Jesus, he preached, he taught, he gave the disciples a mission and then they went and did it. They were called to go out and put that mission to work. So we're going to talk about today. We're going to read in Acts chapter one, and it's verses one through eleven. It should be on your screens as well.

This is a guy named Luke that wrote this. He wrote the Gospel of Luke and now he writes the book of Acts. And he wrote it to a guy named Theophilus. So he says in the former. I wrote the former account, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven.

After he had been given orders by the Holy Spirit to the apostles, he had chosen to the same apostles also. After his suffering, he presented himself alive with many convincing proofs. He was seen by them over a 40 day period and spoke about matters concerning the kingdom of God. While he was with them. He declared, do not leave Jerusalem, but wait there for what my Father promised, which you heard about from me.

For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. So when they had gathered together, they began to ask him, lord, is this the time when you are restoring the kingdom to Israel? He told them, you are not permitted to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, into the farthest parts of the earth.

After he had said this, while they were watching, he was lifted up and a cloud hid him from their sight. As they were still staring into the sky while he was going, suddenly two men in white clothing stood near them and said, men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking up into the sky? This same Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven. So here's a couple things that I want to kind of COVID about what was so important about this time period with Jesus. One of the things is he spent 40 days from the time that he rose from the dead until he ascended into heaven.

And during those 40 days, he did several things. I was talking with Karen yesterday, and the ladies had their monthly gathering and it was a good time. They asked me to show up there. I was like, I didn't put on a wig or anything. I just showed up as me.

They wanted me to talk about discipleship. And so we're talking about this stuff. But she said, I got questions about what you're going to be talking about in Sunday, the scripture. We're looking at Jesus for 40 days, taught his disciples, and we don't really have any, like, words of what he said. We don't know the things that he actually said.

I'd like to know more. It's like, I would too. But we have to kind of read not, not just between the lines. We have to pay attention to the lines that we do have, the few verses that we do have. We got to pay attention to them.

And so let's look at those things and say, okay, what is it that we've got? What is it that we actually do have available? And there's a few things that we see that Jesus did. One is he gave proof that he was alive. He gave them several convincing proofs of his resurrection.

You want it? You want to play with your cars down here on the carpet over here or your toys?

Okay, so he gave several convincing proofs of his resurrection. And one of those proofs that we have today is the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud of Turin. I've talked about it for a couple weeks and I'm not going to bore you with it, but here's one thing I didn't tell you. They ran it through an image analyzer called a VP8 image analyzer.

I don't know what that looks like. I'm just telling you. That's the machine they used. And in this thing, what they found was, was that there was almost a 3D holographic image of the person that was buried in it that we believe was Jesus Christ. And this was the burial shroud, the burial cover made out of linen that they would have wrapped the body of Jesus in after he was dead and laid in the tomb.

And this image that it took, they estimate it would have taken if we had a machine, which we don't. If we had a machine that could produce such an image, it would take 38 billion watts. 38 billion watts of radiant energy that was only be able to last 41, 40 billionth of a second. Like, forget blink of an eye, like so much faster than that, so much more power. We don't have enough power generation on this earth to make that happen.

So there is somehow this image in the Shroud of Turin that represents the person that was in there. And Jesus, we believe when he came back to life is when this happened. And that his image was placed in the shroud. So it doesn't stand in the realm of relics. It's actually an artifact that proves the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Another way that we have proof of his resurrection, besides the eyewitnesses, specifically, we have female eyewitnesses, which, sorry, ladies, back in the day were untrustworthy. Like they did not trust a woman's retelling of events. And yet the disciples of Jesus said, hey, these women, they were the first to see him. And we take their word seriously. The early church was actually elevating women to an equal status before this was accepted by the known world by the tune of hundreds of years.

Another thing that proves kind of the resurrection of Jesus was those who were with him, his. His disciples, his apostles, they all, except for John, were killed for their testimony that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. The Romans, the Jewish leaders, whoever it was, they all gave their testimony that Jesus had risen from the dead. And these people killed them for it because they wouldn't shut up about it. And because of that, some people say, well, yeah, but I mean, lots of people will die for a lie.

Lots of soldiers have gone out because they were told a lie. And they fought for it in different countries, different times around the world and all these different things. But there's Zach's probably like, what's going on, man? So the. There he is.

There's your daddy. All right, I did tell him. I already said that. I was like, I told you to bring him, so. No, you can go sit with dad now.

No.

