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Let us give reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the Gospel according to Matthew, the 28th chapter, beginning at the verse which is numbered 1. Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulcher.

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And behold, there was a great earthquake. For an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning and his raiment white as snow.

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And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said.

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Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him.

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Lo, I have told you." So they departed quickly from the tomb with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. And behold, Jesus met them and said, "Hail!" And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.

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Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his holy word. Let us pray.

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Suppose you were to pick up the newspaper tomorrow morning and the headline read, "Pope becomes a Protestant." Or perhaps the headline might read, "Nixon named chief fundraiser for Democrat Party."

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Or a headline like this one, "Golda Meir turns Arab." Astonishing headlines, and as soon as you'd read them, you'd wonder why. Such great effects must have equally great causes. After all, for the Pope to become a Presbyterian elder, or for Richard Nixon to become campaign

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manager for Edward Kennedy, or for Golda Meir to be packing her bags to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, something remarkable must have happened. I submit to you this morning another headline. A headline that's 2,000 years old, but don't let the dust of 20 centuries take the excitement

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out of it. This headline is just as astonishing as any of those fictitious headlines which I just proposed to you. And this headline might have appeared in the Jerusalem Gazette in about 33 AD.

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It reads as follows, "Paul becomes a Christian." That was an absolutely amazing piece of news. Paul, you see, was the most brilliant young Jew of his day. He was, in many regards, the hope, apologetically speaking, of the Judaism of his time.

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He was a student of the greatest teachers of Judaism in that day, Gamaliel and the like. He was zealous in his persecution of Christians. He pursued them from city to city to city. He stood there and approved and perhaps actively engaged in the stoning of men and women, yes,

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and boys and girls who held to this new and preposterous faith. Paul was altogether caught up intellectually and emotionally in a vigorous opposition to Christianity and every Jew and every Christian knew it. And then one morning, they opened the Jerusalem Gazette and there's the headline, "Paul becomes

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a Christian." Now that kind of great effect must have had some great cause. And the cause was the resurrection of Jesus Christ. For you see, the one thing that Paul could not deny was that which he himself had experienced.

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And when he writes to the Corinthians and talks about why he changed from being a Jew to a Christian, he places the emphasis right there, "I can't deny what has happened to me." He lists a series of the resurrection experiences with Christ, the appearance to some women,

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the appearance to the disciples, the appearance to other groups, one of them having as many as 500 people in it, and last of all, Paul says, "He appeared to me." Now that, Paul could not doubt. That is what reversed his life.

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That is what made him one of the Easter people. And as he entered into this new relationship with a Christ whom he had known to be dead and now absolutely knew to be alive, as he entered into a new experience with this regnant, risen, ruling Lord of his, he found the power of that Lord flowing into his life.

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And he sums the experience by saying, "Once the spirit of him who raised Christ Jesus from the dead lives in you, he will, by that same spirit, bring to your whole being new strength and vitality." That was Paul's word to the Romans.

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That word was the keynote of his ministry. That word is a life text for every person who is one of the Easter people. Paul had discovered, you see, not only that his life was reversed, but that it was reformed and beyond that, that it was transformed as well.

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He learned that the Easter people cannot lose. Now I'll admit that on that first Easter morning, it looked like Jesus was a loser. There he was, bottled by that rock against the mouth of that great tomb. There he was, smothered in that shroud, 33 years of age and already wiped out, a failure

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by most people's standards, a colossal flop. But then, all alone behind that stone, he rose to newness of life. The cold corpse of a Galilean carpenter spread out on a stone slab, white and pale. The eyes glazed with death.

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There is no color there. There is no life there. The heart is like a stone. And then, by the power of God, where there is no life, there is life.

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Where there was no movement, there is movement. The eyes see, the ears hear, the mouth forms words, the figure begins to move. Where there was no color, there is now rainbow within rainbow. Christ rises, and as Christ rises, he asserts that God is finally in charge of everything

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that is. Christ was saying behind that stone that morning, "No to death." Just as he said, "No to Pilate in the judgment hall." Just as he said, "No to those who tried to cross him out on a hill."

