Well, we want to welcome all of you who are watching online and on YouTube, from home and from around the country. But especially want to welcome those of you who are inmates at Soledad and locally. We always are happy that you watch worship, and we pray, really, this would be the encouragement of the week for you. God bless you, and thank you for watching. The Raiders have relocated to Las Vegas. That is absolutely the worst city those guys could play in. So many distractions. The bookies in Las Vegas have figured out the odds now of the Raiders winning a Super Bowl in the next 10 years. They say it's more likely that Lady Gaga will become a nun. I think that's about right. They've also calculated the odds of you buying a lottery ticket and winning a million dollars. The odds are 1 in 111 million. That's a long shot. But I spoke with a member of Compass this last week who refused to let the odds bully her. She bought a ticket a few weeks ago. She won $1 million. And she's going to tithe that. In fact, she already has tithed it to this church. I told her, "Let me give you some more money. Buy more tickets." It always seems impossible until it's done. Saying something's impossible, I think, is a lack of imagination. So what are the odds of Jesus rising from the dead? Well, zero. When you're dead, you're dead. It's impossible. You don't rise from the dead. End of story. So I should point out to you that the disciples, on Sunday morning, the third day, were not standing outside of the tomb, expecting Jesus to walk out risen from the dead. No, they were hiding out in Jerusalem, afraid that they were going to be the next who were crucified by the Romans. The disciples had seen Jesus do many miracles: walking on water, healing the lame and the blind. But rising from the dead? That was a miracle nobody thought could happen. I was an atheist as a philosophy major at Stanford. I had never been to a worship service in my life. My family played golf on Sundays. We didn't need church, didn't need God. Things were good. I was convinced that the Bible was just lies, fiction, myth. Now, I didn't own a Bible. I'd never read a sentence in the Bible. I'd never done any investigation of the facts about the Bible. But I was absolutely sure that the Bible was myth, because all of my friends did. And I was into what George Orwell called groupthink. I thought as they thought. And so, without ever reading the Bible, I was confident that it was not true. So as a student, I decided to write a paper to prove to gullible, weak-minded Christians that the resurrection never happened. The facts ambushed me. I found out that James was the half-brother of Jesus, and he didn't believe a word that Jesus taught. In fact, at one point, he goes out to get Jesus and bring Him back home, because he thinks He's lost His mind. And yet this James, suddenly, after the crucifixion, believes Jesus rose from the dead, that Jesus is God. And he began to preach that, and continued preaching it, even though he was executed for preaching Jesus was God. That was treason, because Caesar's king, not Jesus. Now, what in the world would make you believe that your half-brother was God? What would make you change your mind like that? Only one thing. He saw the risen Jesus. Just like it says in 1 Corinthians 15. Same thing with Paul. He thought Jesus was a heretic. He absolutely hated Jesus and anybody who called himself His follower. And he set out to murder all Christians and destroy the church. And he was having some success, until suddenly this hater of Jesus becomes a lover of Jesus, and begins to preach Jesus is God, and became the greatest church planter in history. Now, what would change a hater of Jesus into a lover of Jesus? Even willing to be executed by the Romans, because you wouldn't stop preaching it? Only one thing. He saw the risen Jesus, just like he says in 1 Corinthians 15. The facts ambushed me. The only honest conclusion I could come to, as I looked at all the facts, was that Jesus did rise from the dead. It's the only thing that explains the transformation of the disciples, who are hiding out in Jerusalem, afraid they're going to be next to be crucified, until just a week later, they're fearlessly preaching on the streets of Jerusalem: "Jesus is risen." Only the resurrection explains that. You know, people will die for something they think is true, but absolutely is not true. But they think it's true. But people will not die for something they know they lied about. These disciples didn't lie. They had seen the risen Jesus, and they were willing to die for that. I became a Christian because the resurrection is true. It means that Jesus is God, because only God could rise from the dead, right? Only God. And it gives us the best news that we could ever hear. First, Jesus has the power to upgrade us as people. He has the power to break destructive attitudes and behavior patterns that make messes in our life. In my research this last week, I came across a story of Ron Chester from Pennsylvania. He's 89 years old, and he's a slow learner. The police pulled him over at 2:00 in the morning, because he was weaving down the road. When they asked him where he was going so late at night, Ron said, "I'm on my way to a lecture about the danger of alcohol abuse." [laughter] And the cop asked, "Who in the world would be giving that lecture at 2:00 in the morning?" Ron said, "My wife." Ron had heard this lecture repeatedly, and for years, but he didn't change. If you want a better marriage, draw a circle around yourself and start there. If you don't change, nothing changes. Isn't that true? If