So nobody will die for something they know is a lie, is the point. If you know something is a lie, you're not going to die for it, alright? If you know something is a lie, you're not going to die for it. You'll die for something that you believe is true, but you won't die for something you know is a lie. And not only that, but there were some other eyewitnesses who became believers in Jesus, and that was the brothers of Jesus.

He had brothers. And if you had siblings and at some point as a teenager or a young adult, you said, hey, guys, I want you to know I'm God, they'd be like, no, you're not. You know, I've lived with either no way or God. And at first, his brothers didn't believe in him. At first they were like, he's gone crazy.

But then. But then after his resurrection, after his ascension into heaven, they became not just believers, but fierce believers. Several or most of them died for their faith that Jesus was God, that their brother was the son of God. These things are just some, just some of the proofs we have of Jesus resurrection and his ascension into heaven. And the thing with this is, we look at these 40 days that Jesus was alive before the Holy Spirit shows up.

We look at these 40 days and we say something was going on, that Jesus was doing something was going on in his teaching. And he was teaching them some things that they needed to know. And even though we don't have the exact words he shared with them, we kind of can understand what he was trying to convince them of and teach them about. One of the other things that he did was during that time, he interacted with the physical environment. He ate food, he opened doors, he walked through things like he was with them physically.

And they said, this isn't just like a ghost or a spirit or a hologram or whatever. This is Jesus. So with those things in mind, I want to give just some kind of foundational observations on this passage that I came up with that I kind of noticed as I was looking through it, the first, that obviously that he had a human body, that was obvious. We just covered that. But I want to say something like his human body, his resurrected body was different.

His resurrected body, even though he bore the wounds from where they had nailed him to the cross, from where they had beaten him, from where they had poked a spear into his side to make sure that he was dead, even though he bore the remnants of those wounds, those wounds didn't hurt him anymore. Even though his body still showed the scars, he was not still sick or hurt or bleeding or broken in any way, shape, or form. And for some of us, we see that and we have hope in that. He gave us those signs that his body, even though it was still Jesus, he was different. And it was with that body that he actually ascended into heaven.

He ascended into heaven bodily, not just spirit, and there was a corpse left or anything like that, he ascended in his resurrected body into heaven and. And he is now what we call glorified, sitting at the right hand of the Father. But the angels told him that one day he'll return and that he will return in the same way. In other words, he comes back in that same body. This blows my mind in a way, because Jesus has existed eternally as God's Son.

He's a member of the Divine Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit, they've always been in existence. And yet Jesus is here. He is. He is born on this earth.

And now he is committed to being in that body for all eternity. The eternal God who could exist in any way, shape or form he wants has bound himself to human flesh and blood for all of eternity. When the Bible tells us that Jesus truly can identify with what we're going through, he not only has in the past, he does now. He has that body, but is glorified now where he exists now. The other thing, the other observation I made was that the 40 days that he spent were very intentional.

Not just showing the proofs of his bodily resurrection, but he gave very specific and focused teachings. The teachings that he gave, the things that he was telling to them were to prepare them for the mission that he had for them. He kept them on a certain topic or a certain line of teaching because he had a mission that he was going to be giving them, and he wanted them to be prepared for that. The other thing he was doing was teaching them about the coming of the Holy Spirit. They had heard him talk about the Holy Spirit, especially in his last few days or last few hours before his crucifixion.

He had taught them about the coming Holy Spirit, but he wanted them to understand what it would look like. And a lot of that changed quite a bit because you see guys like Peter who didn't really know a whole lot of what was going on. Like, Peter was always the guy that was kind of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. And he's doing all this stuff that gets him in trouble so often. And then all of a sudden, after he's.

Even before the Holy Spirit had come at Pentecost, Jesus, it says, just before he's taken up into heaven, breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit, they received a measure of the presence of the Holy Spirit to lead and guide them through right away at that time. And then after that, when the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost, they were filled with the Holy Spirit and they were able to be equipped for life and ministry in that way. Now, Peter, he was one of the disciples, of course, that received the breath of Christ, breathing the Holy Spirit on them. And Peter was immediately a changed man. Even though he'd been with Jesus for, we believe, at least three years.

Now, all of a sudden, with the power of the Holy Spirit and the wisdom and knowledge and discernment that the Holy Spirit gives, he was able to. To do a few things that were like, where did that come from? For instance, Peter stands up with the other disciples and he's like, okay, guys, let's go. Now, in any group or class setting or work setting, it seems like there's always like, that kind of, like, alpha person that's just Kind of like the natural born leader or just somebody that likes to take charge and they really don't know what they're talking about. Have you ever known that person?

