, as Acts 1:3 says, “infallible proofs” so we can believe with complete and utter confidence that Jesus is alive. This is crucial to our salvation, and it is a vital part of the message of the gospel.
In his sermon “The Resurrection of the Dead,” Charles Spurgeon said, “Reflecting the other day upon the sad state of the churches at the present moment, I was led to look back to apostolic times, and to consider wherein the preaching of the present day differed from the preaching of the apostles. I was surprised to find that I had not been copying the apostolic fashion half as nearly as I might have done. The apostles when they preached always testified concerning the resurrection of Jesus, and the consequent resurrection of the dead. It appears that the Alpha and the Omega of their gospel was the testimony that Jesus Christ died and rose again from the dead according to the Scriptures.”
 

Today’s Growth Principle: 

The resurrection of Jesus is not a wish or a fable, but a settled fact that we can and must fully believe.