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So now, he said, "No to death." And saying it, that stone rolled aside, and he came out of that tomb. The miracle, the miracle which has transformed the ages. We have a God who brought his Christ out of a manger in Bethlehem, and the faith which

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makes Easter people into victorious people out of a tomb in Jerusalem. And we have that power available to us. Paul says, "Once the spirit of him who raised Christ Jesus from the dead lives in you, he will by that same spirit bring to your whole being the strength and the vitality that wins."

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A couple of weeks ago, a young man walked into a bookstore in New York City. He was whistling as he entered, very happy and enthusiastic. The clerk said, "You sound very joyous." He said, "I am joyous.

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I'm just back from Vietnam. I was a prisoner of war there for a little over two years, and now I'm home." She said, "That's something to be happy about." He said, "That's for sure."

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"But I'm happy about more than that. While I was there in prison, one day someone gave me an old book to read. It was dog-eared and it was beat up. I would have passed it up under any other circumstances.

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And when I discovered it was a religious novel, I was even more tempted to lay it aside because I didn't read those kinds of things. But in that circumstance, I read whatever was available. And I read it.

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And I learned that the people who belong to Jesus have a power and a strength and a vigor which other people do not have. And I claimed that for myself. And I was changed.

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I was freed two years before Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon got around to freeing all of us. I was freed then in that moment. And I came home to my dear wife whom I love like my very life.

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But I found that in her, and she's sweet and wonderful in every way, I still found in her not that same power, not that same joy, not that same freedom that I knew. And I want her to know it. So I'm here to see if I can find that same book to give it to her.

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I want her to read it. And I want to know what I know." And what does he know? He knows what Paul knew.

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He knows what it is to be one of the Easter people. He knows what it is to have such a grip on life that you cannot finally lose the strength and vitality of a risen Lord living in him. And not only can the Easter people not lose, but the Easter people cannot be finally discouraged.

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Oh, I'll admit, there on that Sunday morning in Jerusalem, standing outside the tomb before it was opened, things looked rather discouraging. Here was the Jesus who was the hope of the hearts of so many, the light in the lives of so many, that spark which brought the only joy some people knew to them, cold behind

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a stone. But he didn't stay there. He came marching out of that tomb. And with his march came the end of discouragement.

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I stood one morning at the Keflavik Airport just outside of Reykjavik in Iceland. There is no night that is as dark as a northern night. And there we were out on the airstrip, and it was very cold, and it was very black, and all you could hear was the sound of the wind.

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And I remember thinking as I stood there that the inky emptiness of that place was the inky emptiness of despair. That's what despair was like, with nothing but the sound of a hollow moan. I was standing with another fellow whom I'd only known for a couple of hours, and there

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wasn't any significant conversation between us. And then the dawn. And the dawn comes up very quickly. And suddenly it was there.

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And as it came, he said to me, "No one can hold back the dawn." And I thought to myself, that's a text for an Easter servant. No one can hold back the dawn. No one, no thing could hold back the power of that risen Christ.

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And it's that power, you see, which ends discouragement for the Easter people. Two weeks ago I walked through that door, and out here on the lawn I met a young man. I'd never met him before. Now I realize you can't tell a great deal about a book from its cover, but he was radiant,

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joyous, enthusiastic, powerful, effervescent. It was a pleasure to meet a person like that. I noticed that he had a cassette of the morning service in his hand, and he was walking out with it.

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He was a glutton for punishment, having one of those. He said, "Well, I'm going to take it home. I'm going to listen to it twice this afternoon." I said, "Why in the world are you going to do that?"

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He said, "Five years ago I got out of the service, and I went into a tailspin. I went into a time of depression and despair and other difficulties. And then after seeing a great number of doctors, I at last came to one doctor who said to me, 'What you really need is a good dose of the love of God.'"

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And I said, "Well, where in the world would I get a prescription for that?" He said, "I'll give you a prescription for that." He said, "You go down to the Glendale Presbyterian Church, and you sit there, and you listen to the love of God being heralded, and you buy those tapes, and you take those tapes

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home, and you play them every day, day after day after day." And he did it. And his life's been transformed, and he's renewed, and he's powerful again, and the discouragement has gone out of his experience.