you don't change, nothing changes. I read a story about a guy who went to the doctor with two badly burned ears. The doc asked what happened. He said, "Well, I was ironing my shirt when the phone rang, and I kind of panicked, got confused, and stuck the iron up to my ear." The doc said, "But you have two burned ears. Why?" He said, "The idiot called back." Blaming. The other person's the problem. Instead of drawing a circle around ourselves, we're forever drawing circles around other people and saying, "You're the problem, not me." But I tell you, as long as we insist other people are the problem, we will never solve our problems. And that's exactly why a lot of people, you know, never change. They never really solve their problems. They live in circles, 'cause they're forever drawing circles around other people and never around themselves. Years ago, I was at a humor conference in Oakland, and at the coffee break, people were mingling, and this guy came up to me and introduced himself. And as soon as he found out that I was a pastor, he told me in no uncertain terms, rather proudly, "I don't need God, and I don't need the church, because I've never done anything wrong." That's the only person I've ever met in my life who was sinless. I asked him, I said, "You mean you've never lied?" "No." "You've never lost your temper and said things that you regret to people in your family?" "No." I said, "You've never been selfish and demanded your own way, rather than compromising?" "No, I've never done anything wrong." I was quiet. True story. Quiet a few seconds, and I said, "Can I speak to your wife?" He said, "Sure. I've had three of them." Ring, ring. Clue phone. Here's a guy, three women have left him, but he's not the problem. They're the problem. Most of us know that 55% of first marriages fail. But did you know that 64% of second marriages fail? And 78% of third marriages fail. You want to take a guess at what the percentage of failure is for fourth marriages? Too bad, I'm going to tell you anyway: 84%. What's wrong with that? I would think that the more often you're married, the better you get at it. [laughter] But the fact is, the more often you're married, the more likely there will be a divorce. Why is that? Because people are forever drawing circles around their ex, rather than themselves. And you know, you listen to people who've been through a divorce. Usually that's what's happening: describing the problems of the other person, rather than, "You know, I had some skin in the game too." C. S. Lewis said sin is like bad breath: everyone knows you have it except you. I have found that to be true. People are just unconscious of what it's like to live with them, or to work with them. We never think about those things. We're slow learners. Mark Twain said, "We're all like the moon. We have our sunny side, but also our dark side." He was talking about sin. But we don't much like the word "sin," or to be called sinners. You don't much hear preachers talk about that. But I'll talk about it, because the Greek word for sin is so significant. It's hamartia. And hamartia is an archery term. And it describes an archer pulling back the bow and letting the arrow fly at a target, and missing. It means missing the target that you're shooting at. And so being sinful doesn't mean that we are bad people. It just means we miss the target a lot. For example, we know forgiving is a good thing. Most of the time, we would like to be forgiven. We think forgiving is the right thing to do. And yet, for most everyone here, there are people we have not forgiven, and we still hold a slight grudge against them. Maybe a big grudge. We carry a little bit of resentment towards some people in our past. We miss the target and disobey a commandment of God, which is sin. But it's not calling us a bad person. It's saying you miss the target. St. Augustine famously said that sin is its own punishment. And it is. You think about resentment and bitterness. Oh, life is too short to live it that way. It's not the abundant life. It's its own punishment. And for example, we know holding our tongue is important, with our spouse and children. But sometimes we say hurtful things anyway. We miss the target and make a mess. Hamartia. We're like the moon. We do have our dark side. The angel said in Matthew 1, verse 23, "Name the baby Jesus," which means God salvages us from our cripplings. Not condemn us, but salvage. I like that word. Salvage things in our life, as He clears up hamartia. Attitudes and habits that cripple us, in marriage, or as a parent, or in business. I'll bet there's a parent here this morning who needs a relationship with a child, a grown child, salvaged, because it was damaged by your cripplings, your hamartia. Surely that rings true for someone here. I wonder if there's a marriage that needs salvaging before it's too late. But so far, you keep drawing the circle around the other person, and haven't drawn it around yourself. I've been reading a biography about Alexander the Great. The best line in the book is this: "He conquered the world, but he couldn't conquer himself." You know, there are a lot of people who are successful in a lot of ways, but they're not successful in relationships, or marriage, or with their children, the things that are really most important. And it's because we're drawing circles around other people rather than ourselves. He had a hair-trigger temper. He would sometimes slap soldiers, and occasionally he'd actually kill a soldier that he was angry at. And so eventually, his army mutinied. They turned against him. Why? Because he never drew