Now maybe, maybe it’s just a little early to start talking about Easter. Of course the Easter eggs are in the store, the chocoholics amongst us have already snuck the odd egg to get a chocolate fix. But as far as Church and Christians and the whole religious thing goes, well we tend not to start thinking too much about Easter until, well I guess maybe in a couple of weeks time.

So some joker like me gets on the radio and starts rabbiting on about Easter, pun intended. Well I might just switch off, after all I’ve heard it all before, same thing year after year. Which incidentally is a problem for preachers too. Each year, year after year, Easter rolls around. What am I going to say this year? Any pastors out there who are listening will know exactly what I’m talking about.

BUT … and I love this big dramatic ‘but’, BUT you know something the really sad thing is that we so often skate through Easter a bit like Bart Simpson in the opening scene of the Simpsons on television. We skate through in and out, before we know it it’s gone, it’s over, we’ve had our chocolate, we’ve had the long weekend, we heard the same old story again, okay what’s next?

Am I right? And we miss the whole point, the whole central idea of what God is up to in our lives here and now, giving us a new life, a new start, we miss that bit and so many people who miss it go on and live miserable lives. I mean how crazy is that?

And the whole point of Easter, the whole point of God sending us His Son, is to give us a new life. So today we’re kicking off a four week series that’s going to end the week after Easter and I’ve called it ‘A New Life In Jesus’. New life! New life! New life! He came to give us a new life. You and me. And if that’s not worth listening to, huh, I just don’t know what is.

Now Easter kind of kicks off a few months before Easter really if we read Johns account. It kicks off with a bit of a dry run if you will, a story about a dead man who came back to life again. But even a little bit before that the Jews, here in the 1st century, are still puzzling about who this Jesus really is. Have a listen, John chapter 10 beginning at verse 22.

“At the time of the festival of the Dedication in Jerusalem it was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the portico of Solomon. So the Jews gathered around Him and said to Him, ‘how long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the messiah tell us plainly’. And Jesus answered them, ‘I have told you and you have not believed. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.

“My sheep hear my voice, I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.’

“The Jews took up stones against Him again to stone Him. Jesus replied, ‘I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which one of these are you going to stone me?’ ‘It’s not for a good work that we’re going to stone you but for blasphemy because you, though only being human, are making yourself God.’

“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your Law “I said you are gods”? If those to whom the word of God came were called gods then the Scripture cannot be annulled, can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into this world is blaspheming because I said, I am God’s Son. If I am not doing the works of my Father then do not believe in me but if I do them even though you do not believe in me believe the works so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.’

“Then they tried to arrest Him again but He escaped from their hands.”

Now the amazing thing, the truly amazing thing at this point is that for about three years Jesus has been wandering around doing these amazing miracles. Healing the blind, healing the lame, healing the lepers and doing so many good things. Feeding thousands with a few small fishes and loaves, walking on water.

I mean have you ever met anyone who does that kind of stuff consistently day after day? Speaks and leprosy leaves a man, touches another man who has been blind since birth and he regains his sight. Have you ever met anyone in flesh and blood who does that sort of thing here on this earth? No, me neither.

And these people in the crowds they’d seen a good deal of what Jesus has been doing. They’d heard about the rest. They’ve seen the evidence and still they want to stone Him to death. People want to kill Him – why? Because He’s claiming to be God.

See some people these days they say Jesus never claimed to be God. He was a good prophet, a good teacher, made a lot of sense but He never claimed to be God. Let me say this very clearly, yes He did. John chapter 10, verse 30;

“The Father and I are one.”

And again in verse 36;

“Can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into this world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am Gods Son?’ “

And this was the heresy. It didn’t fit with their understanding of God and how He works and who He’d sent to be their Messiah. They had this idea of who or what God was meant to be and God did it completely differently. And by the way He proved it was Him through the amazing miracles that Jesus performed but because God didn’t fit into their narrow little religious boxes, their rules, their regulations, they wanted to kill the Son of God. Do you get it? And friend this is still happening today.

These days we want God to be someone who blesses us financially with trinkets and toys. We want religion to fit our way of life. We want God to dance to our tune. Healthy, wealthy, wise. When we’re in trouble run to God or anyone else or anything else that’s spiritual that might meet our needs. Maybe even invent our own kind of little designer religion.