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Why? Because he has become one of Christ's people, which means one of the Easter people. And the Easter people are not discouraged by events. They triumph over them.

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I learned about a young man in Scotland who developed cancer of the tongue, serious case, necessary to remove his tongue. That's a horrible thing for any of us, but it was especially terrible for him because he was a professional singer, a tenor, and he was going to lose his whole livelihood

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in this. He was on the operating table, and the surgeon said to him, just before they began the anesthetic, "Now, this will be the last thing you will ever be able to say in this life. So what would you like to say?"

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And without a moment's hesitation, he sat up there on that operating table, and he began to sing the words of that great hymn by William Cooper, "There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains." And he went on verse after verse until there wasn't a dry eye in that operating theater

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except for his own. And at last he came to the final verse, and he sang it louder and more triumphantly than all the rest. "Then in a nobler, sweeter song I'll sing thy power to save when this poor, lisping,

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stammering tongue lies silent in the grave." Yes, the tongue would be laid aside, and eventually he would be laid aside, but was that discouraging? No, because you see, he had in him the same power of the same Spirit that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.

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This is the testimony of Paul. This is the testimony of that prisoner of war in New York City. This is the testimony of a man on that lawn. This is the testimony of a young Scot's tenor who is today a mute, but who still, praises

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God, rises above that discouragement. For the Easter people, you see, cannot be defeated, cannot be discouraged, and finally, they cannot die. Paul says, "Once the Spirit of him who raised Christ Jesus from the dead lives in you, he

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will bring to your whole being new strength and vitality." And that's not only for this life, that is also for the life that is to come, for we have a God who is not only a God of the dead, but a God of the living. In the Hebrides Islands, they have a very lovely legend about a God who lived beneath

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the sea. And the great desire of this God who lived beneath the sea was for a little boy baby, a human baby. And he was always trying to catch little babies that might be in boats passing along the top

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of the sea from island to island. And so the people, according to the legend, always clutched their children close when in their boats. On one occasion, he almost got a boat.

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He was surging behind it, this sea God, when the boat just touched the shore, and they lifted the little boy who was in it out onto the shore just as this God approached in a great wave. They got away with the little boy, they thought, except the God managed to send, according

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to the story, just one little wavelet, one little bit of foam into the heart of that child. And as that God, momentarily frustrated, settled back down into the sea to his palace beneath the waves, he was heard to say, "He will return to me.

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For I have put a bit of myself in his heart." And years later, the people in the village were astonished to see a strong young man one day go down and get into a rowboat and begin to row out into the sea, not toward any other island.

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And they called to him and said, "There is no island that way!" But he rowed on. And as they watched, when he had gotten out a good distance, he stood up in the boat and dived into the sea to the God who had put a bit of himself in his heart.

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When we were made, God put a bit of himself, a bit of eternity, a bit of the kingdom of heaven, a bit of that which is eternal right inside of us. And it cries out for him. That's the reason we're here this morning.

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And that's the reason that all those who are not here this morning will still, on this Easter day, at some time, in some moment, no matter how fleet, think about things that are eternal and think of themselves in terms of those things that are eternal. For the heart is restless till it rests in the one who made it.

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And the promise, the sure claim of the Easter people is that because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and because we belong to Jesus Christ, we have all eternity stretched out before us and we can approach it unafraid. I cannot explain it to you.

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I cannot explain what happened back there in Wilton, Iowa, when the Reverend A.D. Sanborn was called to the home of a young girl who was dying. And he went into the home and she was sitting up in bed and the family gathered all about, but she didn't seem to be addressing them.

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She was looking ahead as if she could see something. And she said, "I see the gate and it's beautiful. And I see the city that is behind it. And I see all the splendor of the place.

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I want to go. When will they open the gate and call me? Oh, here they come. And when they open the gate, I'll go in."

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Then suddenly her face became very sad. "Oh, they've let little Amy in before me," she said. "Well, I'll certainly be the next one. And over here I see all of these people.

