Good morning Edge Church! I am Neil Schori, one of the senior pastors. It is so good to be with you from wherever you are. We're in downtown Aurora and we are so glad that you joined us last week. We celebrated Easter in a way that is certainly different than we ever have before. We did it from behind closed doors. We never anticipated that we would have to do that, but we did it. Most of us did it with our immediate family. Some people had to be alone and that's really hard. But Easter still happened and Jesus is still alive. And it's exciting because Easter isn't about how we celebrate, but it's about the person that we are celebrating and Jesus is still alive and we get to celebrate all that he has done for us and his great love for us. A year ago, none of us would have imagined at all that we could even have an Easter celebration without a big gathering at church or with family and friends.

But we did it because he is still alive and he is alive today. It made me wonder a little bit about some of the assumptions that we have about God. Like what have we gotten wrong as we've been on our journeys with God, it's always been done. It's been done like this since the very beginning in the garden of Eden. The very first people that we learned about in the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve, they sinned and then they tried to cover up their sin and they realized that only God could do that. People got God wrong on 9/11 when a group of hijackers hijacked airplanes and flew them into buildings. The terrorists wanted to crash planes to kill people because those people didn't believe the way that they did. And people have gotten it wrong about God. Even on the very day of Jesus, his resurrection over 2000 years ago, Jesus had repeatedly told his followers what was going to happen, that the Savior had to suffer and he had to die.

And on the third day, he would rise again, but they still didn't grasp it. They were convinced like all of us probably would have been, that dead people don't come back from the grave. They felt like death was a failure and maybe Jesus wasn't all that people had thought he was. So today we're going to look at one of my favorite stories in scripture because I'm convinced when I read this story that these characters were a lot like me. And maybe you're going to find that there are a lot like you. We're going to look at Luke 24:13-35. It says:

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him.

He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”

They stood still, their faces downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

“What things?” he asked.

“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”

He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.

I love the mystery of this story because it tells me that even today, Jesus could be right next to me or right next to you and we might not recognize him. I wonder if that's because he appears to us in ways that we're not really looking for him or, or maybe it's because he isn't the kind of savior that we were hoping for him to be.

What that tells me is that God exists outside of our paradigms and outside of our constructs that we give them. So what can we take from this story that was written about 2000 years ago and apply it to our lives today in 2020? Here's my first suggestion. We all have blind spots in our experience. The reality is each of us has an experience in life and each of us has a lens in which we view our lives and experience things. There are all sorts of things that shape our families of origin... shape those experiences and give us a lens. Pain and suffering shapes that. Blessings shaped that, but if we don't recognize those things, it's very likely that we're going to make God a lot smaller than he is or maybe we'll act on things that God actually has never promised us that he would do for us.

When I was in seminary, I remember being taught principles of exegesis and I said, Jesus, those are big sounding words for some people, but exegesis is basically digging into scripture to understand what the author's intent was and then applying that truth to our lives. I said, Jesus is a little bit different and it's when we take our own ideas and we superimpose them onto scripture, so we take our experience and put it on to scripture and we look at scripture through the lens of our experience first. Obviously neither one is perfect because we're humans. So whether we're trying to understand what scripture says or whether we're trying to make scripture mean something based on our experiences, neither is perfect because we are humans. But exegesis is a more focused attempt to be centered on God and what he wants to say to us.

And I said, Jesus, is more centered on our own ideas and reading those into the Bible. Now, these disciples had spent years with Jesus and they were really disappointed in the person that they thought Jesus was. They thought that he was going to be a political liberate or that he was going to come and set the Jews free from Roman oppression. And they were convinced that Jesus had disappointed them and let them down because they hadn't seen him yet. It makes me wonder how many times I've been frustrated by the God that I've made instead of the God of the Bible. And maybe you've done that too. Maybe you have ideas about God and you've made him smaller than he actually is. So here's our second thought today. To know God, we must have a high view of scripture to know God. We must have a high view of scripture.

So one of the things that we have to look at is how do we address our blind spots when it comes to Jesus? And then on top of that, besides recognizing that we have blind spots, we also need an action step. Don't wait. And we find that step right here in this passage. Notice that Jesus didn't run up to the disciples and say, Hey, look, it's me. It's Jesus. I'm alive. He also didn't try to show them his nail-pierced hands to say, look, it's me. You remember you saw me crucified and I'm alive. I was dead and now I'm alive. After asking the disciples what they were discussing when he approached them on the road to Emmaus and He heard about their sense of letdown about him, can you imagine how much he probably wanted to say, guys, it's me!

But that's actually not what he did. He did something very different. He took a different approach. Luke 24: 25-27 shows with that is the first he started, he said, “how foolish you are.” Now, I don't know about you, but I don't love how that sounds initially, but it doesn't mean exactly how that comes across.