A movie came out recently, Eat Pray Love, that’s what it was all about, the spiritual search for self gratification. That’s who we want God to be if there is such a God. ‘Pamper me God, sugar daddy God, run after me God’. The last thing, the last thing we want is a Jesus who turns our world upside down. The last thing we want is a Jesus who challenges our ingrain sin.

We don’t want that. We want a God who’ll tell us how wonderful we are. We want a God who makes us feel good and so what we want to do is replace this gruesome message of the cross with chocolate and Easter bunny’s and all things nice and soft and fluffy. We don’t want to know and my hunch is that if this very same Jesus wandered into a Church near us we’d listen to Him for a while, we’d be wowed by His miracles and then we’d probably want to stone Him to death.

It’s offensive to many people when we stand up and say, ‘You know something, Jesus is the Son of God and no one but no one comes to the Father except through Him’. No other swami. No other religion. No other set of values. No other belief system or design your own faith. We come to God the Father through Jesus and Jesus alone.

That’s offensive to people. People want to tear you down. Come on, tolerance. Come on you can’t say that. I say it because Jesus said it. Jesus was misunderstood and rejected back then. Jesus is misunderstood and rejected today and I know absolutely, if we could we’d kill Him all over again and this God who sends us His Son with such great love, people want to kill Him because He calls a spade a spade.

You have to ask yourself, what does that say about us?

As we head towards Easter we’re chatting about the new life that Jesus came to bring us, completely new life. Born again from above as we believe in Him. Of course that label ‘born again’ has become a bit of a cliché, even a derogatory label in some quarters for those loony tune religious nuts with stars in their eyes who wander up to you in the street and give you some tatty pamphlet that tells you Jesus loves you, right? At least that’s what I used to think being a born again Christian was about.

But when you think about it if Jesus did indeed come to wipe the slate clean, that’s what the whole cross and crucifixion thing was supposed to be all about and to give us a new life, the empty tomb, the risen Jesus, isn’t that a big deal? If He came to wipe my slate clean and yours, if He came, the Son of God, to give us a new life, well I reckon that’s worth grabbing a hold of. It’s a big deal, He either got it right or He didn’t.

Well a few weeks before that very first Easter He has a dry run of this death and resurrection thing, a practice session if you like with His good friend Lazarus and when this good friend of Jesus, Lazarus, died it seemed to everyone else that Jesus had missed the boat. Let’s take a look.

We pick up the story in John chapter 11 beginning at verse 1:

“Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped His feet with her hair. Her brother Lazarus was ill so the sister sent a message to Jesus. ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it He said, ‘The illness doesn’t lead to death, rather it is for Gods glory so that the Son of God maybe glorified through it.’

“Accordingly though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill He stayed two days longer in the place where He was. Then after this He said to His disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again’. The disciples said to Him, ‘Rabbi the Jews were just now trying to stone you and you’re going to go there again’.”

This is a really important story in the scheme of things, in the scheme of Easter and let me say in the scheme of your life and mine. Because this Jesus has some friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus. They were dear friends. Lazarus is referred to as the one whom Jesus loved in verse 3 and in verse 5 we discover He loved not only Lazarus but the sisters Mary and Martha.

Now before we get the wrong idea here there are three words used in the New Testament for the word love. The first is Phileo which is a deep friendship, that’s the word used in verse 3. The second is Agape which is a powerful, unbreakable, unconditional love. That’s the word used in verse 5. The third is Eros which is the love between a man and a woman and that’s not used in this passage at all.

So we discover that Lazarus and his sisters were close friends whom Jesus, the Son of God, loved with the love of God. These people meant a lot to Jesus. Lazarus is really sick and as we find out later he’s actually on his death bed. And Jesus holds back from going to heal him. First Lazarus has to die and then Jesus is going to bring him back to life.

The reason that this story is so important is that it points forward to Easter and it points forward to your life and mine. I want to unpack that a little bit today. Lazarus is a Hebrew name that actually literally means ‘God is my help’. And the whole point of Easter, as we’re going to see over the coming weeks, is that before someone can be risen into a new life through Jesus, first they have to die to the old life, they have to die to self.

