Resurrection Sunday

I love Easter. I think it is the best holiday in the world. In fact, I think it is the best holiday in the history of the world! Unfortunately the name Easter needs to be changed because of its pagan origins from ancient Babylonia, so in this article we will call it, "Resurrection Sunday." It is the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And without the resurrection of Jesus, there is no forgiveness of sins! So that makes it extremely important to all human beings!

This year for Easter our church planned a special service. We decided to move the service time a little earlier from 6:15 pm, to 5 pm, in order to have a big meal together afterward. We had a few special decorations and even made invitations for people in our church to pass out to friends or family members. Our hope was to bring in people to our church to hear about the good news of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and hopefully see people place their faith in Jesus to receive forgiveness of sins by His grace.

Well, as the service began, we had a great time of worship and then moved into a time of teaching of the word. We started in Matthew chapter 28 to look at the account of the resurrection and then jumped over to 1 Corinthians 15 to look at the significance of the resurrection. But during the sermon, a visitor began to talk out. At first, I thought she was just trying to add some sort of insight to the passage, which is not something we encourage during the sermon because it interrupts the teaching the God's word and can easily cause the person teaching to lose their train of thought. But because this was a visitor I just assumed that she did not know the norms of our church and I let it go. But then again, she chimed in and her comments were not really relevant to the subject, the resurrection. I let it go again. After a good amount of time had passed, she spoke up a third time saying something that was actually against what I was teaching in 1 Corinthians 15. She was saying that there is no resurrection, that is why we need cemeteries. I began to wonder what was really going on here.

Finally a fourth time she interrupted and I could not understand what she was saying. So I made a comment to the entire group asking them to please hold their comments or questions until the end because it was hard to keep my train of thought and I would be more than happy to sit down to discuss anything after the service had ended. We moved on. But it was not long before she interrupted again. At this point I had to ask her to leave. I asked a few of the guys in the church to escort her downstairs to avoid anymore interruptions. But as she got up, she began to tell the entire church that she was a servant of God and that we were all fallen angels.

The entire situation clearly disrupted our service, causing a ton of confusion, which disappointed me. And I am not the type of person who tries to over-spiritualize everything, but the way things happened and the things this lady was saying definitely seemed to be at least a little bit demonic. Personally, I think that makes sense. We have been planning this service for several weeks to invite new people to our church and tell them all about the forgiveness that God offers to them through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then when several new people came, it turned into exactly the type of situation that Satan would love to disrupt to prevent people from hearing the good news of Jesus.

Now fortunately, we were able to regroup. I apologized to the congregation for the distractions and for having to ask this lady to leave, because I never want someone to leave our church; I want them to stay and hear the teaching of God's word. But it had to happen because it was distracting everyone there. So we got back into the passage, finished up the glorious news of Jesus' resurrection and victory over death, and presented the offer of salvation that only Jesus provides, to the entire group. We were also able to move into another time of worship and take communion together to remember the body and the blood of Jesus that was broken and shed for our sins.

Following this we had our meal together. Everyone from the service hung out down stairs sharing the food, talking and enjoying one and others' company. Because of the earlier starting time, people were able to stay talking longer and not feel like they had to get home to go to sleep, which made for a great time of fellowship. The food was really good and there was more than enough for everyone eat. Overall, the service was a huge blessing, even with the distraction that occurred. God's bigger than anything and He would not allow something as little as that to ruin such a great celebration.