a circle around himself and thought about what it was like to live with him. People tell me they cannot change. Have you heard this speech? "I am the way I am. God created me the way I am. I can't change. Tough." Surely you've heard that speech. I think that is one of the saddest speeches in the world, because saying "I can't change" is a lack of imagination about the person I could become, that I could actually be better. We're back at that humor conference: "I don't need to change, because I'm already perfect." It's a lack of imagination. Do you have much imagination about how you could be upgraded in attitudes or behavior? Any attitude at all? Do you have any imagination about the person you could actually become by the power of Christ? Cripplings actually solved in your life? Any imagination about that? It's important to spend some time imagining yourself upgraded, because if we can't imagine it, we'll never do it. And that's what the resurrection of Jesus means. The resurrection means He has the power to do the impossible. And that means the impossible of changing us is no problem for Him, if we put ourselves in His hands. Will you do that? Easter is about a lot more than chocolate bunnies and Easter eggs. And secondly, there's no regret, no sin, no guilt that we carry that Jesus will not forgive and cleanse from our conscience. I think many of you will be surprised that what Jesus was most often criticized for was that He forgave people who should not be forgiven. For example, He forgave a prostitute who stripped for money. And He forgave a woman caught in adultery, red-handed, that everyone else wanted to stone. He was forever doing that. Now, my guess is, most everyone here has a chapter in your personal history that you don't want anybody to ever read. I know I do. Way back. I have some things I hope to God nobody ever finds out about. But I have found in Jesus Christ this impossible forgiveness. Honestly, what regrets and guilt do you still carry? A woman who watches our TV ministry came to see me. She was eaten up with guilt. She was a stripper and a prostitute. She wanted to leave that life. So she chose a church in this community to start going to on Sundays, hoping that she'd find the power to leave this life. But some women in that church found out what she did for money and let her know that she was not welcome in their church. She teared up, and she asked me, "Isn't there a church that a person like me, who has messed up and done bad things, can go to?" I said, "Yes. Compass." Because Compass is full of people who have messed up and been forgiven. And at the head of the line is the pastor. We are a church with a policy of no condemnation, because if we start condemning people, we're part of the condemnation. I read to her Isaiah 1, verse 18. You know that verse: "Though your sins are as scarlet, I will make you white as snow." Wow. I read her 1 John 1:9: "If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to purify us from all," no exceptions, "all unrighteousness." There's nothing in your history that Jesus will not forgive you of, if you'll ask Him. Put your name in that verse, and underline the word "all," because the death of Jesus on the cross was sufficient. Add nothing to it. She became a Christian that day in my office, and she is regular in worship at Compass. In fact, in the last service, I saw her out there. You don't know who she is. You never will. But she's a different person now, and worships at Compass. Third, Jesus offers us the power that raised Him from the grave. The very power of the resurrection is offered to you. Ephesians 1:19 promises the power of the resurrection to us, so that we could do what otherwise, humanly, we couldn't do. I want you to let that just ring in your ears: so you could do what otherwise you could not do. So that verse says, "How incomparably great is His power to help those who believe in Him." The same mighty power that raised Jesus from the grave. Think of that. Don't think of Christianity as being a good person. It's being a powerful person inside. Don't think of it as a creed. It's the offer of the very power of the resurrection to you. And so a Christian can never again say "I can't," or "This is just the way I am." You have the power of the resurrection in you, if you've come to Christ. I counseled a woman who listened to our radio program, and her story was that she loved a man deeply, and moved in with him, and became pregnant. He told her to get rid of the baby, or he was gone. She didn't want an abortion, but she didn't want him to leave. And so she did it. Six months later, she caught him cheating on her, and he left her for this other woman. He had betrayed her. He had used her. He was responsible for the death of a baby. And yet he left her for another woman. With incredible emotion, she said to me, "I hate him. I will always hate him. I will never forgive what he has done." I believed her. Because forgiving him, well, that's just asking too much, isn't it? I talked to her about forgiving him as the only way she could take back her life, rather than rehearsing again and again the bad things he had done. But she, I can still see her, sat there stone-faced, looking at me as I spoke. And then she said, "It's not the end of the story. He called me this last week and asked if I would bless his marriage. He's marrying the woman he ran off with. Would I bless his marriage? I told him to go to hell." And I wanted to stand up and cheer, because that's where you belong. But then I stopped, because I have seen so many times, bitterness is a form of self-abuse. It's a form