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One's I've known. Oh, here they come to the gate again. And this time it'll surely be for me. This time they'll be..."

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And once again there was sadness. "Oh, now they've let Grandpa go in before me too. Well, I'll have to be the next one. I just can't wait any longer.

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Oh, here they come again. And they're calling my name. This time it will be..." And with that, she was gone.

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And the Reverend A.D. Sanborn, fascinated by that experience, said to the family after their initial grief, "Who is this little Amy? The only person we knew by that name

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was a neighborhood child who used to live beside us about 12 years ago. Grandpa, is that someone in your family? No.

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Grandpa was an older man who lived across the street from us in the town where we used to be. Do you know anything about these people? Or we know where they live.

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Would you give me their names and addresses?" "Well, yes." And they gave them to him. And that day he sat down and he wrote letters

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to both of those people. And about two weeks later, on the same day, he received a response from both parts of the country. Not from the people to whom he had written,

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but from members of their family. For you see, both little Amy and Grandpa had died on the same day as that little girl. And indeed, at the very same hour.

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I cannot explain that. But the testimony of scripture, and the testimony of new researches in parapsychology, and the testimony of every person who knows his own heart

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and who is one of the Easter people is that that is exactly the way it is going to be. That we cannot lose in this life. We cannot and will not be discouraged in this life.

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And we cannot lose in the things that are eternal. That's the power that belongs to the Easter people. Don't make the mistake this morning of those first disciples who came running to that tomb,

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peeked in, and then went home again unconvinced. Don't just peek at Easter. Claim it for yourselves. I say this to you, not out of some sense of urgency

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that you might die tonight and not know all of the glory of which I speak. I don't think any of you will die tonight. I feel sure that all of you will be alive tomorrow morning.

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But the question is, that life you're leading tomorrow morning, will it be a victorious one? Will it be an undiscouraged one? And will it be a life that will go on into a life hereafter?

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That's the question. Are you one of the Easter people? Now, there's just no way to conclude a sermon like this with a prayer.

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There's no way to conclude it by moments of meditation. The only way you can assert that you're one of the Easter people is with a song. And I looked all over, trying to find a song for Easter people.

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And I had to go all the way to New Jersey. That's at the other end of this strange continent of ours, back in the primitive East. And back there, I found this song.

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It's called "Every Morning is Easter Morning." It's the best Easter song I've ever heard. It's in your hymn book this morning. They put a copy there just for you.

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Only leave it there when you leave. And now dawn's going to lead us. The choir's going to sing the first verse. And then we're all going to join in and sing it all.

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But remember this. Don't turn to page two of the song till dawn gives you the victory signal. [MUSIC - "EVERY MORNING IS EASTER MORNING"]

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(SINGING) Every morning is Easter morning. Come, y'all, all of us. Every day, the church can hear the masses go from door to door. The Lord's coming, he will be coming.

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The Lord's coming, he will be coming. Every morning is Easter morning. Come, y'all. Every day, the resurrection day, the passage over and on.

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The fire will light the earth, the heavens shall overflow. I am one of the Easter people. My good life will be gone. Every morning is Easter morning.

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Come, y'all, all of us. Every day, the resurrection day, the passage over and on. Many years, you'll have your feet under the snow. Guess what?

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Getting straight from the Easter people, God and children of the world. Every morning is Easter morning from now on. Every day, the resurrection day, the passage over and on.

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Yesterday, I was bored and lonely, but today, I'm happy. I belong to the Easter people. I'm so excited to be here. Every morning is Easter morning from now on.

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Every day, the resurrection day, the passage over and on. Every morning is Easter morning. Every morning is Easter morning. Every morning is Easter morning from now on.

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That was so good, Don. I want to sing that chorus again, just the coda part. Mary Ann, pick it up right there. Every morning is Easter morning from now on.

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Every day, the resurrection day, the passage over and on. Every morning is Easter morning. Every morning is Easter morning from now on. You are the Easter people.

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Go forth in power and in joy and in victory from now on. (static) (static)