Like, like, oh, not this idiot again, you know? Or sometimes it's just kind of like, okay, you know, this is the person that knows what's going on. We're gonna follow them. Well, Peter all of a sudden went from being like the idiot that everybody's like, he's saying it again, you know, to like, he's the guy that they're like, we should listen to him. He knows what's happening.

And Peter says, okay, Jesus had 12 disciples. One of them is Judas. Judas betrayed Jesus and the rest of us kind of too. And Judas killed himself. So now there's only 11.

There should be 12. And then he starts quoting scripture from the Old Testament. Now, these were people that just a few days before Jesus had clearly said, I'm going to die. I'm going to be dead three days. I'm going to rise again.

The scriptures say so. And they're like. Acted like they'd never heard it. And then now Peter, all of a sudden, he's quoting obscure references in scripture in the psalms and things. He's like, it was clear that Judas was going to do it.

The scripture said so. And he starts quoting the scriptures to say, like, his place will be deserted. And then he says, there's another one that says, may someone else take his place of leadership? So now he's saying, like, somebody else has to take Judas place. And he says, we need someone that was with us the whole time, that heard everything Jesus said that was there for all the miracles.

And so they nominate a couple people. They vote on it. Kind of like we'll do later, you know, like with board members and stuff. People were nominated. We're going to vote on them, and then they're going to serve.

And so that's what they did. But Peter, something changed in him as the Holy Spirit had been breathed on them. And so Jesus was preparing his disciples very specifically to receive the fullness or baptism of the Holy Spirit. But one other thing that he did that you might have missed was he corrected bad theology. Theology is like simply words or talk or conversation about God.

It's the way we understand who God is and what God has done for us and what God's calling us to do. And we all have bad theology at some point in our life, maybe at different places in our lives, we believed something that was wrong. Maybe it was from official teaching from a church Maybe it was from a book you read, or just some people just get all their theology on, like, YouTube and Facebook, you know, like, that's. There's some good stuff on there. Sometimes it's kind of like, okay, you know, like, that wasn't right.

And so sometimes we're getting our theology from bad places and bad teachings. And the disciples had some erroneous theology or bad theology. They expected that the Messiah was going, which is who Jesus was, the Messiah, the King of God, that the Messiah was going to come and right all the wrongs that had been done to their people, to the Jewish people, the nation of Israel, at the time. And they said, okay, great, Jesus, you died, you won, you came back to life. This is awesome.

Is it now? Like, now do we get to fight? Like, now, are you going to overthrow Rome? Are you going to give the rightful place of leadership back to the Jewish people? He's like, you guys are hung up on that one.

Okay? You know, there's people hung up on that today, and they're like, oh, we've got to go through. There's so much bad theology concerning what they think God's going to do with his people. When Jesus told us one big thing, he's like, go make disciples. I'm coming back.

I expect you to have more. There needs to be more of you than there was when I left. That's kind of his point, right? Like, go and make disciples. That's what we talked about in the wow Meeting yesterday was like, we all have the job of going and making disciples of other people.

That doesn't mean you've got to preach with, like, a bullhorn, you know, on a street corner, although I've known some people that do that. But you do have the responsibility to go out and as you're going along and as you meet people and get to know them and find out where they're hurting in their lives or where there's the lack of the presence of God in their lives. You can say, like, here's what God did in my life. Here's the testimony of what Christ has done for me. Here was what my life was like before I knew Christ, and here was the moment that I came to Christ, and here's what it looks like since then.

That was kind of the core of what we worked on yesterday in a little workshop in the meeting was like, just trying to drill that down and be able to share that within just a minute or so. Most of us like to talk too much, and we couldn't drill it down to A minute. It's really hard to do. But the other thing that happened in this time, besides Jesus giving proofs of his resurrection, correcting bad theology, preparing them for the coming of the Holy Spirit, one of the things that he did was when he ascended into heaven to. They're standing up, looking after him, because it's pretty cool.

They've never seen somebody float into the sky, you know, it just has never happened. They didn't know if they should have tied a kite string to him or something, you know, like, pull him back down. What's going on? Is this our fault that Jesus is floating away? What else is going to happen?

That's funny. Come on, guys. All right, here's the thing. They've seen him walk on water. They've seen him bring people from the grave.