Before Jesus could be our risen saviour first He had to die and here in the story of Lazarus we see a physical representation of that spiritual truth to help us to understand the spiritual truth. I’ve read commentaries that say the story of Lazarus of Bethany is a story of persevering through trials. Well okay, maybe that’s one angle but more than anything to me this story is about God, it’s about God being our help, God being the one who brings new life, a resurrection life out of our death through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Think about what God’s trying to say to us through this story. It picks a guy called Lazarus and whose name means literally ‘God is my help’. Now remember in Hebrew culture the meaning of someone’s name is really important. So immediately we know God is speaking to us through this story and all the disciples are kind of nudging Jesus towards going to heal Lazarus. In fact when He says, ‘let’s go to Judea’ they’re incredulous, we’ve been there, they tried to kill you, in brackets, let’s go heal Lazarus your dear friend.

What’s his answer? When Jesus heard it He said:

“’This illness does not lead to death rather it is for Gods glory so that the Son of God may be glorified through it’. Accordingly though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus after having heard that Lazarus was ill He stayed two days longer in the place where He was.”

See God had a plan and it was a plan that you and I would never have. I mean I would never do it this way but God did. God had a plan to actually allow Lazarus to die so that Jesus could raise him from the dead. God had a plan to glorify Himself and His Son through the death and resurrection of Jesus. God had a plan to speak to you and me about the new life that He can bring to us here and now. That was Gods plan.

And so He did it differently, Jesus waited for a couple of days, He tarried, He waited so that He knew Lazarus would be dead. The plan was to bring a guy back to life. Now that’s a pretty neat trick and of course it’s going to glorify Jesus and later Jesus talks about His death and resurrection in the same way. John chapter 12, verse 23:

“Jesus answered them, ‘the hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified.”

You have to die in order to be raised from the dead and that brings glory to God. Jesus demands exactly the same, death and resurrection from you and from me. Luke chapter 14, verse 27:

“Whoever doesn’t carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

See, the picture of the cross is a picture of death. Jesus said, ‘If you want to follow me you have to deny yourself, take up your cross every day and follow me’. Why doesn’t Jesus just heal the ills in my life? Why doesn’t He come and fix all my problems? Why doesn’t He just wave His magic wand and make all this rubbish and pain and stuff go away?

I’ll tell you why. Because He’s waiting for us to die first. He’s waiting for us to die to self so that He can raise us up again in Christ. This is a deliberate plan. This is His choice because He wants us to love Him with all our heart and soul and strength and mind. With everything we are, with all we have, with every hope, with every dream, everything laid down at His feet, putting Him first as not just our saviour but our Lord. Putting Him before all things, having no other gods before Him.

That my friend is dying to self. He wants us to decide. He’s waiting for you to decide and me to decide and only when we die to self, only when we take up this gruesome cross for ourselves every day, only when we feel the pain of leaving our whims and fancies and lusts and desires behind do we discover that God is our help. That’s what Lazarus means, God is my help.

God is the one who raises me from the death that I have in my sin into a new life in Christ and before we can do that, before we can be raised from the dead you have to die. He waits for that and then comes Jesus. What does Jesus mean? God’s salvation. God becomes my saviour in Jesus when I die to myself. A deep mysterious, timeless, spiritual truth in the story of one mans death and resurrection.

Well yesterday we started listening to the story of Lazarus. This dear friend of Jesus who was critically ill. I mean on his death bed. Jesus is off ministering somewhere else and a message comes through, ‘Quick, come and heal your good friend Lazarus’. So what does Jesus do? Huh, He ignores it and He gives this excuse. When Jesus heard He said:

“’The illness doesn’t lead to death rather it’s for Gods glory so that the Son of God may be glorified through it’. Accordingly though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus after having heard that Lazarus was ill He stayed two days longer in the place where He was.”

Now we’re going to pick up this story in the next stage and I’m hoping what you’ll do with me is to take a particular perspective. I’m hoping that you and I can walk together in the shoes of the people around Jesus at the time. The disciples, the friends, the family of Lazarus.

