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Series: Self-Denial | Sermon 4: "Self-Denial Leads to Life" — Easter Sunday
We live in an age of deepfakes — where the extraordinary is met not with wonder but suspicion. On Easter Sunday, the claim is bold and clear: the resurrection is not a fabrication. It really happened. Paul staked everything on it, writing that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins.
But the resurrection is more than a historical event. It is the ultimate vindication of the most counterintuitive teaching Jesus ever gave: whoever loses their life for me will save it (Luke 9:24). Over four weeks, this series has explored what it means to die to self — to be like a seed that falls into the ground before it produces life.
The disciples lived this tension in the most painful way imaginable. They had surrendered everything to follow Jesus — three years of self-denial, dusty roads, and dashed expectations. And then came the arrest, the denials, the cross, the tomb. Behind locked doors on Saturday, it looked like self-denial had led nowhere but loss. Saturday is the day of silence — and many of us have lived there, sometimes for years.
Then Sunday came. An empty tomb. Burial cloths lying folded. And Jesus — real, embodied, risen — appearing to his disciples, eating with them, and tenderly restoring Peter with the same three questions that mirrored his three denials.
The resurrection is God's signature on the way of the cross. The seed did not stay in the ground. Jim Elliot, martyred at 28, said it plainly: "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."
The empty tomb is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of yours.