They've seen him heal people. They've seen him do all this stuff. This one was new. And they're like, huh? Is he coming back?

What's going on? And then all of a sudden, a couple angels show up, men dressed in white. And they're like, what are we looking at, huh? Oh, Jesus. You went there.

They're like, yeah, don't worry about it. He'll come back the same way you saw him go. He'll return. By the way, Jesus, he had taken them to the Mount of Olives, which is the same place where they had arrested him before his crucifixion and all these things. This is where he went to ascend into heaven.

Because the scripture tells us that when the Messiah returns, that he will come from the Mount of Olives. So these angels that had showed up, maybe it's the same ones, maybe it's different ones, but there were angels that showed up at the birth of Christ to announce his birth. There's angels that showed up at the empty tomb to announce his resurrection. And now there's angels that show up at his ascension to announce his return. This is the hope of Christians all over the world, of all eras and times.

No matter what you thought or believed about your Christian faith, the hope is that Jesus will return, that he is not only triumphant and victorious right now, but that he does return, and that one day we will be with him forever. That all the evils of the world are wiped out and Christ reigns supreme forever and ever. Amen. All right, so that's where we find ourselves today, eagerly awaiting his return. So those were some of my kind of observations, and I want to draw what I think are some reflections and hopefully helpful conclusions.

The first one is this Jesus. I talked About a little bit. But his human body that has been now glorified in heaven, that his human body that is free from the pain of his. Of his trials and his suffering and his crucifixion, gives us hope that one day we have the same thing the Bible tells us in Isaiah and then quoted again in the New Testament, it says, by his wounds we are healed. And so often we pray like we believe that scripture, and we pray about it and say, okay, Lord, I'm suffering, I'm struggling.

I have this ailment, this disease, this illness, this cancer, this whatever it might be. And we pray for God's healing. And many times he answers that prayer in a miraculous way. I know several of you around this room have shared a testimony of a way that you were very ill, very sick, and God brought healing to you. I know there's probably a greater number of you that say, I prayed and prayed and prayed.

I had the church come around me. I was anointed with oil, whatever it is, and it didn't change. But God was with me the whole time. And I'll tell you what. We pray in faith, believing that Christ can, will and does heal us here on this earth, but that sometimes, for whatever his reasons are, he doesn't choose to do that.

Right now, we have hope. Because of his stripes, we are healed. Means he took the beating on this earth, he took the pain and the suffering on this earth, but that could not keep him down, that couldn't keep him in the grave. And because he triumphed over that, we know that one day we will share in that triumph, that he will give us an eternal triumph, an eternal healing, and an eternal wholeness and wellness. Amen.

Take comfort in that, even when you're suffering here on this earth today, that it's not forever.

The second conclusion to this is that the fact of the resurrection of Jesus, and I say it as a fact because there are skeptics and scholars who will argue with it, but the fact of the resurrection is one of the most provable events in human history. I just gave you just a very small bit of evidence at the top, just a few small things that help to be the evidence that proves his resurrection. Many of you don't need proof. You're like, I'm good. I believe it.

I'm fine. Praise God. I'm thankful for you. I'm thankful that you have that faith. But even those of us with the strongest faith, many times we have those kind of like, nagging things in our mind, maybe early in the morning, maybe it's somewhere throughout the day, maybe it's the last thing on your mind.

And you're like, is this God thing real? I'm not going to make you raise your hand, but I bet you've been there. Maybe you've been there lately. Maybe you're going through a time of that right now and you're going to find a moment in your life where you're like, lord, are you there? God, are you real?

Sometimes you just need a little bit of help. Oh, sure. We like to talk about Thomas, right? Like Thomas, the disciple that says, I won't believe that Jesus is alive again unless I can see the wounds, unless I can touch the holes in his hands, unless I can put my hand in his side where he was stabbed, unless I can see that myself, I won't believe it. And a lot of times we think that idiot Thomas Doubting Thomas, that's like his, that's what he gets known by us, like that.

Not that he went, what was it, to India, I think, and preached the gospel there. Like, not that he was one of the farthest ranging missionaries for Christ from that group of disciples. Like, none of that stuff. We just think like Thomas Doubting Thomas, he just didn't believe when the others did. It's like the others had seen him and he just didn't happen to be in the room when he saw him.