So there we are, we know Jesus, we’ve seen Him do these amazing miracles. We know He’s the Messiah. I mean God promised a saviour of Israel but He’s not what we expected. He keeps calling Himself the Son of God which is, well it’s mildly worrying because it’s heretical and on top of it all He keeps talking about the fact that He’s going to die on the cross.

So there are bits we don’t understand about Jesus, bits that we’d rather ignore and now this message comes to Jesus that Lazarus is dying.

There we are, we’re there, one of the disciples, walking with Jesus, trying to understand what’s going on. And just like the rest of the disciples we’re utterly perplexed when He delays by a couple of days going to heal His friend. We simply can’t understand, what’s Jesus up to? I mean Lazarus is your friend, he’s really sick, he’s dying, hello Jesus, what are you doing?

Ever wondered what God was doing in your life? Why He’s letting these things happen in your life? Well you and I aren’t the first ones to wonder that. His disciples felt like that too from time to time and this was one of those times.

So there we are, what happens next? Well let’s have a look, John chapter 11 beginning at verse 11:

“After saying this He told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep but I’m going there to wake him up’. The disciples said to Him, ‘Lord if he’s fallen asleep he’ll be alright.’ Jesus however had been speaking about his death but they thought He was referring merely to sleep. So Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. For your sake I’m glad I wasn’t there so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’

“Thomas who was called The Twin said to his fellow disciples, ‘Let us all go that we may die with Him’. When Jesus arrived He found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days.

“Now Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles away and many of the Jews had come to Mary and Martha to console them about their brother. When Martha heard Jesus was coming she went and met Him while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, ‘Lord if you’d been here my brother wouldn’t have died but even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of Him’.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to Him, ‘I know he will rise again in the resurrection on that last day.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me even though they die will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ She said to Him, ‘Yes Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world’.

“When she said this she went back and called her sister Mary and told her privately, ‘The teacher’s here, He’s calling for you’ and when she heard it she got up quickly and went to Jesus. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village but was still at the place where Martha had met Him. The Jews who were with her in the house consoling her saw Mary get up and quickly go out, they followed her because they thought that she was going to the tomb to weep.

“When Mary came where Jesus was and saw Him she knelt down at His feet and said to Him, ‘Lord, if you had been here my brother wouldn’t have died’. When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her were also weeping He was greatly disturbed in the spirit and deeply moved, He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ And they said to Him, ‘Lord come and see’.

“Jesus wept so the Jews said, ‘See how He loved him’ but some of them said, ‘Could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?’”

See there it is. This is a sixty four thousand dollar question. What was Jesus doing? Where was He? Why couldn’t He have stopped this? The disciples were asking it. He had after all delayed in coming so that Lazarus was now dead for four days. Everything was lost, well and truly on the nose, smelly in the tomb. Mary was asking it, Martha was asking it, why hadn’t Jesus saved their brother who was after all the man in their family? He was their livelihood.

The towns folk who knew Jesus, they’d seen what He was capable of, they were asking this question too. Jesus why did you miss the boat? Why did you leave it so long? You could have saved him, why did Jesus miss the boat here?

Well the reason, the reason can be found in Martha’s beliefs and in fact everyone else’s too. Jesus said to her:

“Your brother will rise again. Martha said to Him, ‘I know he’ll rise again on the resurrection on the last day’. Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me even though they will die will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ ”

See she was prepared to believe in the resurrection of the dead one day to live with God eternally. She believed in an eternal life that would come one day in the future. But what she didn’t believe for was a new life for Lazarus here and now. She didn’t believe in a resurrection life here on this earth now. And actually, to be fair to her, nor did any of the others.

While they were all carrying on over what could have been if Jesus had just hurried up. Jesus was doing what He always told them He was going to do. He was doing what He always planned to do from the moment that He heard that Lazarus was dying. He had deliberately delayed so that Lazarus would die, He was about to bring Lazarus back to life here and now. An actual miracle.

This happened, this is a historical fact. It’s not some allegorical tale. Lazarus was dead in the flesh. Stone dead. On the nose. Four days and as we’ll read in the story over the next few days, Jesus brings him back to life. But that was always Jesus’ plan, not just to bless them but to teach them something and to bring glory to Himself and to His Father.