of self-abuse. I see her occasionally around town, and her eyes tell me the torment she's living in. She is bitter, but he dances the night away with his new wife and gives no thought to what her opinion is. Bitterness is a form of self-abuse. The power to forgive is not a piddly thing. It is a lifesaver. Life is too short to be tormented by grudges and resentment. It's just too short to let it poison a single minute of our life. Are you in the group that says, "I can't forgive"? Or are you in the group that says, "By the power of Jesus Christ, I can"? If you're in the "I can't" group, why not switch this morning to the "I can" group? You can do that. When I graduated from Princeton in theology, I became a youth pastor in an Oakland church. And the mother of one of the girls in my youth group developed cancer. And so, because of her daughter, I went to visit her, and over the months, I became very close with Dorothy. One day I heard she was back in the hospital, and I went to see her. And when I walked in the room, she said, "Pastor Mike, I'm very depressed. I'm thinking about all the things I don't want to miss if I die, and I don't feel the presence of Jesus with me." And so I opened up my Bible, and I just began to read all these promises of His presence, like Hebrews 13:5, where Jesus says, "I will never, never leave you nor forsake you. I will always be with you." And I did something that I have done often in my ministry. I went over and got a chair in the room, and I pulled it up next to Dorothy's bed, and I said to her, "Jesus is in this room with us. Let's give Him a chair to sit in, so we can talk with Him." Now, I know that for many of you, that sounds very unsophisticated. But for many of us, it's reality. We do talk to Jesus and hear Him talk to us. His presence in our life. Dorothy and I sat there, and we talked to Jesus in that chair, and we laughed and remembered beautiful things in her life, like her wedding, and like the birth of her children, and so on. And she talked with Jesus about how she wanted to see her daughter graduate from high school and be there when her daughter eventually married. We laughed, and we cried together. After a while, the nurse came in and said that visiting hours were over and that I had to leave. And she started to move that chair, and Dorothy said, "Don't move that chair, please." And the nurse said, "Why?" Dorothy said, "Because Jesus is sitting there, and I'm talking with Him." And the nurse gave her an unbelieving, condescending smile. We walked out into the hallway, and the nurse said to me, "Thank you for cheering her up." And I said, "I didn't. Jesus did." And she gave me the same condescending smile. That night, Dorothy died. No one expected it that soon. A couple of weeks later, I was in that same hospital. I saw that nurse in the hallway, and I went up to her, and I said, "Did you see Dorothy anymore that night?" She said, "Yeah, I did. I was walking the hall, and I heard talking in her room, and laughter. So I went in there. I thought somebody had snuck in there after hours. I went in there to shoo him out, and there was no one in there." I said, "Did Dorothy say anything to you?" She said, "Yes. She asked me to move that chair closer to her." And I asked, "What chair?" And this time, without any condescension at all, she said, "The chair Jesus was sitting in." Dorothy died laughing, because she was in the very presence of Jesus, talking with Him that night. And I have to tell you, there is a world of difference between knowing about Jesus and actually knowing Him personally, and practicing His presence in your life. Having prayers in which you don't do all the talking, but you hear Him talk to you. There's a world of difference. Do you have that kind of relationship? You know, a lot of people just discount this: "Oh, it's just not that important." Just like I did in college. You don't know what you're missing. But you know, the other thing I find is that people don't want to work in order to have this relationship. They just want it to be magically dropped on them. But it takes spiritual sweat in order to develop that kind of relationship. First thing you have to do is ask Jesus into your life. And a lot of people have never done that. They believe in Jesus. They don't realize the Bible says even the devil believes in Jesus. But inviting Him in your life as Lord and Savior, have you ever done that? And then it takes coming to worship regularly on the Lord's Day. Not irregularly. People who are irregular in worship, they never grow close to God. I promise you, it doesn't happen. It's like, "I want to get strong, but I don't want to go to the weight room." Not going to happen. Worship, you sing truth, and you hear sermons that teach you new things and challenge you. And then becoming part of a small group, a life group, out there, that reads quotes from my sermons on Sunday and then just discusses them. You don't have to be a veteran, seasoned Christian to be in that group. You can be a rookie. And what happens is, people rub off on one another, and faith becomes contagious. Best thing you can do for your marriage is to be in a couples group. You could do that this morning. But whatever, don't let life bully you. Pull up a chair for Jesus and start talking to Him. Let me pray for you. Lord Jesus, we don't want to be religious, and we're not into rituals. We want a relationship with You that's deep. And I pray right now the Holy Spirit would be stirring some of us up, that we'd want this, and we'd go after it. Change our schedule in order to change. Speak to us, Lord Jesus, I pray. Amen.