Easter Sunday. Not sure it gets any better than that. Packed house for both services, lots of family and friends and people from our community making their annual pilgrimage :) The beauty of knowing that visitors are coming (and we plan for and expect visitors every week) is that you can be praying and preparing for them to respond when they hear the great news of the resurrection. Of course the challenge is that people (not just visitors) go in to “I’ve heard it all before” mode very quickly so you’ve got to present the timeless truth of the gospel in a way that may penetrate an already hardened or indifferent heart.

We’ve been working our way through the gospel of Mark over the past 6 or 7 weeks and on Sunday we finished the series by looking at the resurrection account in Mark 16. As you read, you can’t help but notice the obvious presence of both doubt AND belief from those who have encounters with the risen Christ. Over and over people are told about the resurrection, they are afraid and they don’t believe. Then an encounter with Jesus and they move from doubt to belief. They go to tell others but the others don’t believe. Until they meet Jesus. Incredible.

Let me sidestep here and say that this should be very encouraging to those of you who are in leadership positions at your church and may not be seeing the fruit of lives changed by the gospel. Even those who were in the presence of Jesus himself after the resurrection were not able to convince his closest friends – the ones who had spent three years with Jesus, witnessed the miracles… he even told them three times he would be killed and then alive three days later. And those guys couldn’t be convinced by those who had seen Jesus alive, until they had an encounter themselves. This should be encouraging to you. Pray for Jesus to reveal himself to people who need to know him.

Here’s what our Easter Sunday service looked like -

Everlasting God – Brenton Brown – Bb
Our God – Chris Tomlin – Bb
“He Is Risen!” responsive reading
Christ The Lord Is Risen Today – Bb -> C
Offering
Congregational Prayer
Video –  Skit Guys “Grace”
We Will Run – Gungor – E
Forever Reign – Hillsong – C
Christ Is Risen (chorus/bridge) – Matt Maher – F
Message – Mark 16
I Stand In Awe – Mark Altrogge – A

Three things about our service on Sunday that I want to share with you -

• A couple of really special moments yesterday. At the end of “Christ Is Risen” we normally do this big ending where we just give people a chance to declare and celebrate  - “He’s alive! He’s alive! Our God is not dead, he’s alive!” Yesterday people starting clapping and cheering while we were singing that part. I’ll remember that for a long, long time. Incredible.
• We’ve been praying for some people in our church to come to Christ for YEARS and we saw several of them respond yesterday. We’re doing some follow-up to work through that response and decision but God was clearly at work. Amen.
• I posted this yesterday on twitter – “Worship leaders, don’t let the Pharisees in your church decide if your service was ‘good enough.’ It will never be good enough for them.” I can’t even tell you the kind of response I got from that. It clearly struck a chord. If you feel like nothing you did was appreciated, people were focused on singing the “right” songs rather than focusing on Jesus, if people just deflated you with their words as soon as the service was over know that you are not alone. Jesus is still risen. The gospel is still true. And Pharisees are still present.