When our lives are so bad, so broken, so lost, so dead, as mine was. When we finally let go and die to the flesh, die to the self, it’s then that Jesus comes along with a new life. And that brings Him such great glory. The one thing I never expected frankly of Jesus was the one thing that Martha and Mary and the disciples and the friends of Lazarus never expected either. A new resurrection of life here and now.

A fresh, brand new, vibrant life on this earth in this body. This true story of Lazarus is meant to tell us something. That Jesus always meant for us to die on this earth as well. For us to die to self and to be raised again by Him on this earth through faith. Born again from above through faith in Jesus into a new life.

The very same power that raised Lazarus from the dead, the very same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that raises us out of the depth of our sin into a new life, a resurrection life. The life that Jesus always had planned for us starting here, starting now.

Now over the course of this week we’ve been looking at the story of Lazarus because actually Jesus’ journey towards the cross which is what we’ll be celebrating as Easter comes around again. In Jesus journey this Lazarus incident is a key marker and a turning point.

Now we’ve seen so far that Jesus received word that His friend Lazarus was critically ill and decided, instead of racing to his side and healing him, to delay and deliberately wait for him to die. The reason He does this is to make a point. To glorify His Father in heaven and Himself as well as being able to teach us something.

Because as we saw yesterday what everyone has a flap about, what could have happened had Jesus made it there on time, Jesus was getting ready, not to stop Lazarus from dying which is what everyone had expected Him to do but to bring Lazarus back from the dead which is what no one expected Him to do or believed He could do.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again’ and Martha said to Him, ‘I know he’ll rise again on the resurrection on that last day’. Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me even though they die will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?’ “

The last thing that Martha expected was to see her brother alive again in this life. Sure she believed in a future resurrection but not today:

“When Mary came where Jesus was and saw Him she knelt down at His feet. She said to Him, ‘Lord if you’d been here my brother wouldn’t have died’. When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who came with her also weeping He was greatly disturbed in the spirit and deeply moved. He said, ‘where have you laid him?’ They said to Him, ‘Lord come and see’.”

“Jesus wept so the Jews said, ‘See how He loved him’ but some of them said, ‘could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

That after all was the question on everyone’s lips. What was Jesus doing?

“Then Jesus, greatly disturbed, came to the tomb, it was a cave and a stone was lying against it and Jesus said to them, ‘Take away the stone’. Martha the sister of the dead man said, ‘Lord there’s already a stench, he’s been dead for four days’. Jesus said to her, ‘Didn’t I tell you, if you believed you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone.”

“And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father I thank you for having heard me. I knew you’d always hear me but I’ve said this for the sake of the crowd standing here so that they may believe that you have sent me’. When He’d said this He cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out. His hands and feet bound in strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him and let him go.”

Now again, let me say, this is a matter of historical fact. This actually happened. Some people want to reduce this story down to an allegory. It didn’t really happen, it’s a fable that brings some meaning into our lives today. Can I say in response to that, let me say this, rubbish, absolute rubbish? This is a true story.

Either it happened or God is in the business of deceiving us because these Gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, are written in a narrative style. The sort that you would find recording a new story in a newspaper. Factual and that’s how they’re meant to be read. This actually happened.

But as with many of the things that Jesus did there’s also a symbolic dimension. When He healed people on the Sabbath only to be criticised by religious leaders, He was teaching people something about who He was and what God is like. When He hung around with prostitutes and tax collectors again to be criticised by the religious establishment, he was teaching us about the grace and the love of God.

So here, when He raises Lazarus, timed as it is just before His own death and resurrection, He’s teaching us something about God and the spiritual principle of death and resurrections. Sadly what we do sometimes is we kind of chop the Bible up, we segment the Bible stories and then we read them in isolation. This story’s about this, that story’s about that but something taken out of context can be distorted into a lie.

I mean that’s what the devil does when he takes the Scriptures. No the Bible is this huge sweeping story of Gods engagement with humanity. God coming after you and me out of His great love and mercy and compassion for us. You and I, dead in our sin, saved by God through faith in Jesus Christ to be given a new life and this Lazarus story is a graphic real life picture and representation of what that looks like, coming as it does at this critical point just months before Jesus dies on the cross.

