Jesus has risen but has it made a difference in your life?

Here we find the women who had gone to the tomb to prepare the body of Jesus coming away from the tomb. As you recall they are coming away from the tomb because the angel instructed them to go tell the disciples that Jesus had risen from the grave. The angel not only instructed the women to tell the disciples that Jesus had risen but they were to also give them another important piece of information. The women wre supposed to tell the disciples to get to Galilee because that is where they would see Jesus. According to verse 8, the women left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy. He is risen, now what?

There are some words in the bible that are more comforting than others. Today we have two such words in our text. These words should bring comfort to the saint and the sinner alike.

It has been 14 days since we celebrated Resurrection Sunday (Easter), have you become disinterested or disconnected? 14 days and look how many have stopped going to church already! We get more excited about the trappings of Easter than the reason why we as Christians celebrate the Resurrection. We get more excited about how we are going to look during Easter than how the Resurrection is supposed to make us look.

If you purchased a house and regardless of whether you made the payment or not, the mortgage company said we will never penalize you in any way, how many of us would make a mortgage payment? In viewing Jesus only as your ticket into heaven, you find yourself saying now that I have Jesus I don't have to make any other changes in my life. I can still be of and in the world and everything is cool.

As I was going through the books of Kings, it just amazed me how many kings did good in the sight of the Lord but never tore down the high places. In every instance where they did not tear down the high places, the people went to those places to worship. Some even went there to worship Jehovah; but can you really worship God in such a place?

Of all the talk of problems over the past several weeks the problem we are going to discuss today, like other problem areas, has many different faces. It has a "not admitting I'm wrong" face; it has a denial face and it has a prideful face. While having this problem as an unsaved person is bad enough, it should be troubling to Christians when Christians exhibit this type of behavior. What am I talking about? Accountability!

It's easy to believe and trust in God when things are going well but what about when they are not? People will come to church when things are bad but what about when they go from bad to worse? What about when the issues of life don't seem satisfied with knocking you down they want to beat you down. What then?

Do you have or have you ever had a problem that seemed like it will or would not ever go away? I'm not necessarily talking about the person sitting next to you but sometimes it seems as if a problem has taken up residency in your life.