So instead of trying to show who he was by saying, “Hey, look, you remember what I look like physically? You remember that my hands were pierced with nails?” He didn't do that. He actually took them back to the Old Testament scriptures that they had read for their whole lives. He took them back to that to be the source of truth. His words might sound harsh when he says how foolish you are, but they would have echoed in the ears of the disciples that probably heard what he said in Matthew 7 when he talked about what it looked like to be foolish and what it looked like to be wise. Matthew 7:24-27 says:

Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

You'll see the difference between those two. We don't get to escape the reality of storms and trials happening in our lives. The question is, what is your foundation when you go through the storms and trials in your life? Jesus placed a very high value on his followers, not just hearing what he had to say, but actually doing it, and he said that when we do that, when we practice the words that he gave us, our words will still be affected by the storms, but our lives will not be destroyed. That sounds particularly important to us and this era that we're going through right now as we wrestle with this, this completely unseen enemy and coronavirus, that it can hit us.

It can even kill, but it cannot take the life that Jesus has for us. Here's an important point. The opposite of foolishness is not simply gaining knowledge. We all know a whole lot of people that we'd probably say are pretty foolish, that know a whole lot of things. The opposite of foolishness is knowing information and then actually practicing it. That's wisdom. And I'd also say that if the resurrected Jesus went to scripture to point out the truth to followers on the very day that he was resurrected, how much more should we rely on the truth of scripture in our lives? Here's our final idea today, and I think it's probably the most important one. Salvation is free, but we must receive it. Salvation is free, but we must receive it. Last week was Easter and we celebrated all that Jesus did for us, that he came to earth and he lived a perfect life and then he died for our sins and he rose from the grave.

So the reality is that sin is defeated and forgiveness is for you, but you don't automatically get to be reconciled to God because of the reality of what Jesus did for you. Because if you leave it there, what you've done is you've heard information, you can hear about Easter, you can learn about the resurrection of Jesus, you can hear about forgiveness, but until you appropriate it for yourself, it's an unopened gift. It's fascinating to me that we see this played out in the story of the disappointed disciples on the road to Emmaus. It says as they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther, but they urged him strongly, “Stay with us for it's nearly evening.” The day is almost over, so he went in and stayed with them. I think it's an interesting point and I really want everyone to grasp this, that Jesus will never force Himself on you.

He'll never force you to believe in him in any way, shape or form. He just offers himself. He offers his life, his death, and his resurrection. He offers all that to you and he gives you a choice. You can learn about him all of your life and do nothing with him, but that's like being offered the best gift in the entire world and leaving that unopened present, it doesn't make any sense. Does it? Revelation 3:20, it's the last book in the Bible. Listen to these words of Jesus.

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

God is eager to save you. He is eager to give you a life that is fulfilled. But if you're like me, there are, there are times when you doubt that maybe this week you've had moments where you've gotten bad news or maybe you've lost your job like 22 million Americans have over the last handful of weeks.

Sometimes when life gets hard, it's hard to see the goodness of God. But I want to encourage you to do this. When you doubt if God loves you, when you doubt if he's for you, I want you to imagine that you're looking at that empty cross from 2000 years ago. The cross that Jesus came off of. And I want you to imagine that empty grave, the grave that was robbed by the power of God and know how deeply loved you are by God and how far he was willing to go to invite you to come home. So what would it actually look like to take this information? And appropriate it for yourself because no matter how faithful people were in your family or are in your family, there's no family that's faithful enough that it just gets passed on to you. You actually cannot be a Christian just because everyone else in your family was a Christian.

You can't be born into Christianity. You have to be born again to receive Jesus. Well, here's how you do it. The apostle Paul tells us this way in Romans 10:9-11 I love this. He said,

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. As Scripture says, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.

If you've never made that move towards Jesus, I invite you to do that right now. Wherever you are. You don't have to be embarrassed because you're at home. Maybe you're by yourself. Maybe you're with your family. Maybe you're just with a few people. I just want to invite you to make this prayer your own Jesus. I believe that you are Lord of all and I believe that God raised you from the dead so that I could live forever with you. Thank you for dying on the cross for my sins and defeating death. Please give me the grace to follow you for the rest of my life. That's all you have to do is just to turn away from yourself and turn to God. That's as simple as it is and then the Bible says that you are born again. When you do that, what an incredible opportunity that God has given all of us and I don't want any of you that are watching this today to wonder what your next step is in the faith.

As we move into our final worship song, I would like to invite you to share in the comments below over the next minute and a half or two minutes. What was it that made you move towards Jesus for the first time? So share that in the comments right now. This is your testimony. If you did that and you'd look back at this time and you're going to have a warmth in your heart as you realize that God's been pursuing you for a long time. Look back and share in comments right now. What is it that made you take that step towards Jesus for the first time? And if you haven't done that, I'm actually more interested in hearing from you. No one on this feed is going to shame you for this or make you feel less than you are. Not less than. You're just in a different place in your journey. If you haven't done that and you're willing to share why you haven't done that, I would be so honored if you would share in the comments what it is that's kept you from moving towards Jesus for the first time. All comments are safe and completely judgment-free. Take a moment and do that right now.