Jesus wept over the death of His friend, as God Himself weeps over the death of each person in their sin. God is a God who loves and feels and laughs and weeps and cares and we’re made in His image after all. He is, apart from our sin, like us because we are, apart from our sin, made in His image. He feels, He’s moved, He aches, He rejoices and here He sets the stage to show us who He is through His Son. Both through His tears and through His well directed power, power that overcomes the absolute impossible.

Honestly when I was dead in my sin as Lazarus was dead in that tomb, well and truly dead, when my flesh was rotting and the stench of my sin filled the nostrils of God the last thing I could have imagined, the very last thing I could have believed for was a new life. I couldn’t imagine being raised from the death of my sin into some vibrant exciting new life in Christ here on earth. It was simply beyond my imagining. I didn’t hope for, I didn’t expect it, I simply gave my life to Jesus out of some impulse of love.

The new life, the resurrection life out of the rotting stench of my sin was a complete and utter surprise for me. The vibrancy, the joy, the peace, the hope, the sense of anticipation on what God’s doing and the small part He’s allotted for me to play. A complete and utter shock.

“Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone’. Martha the sister of the dead man said to Him, ‘Lord, already there’s a stench, he’s been dead for four days’ and Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?’ “

And that’s why faith is so important. God is a completely utterly surprising God. I mean would you have dealt with Lazarus this way had you been God? No. Would you have let your son Jesus die on the cross had you been God? Probably not. Would you have let you and me rot and die in our sin until we came to our senses? No.

Our plan is always the quickest and easiest path from A to B, step on it, business class please. But God’s thoughts aren’t our thoughts, His ways aren’t our ways because when God is our help, when God saves us from sin and death, when God does the absolutely impossible by pouring His Spirit into us and giving us a new life as He did with Lazarus, then God gets the glory.

And it’s so much better, so much more wonderful, so much richer and more enduring that way than had we done it for ourselves which we could never have done. And as we emerge from the grave of our sin, bound in the grave cloths of the past, with sin that still clings to our flesh, Gods command over our lives is the same as over Lazarus. Unbind him and let him go. Unbind her and let her go.

We can’t live our lives, our new lives bound up in the grave clothes of the past. There’s a new life to live, a vibrant life, a full life. A life that brings glory to God. That’s what this story is all about. That’s what Easter is all about.

When I was young I remember that I wasn’t one of the beautiful people amongst the crowd at school. Instead of being a talented sportsman which in Australia gives you immediate beautiful person status, I was shortish, a little on the dumpy side, quite academic and instead of playing rugby I played the piano. Yeah, all in all not a good look.

And the more successful I was at school the more the other kids gave me a hard time. My mother at the time told me it was because they were jealous. Now I remember thinking that just doesn’t make sense to me, why would you give someone a hard time and pick on them just because they’re jealous? But as I grew up, as the grey hair started to appear I discovered, you know something, she was absolutely right.

People, instead of having this ‘abundance’ mentality, hated it when someone else gets the limelight or when someone else succeeds. Particularly when that someone else isn’t one of the beautiful people. Particularly when that someone else is just a little bit odd and actually people do terrible things out of jealousy which brings us back to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

Now yesterday on the program we saw how Jesus did just that. An amazing thing, bringing someone back from the dead, something that people just didn’t expect. Lazarus has now been dead for four days, he’s definitely on the nose:

“And Jesus said, ‘Look take away the stone’. But Martha, who is Lazarus’ sister said, ‘Lord, there’s already a stench because he’s been dead for four days’.

“Jesus said to her, ‘Didn’t I tell you that if you believed you’d see the glory of God’ so they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew you’d always hear me but I’ve said this for the sake of the crowd standing here so that they may believe that you sent me.

“When He’d said this He cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out’ and the dead man came out. His hands and feet were bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him and let him go’.”

Now again lets just put ourselves in the shoes of the people standing around in that crowd watching this thing happening. Bethany is a small town. Everyone knows Lazarus. They know he died, they were there at the funeral four days ago. They saw him interned in the tomb. And Jesus now raises him from the dead.

