When I was a kid, to me, Easter meant a card was coming from Grandma with a $25 check in it…jelly beans, chocolate, weird fake grass and wicker baskets. Body checking my sister as we both ran towards the same egg hidden obviously in the leaf-less trees in our yard. Mall trips and pictures with an incredible hulk bunny…freakishly overgrown and synthetically furry…I’m not sure I was ever told what Easter was all about when I was a kid…

As I got older, late teens, early twenties…my college years…so long ago now…Easter meant…well nothing. An early dinner at my grandparents house maybe and then well, that was it. Just another Sunday before just…another…manic…Monday…wish it was Sunday….(HA – Old horrid song!). No more candy, no more baskets, no more $25 checks…Holidays became to me, well, to be honest, a burden because they were the times where I had to go home…where I had to go and spend time with my family…and to me…that meant a day that I wouldn’t be able to spend getting high…

And as I thought through all of this, what Easter had meant to me during those years, before too long I found myself thinking through and recalling and reliving in a way…all the crisis…Crisis of being alone as a child. Not alone physically because mom was always there, my big sister was always there…but the cruelty, I didn’t even know then, but I do now…how very cruel we were taught to be…

Anger was born, wrath became my personality as men came and went including my own father and that carried me into highschool and that anger, that loss of so much that we as people are wired to need…love, security and acceptance…well I proliferated it…ruined people’s lives…not a clue at the time man (and this is the current story of still so many man), no real understanding of what I was doing but none-the-less…I see it now. Crisis as a child, crisis as a young man and then into college where a whole new class of crisis was born when I was introduced to drugs…

To the disciples, the Mary’s, to the crowds that had laid down the palm branches in front of the passing famous One, Jesus of Nazareth…the entire week had been filled with crisis! He had entered Jerusalem miraculously! Filled with pomp and praise…the air was electrified as the King of kings was welcomed into the Holy city…And the crowds roared! Hosanna! Hosanna! Then…crisis.

A wonderful meal filled with love and service as Jesus would wash the feet of His disciples…a midnight stroll over the Brook Kidron, which would be flowing with water mixed with blood as the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in the Temple…and then into the Garden…the Garden of Gethsemane where He would be betrayed by the king of crisis, Judas Iscariot…

Then the unlawful trial where he was tried at night, asked to testify against Himself…all against the Jews own laws…and finally handed over to Pontius Pilate where Pilate asks Him in Luke 23:3, "Are you the King?" And Jesus replies, "It is as you say." And at this, in verse 22 of Luke 23, "They became insistent, demanding with loud voices that He be crucified." And we read in verse 33 that they took Him to a place called Calvary, and there they crucified Him amongst thieves.

But, in the crisis they had forgotten, they hadn’t figured it out, they hadn’t considered…that it was Jesus that actually coined the term stolen by Arnold, "I’ll be back!"

And so on the third day, we find this account in Mark Chapter 16, look with me at verses 1 – 6. The tomb was empty! The proclamation from the angel, "He is risen!" In other words He is alive! He’s died yes, He’s been laid in the tomb, yes…yet He lives again! Just like He said!

But what strikes me, what grips me is something only Mark tells us…something not found in any of the other Gospels…that even on the way to the tomb…crisis. "How will we remove the stone?" They had no chance you see. They brought spices. They wanted access to Him…but the stone…it was placed there so that the body could not be stolen by the 11 remaining disciples! And here we have 3 women by Mark’s account…impossible. That stone could have weighed as much as 4,000 pounds…

And then my mind clicked as I mispronounced crisis…They encountered despair, I wasted so many years and so many lives…why…I may recall crisis but the real problem for these women and for me and maybe for you today, why the boulders remain, why the blockages persist to a life actually lived man…isn’t so much the crisis but it is the ignorance or the denial or the unawareness to the fact that Christ is NOT us!

You see the origin of the crisis, the birth point…where it all begins and remains until we get it man……the root of crisis…in the mispronounced word…Christ-us…when we trust in self, when we gather all that we will accept simply from what we can sensually understand…and therefore we make Christ to be us and the result…crisis!

We could not save ourselves. We cannot make ourselves right or clean or acceptable…we cannot be our own Savior…and God knew it…and it broke His heart…so He made a way and today He wants you to know that…that THAT is how much He loves you man!

Why roll the stone away? Jesus would appear to the disciples later in the Biblical account and how did He do it? Walked right through the wall man. So the stone was not rolled away to let Him out. That tomb could not have held Him if it was laced with kryptonite! It was for them! To show them that Jesus is exactly who He said He is…He is the Son of God…and He has done exactly what He said He would…take away the sins of the world man!!! And the proof? He would die and then He would rise from the grave!!

I want my little guy to know…my little girl…my big guy…who I just found out is 6’2"!!!!!!!!! This is a message for all men and all women because God Himself became a man…born under the law…to fulfill it…to pay a debt that we could not pay…righteously so that we may all be as He is today…alive forever!

Three friends were discussing death and one asked the group: What would you like people to say about you at your funeral? The first thought for a moment and said, "He was a great humanitarian, who cared about his community." The second pushed his chest out a bit and replied, "He was a great husband and father, who was an example for many to follow." The third took a breath, looked at the other two and with a kind of smirk remarked, "Look, he’s moving!!" HA!

The cross of Christ without the resurrection leaves man in crisis…no Savior…but because the grave could not hold Him…Truth has arrived man! A Dr. Seamands tells of a Muslim who became a Christian in Africa. "Some of his friends asked him, 'Why have you become a Christian?' He answered, 'Well, it’s like this. Suppose you were going down the road and suddenly the road forked in two directions, and you didn't know which way to go, and there at the fork in the road were two men, one dead and one alive--which one would you ask which way to go?'"　

Mohammad is dead. Budha is dead. Chrishna is dead. Joseph Smith is dead. Confuscious is dead. Ellen G. White is dead. Charles Taze Russell is dead. Literally there are hundreds of men and women who have claimed to be life…to have it man…and they are all dead! All the men and women that have lived from the beginning of time…some saying I am my own god, some saying there is no god, some saying god is what or whoever makes me happy…the world screams out "YOLO!" You only live once! The world has it wrong!!! Crisis! All of these proclaiming to be the way, the truth and the life…proved to be frauds man…they don’t have life today do they? They did not find life man, they found nothing but dirt man, six feet down! ALL. BUT. ONE. We have found LIFE! Because He lives…

John 5:24 – 25. Your turn. Will you hear? Will you live?