What would your reaction be? Come on, what’s your reaction? I think I’d be utterly amazed, completely and utterly gobsmacked. Blown away. I’d be looking at this Jesus wondering, who is this man? How could He do that? It would certainly open my heart to listen to what He has to say and hear from God. At least I think that’s what my reaction would be, I hope that’s what my reaction would be.

So what was the reaction from the crowd? Well let’s take a look. John chapter 11 beginning at verse 45:

“Many of the Jews therefore who had come with Mary and seen what Jesus did believed in Him.”

So there’s pretty much the normal reaction, just what we’d expect.

“But some of them went to the Pharisee’s and told them what He’d done. So the chief priests and the Pharisee’s called a meeting of the council and said ‘what are we to do? This man is performing so many signs, if we let Him go on like this everyone will believe in Him and the Romans will come and destroy both our Holy place and our nation.”

“But one of them, Caiaphas who was the High Priest that year said to them, ‘You know nothing at all. You do not understand that it’s better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’ He did not say this on his own but being the High Priest that year he prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the nation and not for the nation only but to gather the dispersed children of God.

“So from that day they planned to put Him to death. Jesus therefore no longer walked about openly among the Jews but went from there to a town called Ephraim in the region near the wilderness and He remained there with the disciples.

“Now the Passover of the Jews was near and many went up from the country to Jerusalem before the Passover to purify themselves. They were looking for Jesus and they were asking one another as they stood in the Temple, ‘what do you think? Surely He will not come to the Festival will He?”

“Now the Chief Priests and the Pharisee’s had given orders that anyone who knew where Jesus was should let them know so they might arrest Him.”

Do you see this terrible irony? God sends His Son to this earth and it’s the religious leaders, the leaders of the strictest of the sects, the Pharisee’s who plot to kill Him. Why? Because they were jealous. He was stealing the limelight. He was taking their disciples and therefore taking their income from them. He was turning their safe cushy little religious world upside down and so from that day forth when they heard of the raising from the dead of Lazarus they plotted to kill Him.

So not only is the raising of Lazarus which in Jesus own words brought glory to God. Not only is this an amazing miracle, a signpost to what is to come, the death and resurrection of Jesus but it’s the turning point that brings it about. The Pharisee’s had been looking for a way to get rid of Jesus for a while now but this raising of Lazarus from the dead was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It was the act that set in motion the events that would cause Jesus to be glorified by being nailed to the cross. Why? Ha, because the Pharisee’s were jealous. Jesus had only done good, He was out there exposing religious hypocrisy which of course threatened these religious leaders, He was healing, He was preaching with power, He was setting people free from the yoke of religious oppression, He was telling them about God in this amazing new way, He was pulling crowds of five thousand.

Let’s just go back to the 1st century, Jerusalem. A crowd of five thousand is a huge crowd. Jesus was only doing good and that, the good that He was doing is what triggered His death. His goodness because it threatened the Pharisee’s and the Sadducee’s and the scribes and their cushy religious world and the cushy arrangement that they had with the occupying Romans.

And friend today still Jesus is being misinterpreted. The number of people who have no idea about who Jesus is, what He said, what He did, what He’s still doing and saying today, that ridicule Him, that are threatened by Him, that want to belittle a faith in Him. Friend I relate to that because that’s exactly where I’ve been for most of my life. I had not a clue about who Jesus was but wasn’t I prepared to persecute and ridicule the people who believed in Him.

In many parts of the world today if you confess to a faith in Jesus you’ll be persecuted and even killed. There are some people listening to this program right now today in secret for that very reason. This Jesus was persecuted for His good and to a greater or lesser degree those who follow Him today will be persecuted or at least ridiculed. That shouldn’t be any surprise to us because Gods goodness, the bringing of new life, eternal life is what got Jesus nailed to the cross.

What I discovered when I accepted this Jesus into my life is that not everyone around me was thrilled. Not everyone around me was excited when I went to Bible College to study a ministry degree. Not everyone was over the moon when I tossed in my rather lucrative career as a management and IT consultant to take up a full time ministry role because the goodness of Jesus shines a light into this evil world. It was true back then and my friend it is still true today.

We should not be surprised when the goodness and the glory and the grace and the mercy and the love of Jesus which flows out through those who believe in Him, bring upon these Christ followers a persecution. It happened to Jesus, it happens to us.