And he's like, I don't know about you guys, he was the first skeptic that turned into a believer as far as, like, you know, when everyone else saw it and he didn't, he's like, I don't believe it. I won't. I gotta see the proof. Jesus granted him that proof. Sure.

He said, blessed are those who believe having not yet seen, hi guys, congratulations. If you believe in Christ and you haven't actually seen the physical proof of his resurrection, praise God that you have that belief. But there are times where we have that spirit that Thomas had that says, I need more though. I need something that I can hang my hat on. I need something that my belief can be assured by.

I believe in Jesus. Like the guy that came up to him and said, can you heal my kid? And he says, can I? He's like, well, I believe you can, but just help my unbelief. Like, yes, I believe.

It's just that my belief struggles sometimes.

The resurrection is the most verifiable fact in human history, period. It gives us confidence in our faith and in our future. And I believe it also encourages us to look into the rest of the Bible to the rest of the things in the scripture and to dig into it. Because if we can believe that one thing, that may be perhaps one of the most outrageous claims in some people's minds that the Bible makes, if we can have that kind of faith in that thing, then we can begin digging into the other details in scripture and say, lord, thank you for your word. I believe in this.

I believe in you. The third conclusion and reflection that I make here from all of this is this the teaching of Jesus during this time. It says that he taught through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit, even though this is Jesus Christ, the second member of the Trinity. Now the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is. Is giving him the words to say.

The Holy Spirit is filling Jesus with the things to teach his disciples. I pray every week when I come up to preach, I'm like, holy Spirit, tell me what to say. Like, give me the words. It might be words that I've studied and written down some notes and all these things, But I need you to give me what needs to be said to the people that are here today. And so many times I'll say something where I'm like, I never thought of that.

I never planned on saying that. And it comes out in the moment. And sometimes I say the wrong thing and I really make myself look like an idiot. And sometimes it just so happens to be the one thing that somebody needed to hear that I had no idea about. I didn't know they were going through that in their life.

But the Holy Spirit knows. He says, boom, you say this, and I need you to share that with everyone.

Jesus speaking through the Holy Spirit, he teaches his disciples about the kingdom of heaven. Now, the kingdom of heaven, or that's what the Gospel of Matthew calls it, Matthew is a Jewish author writing to a primarily Jewish audience. And they don't like to say God or the name of God. They won't write it down. And so he would alternate the word.

Instead of saying what the other gospel writers call the kingdom of God, he said the kingdom of heaven, Heaven being the place where God dwells. And so they just kind of changed it around. He says, the kingdom of heaven. So when you read kingdom of heaven and kingdom of God, we're talking about the same thing, just to two different groups of people. They changed the language on it.

And so the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, is this idea that the authority of God is in place on this earth. Even when it seems like there's governors and presidents and kings and all these titles that they have, and all the things that they're doing and the wars that they wage and the economic policies and the human policies that they do about humanity and all these things, social policies, all these different things that it seems like they're in charge of. Their little group, their country, their area, whatever it might be. But in the end, Jesus Christ reigns and rules. And his kingdom will be not only stretching across all of time and eternity, but it will be physically located here on this earth.

When he returns, he will quash all evil, that he will be the one to whom all knees will bow. The Scriptures tell us that every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And so Jesus was during these 40 days, one of the things that he did was he told his disciples about his kingdom and he prepared them for it to focus on the thing that they would be calling people to, is to be citizens of his kingdom. In our Wednesday morning Bible study, we have those at 11 o'. Clock.

And we've been going through the book of First Peter, and he addressed them as foreigners and aliens in this world. He says, you live here, but this isn't where your citizenship is. Your citizenship is in the kingdom of God. When Jesus was on trial before Pilate, we saw this last week, I believe, when he was on trial before Pilate, the Roman ruler that ended up signing his death warrant.

The thing that they're having this conversation about is Pilate saying, are you actually a king? He said, who told you that? Did you come up with that on your own or did somebody give it to you? And finally Jesus comes around, he says, I am a king, but my kingdom isn't of this world. Pilate says, okay, we've settled it.

You're a king, but you're no threat to me because your kingdom is from somewhere else. So no problem. Pilate didn't understand it, and so many times we don't either. And for sure, Jesus disciples didn't understand it. So he spent time teaching them.

I would commend to you that you could read through the Gospels and, and you could look for every mention of where Jesus taught about the kingdom of God and what does he say about it? And you start kind of maybe taking notes or writing it down or meditating on it and saying, what does it mean to be a citizen in God's kingdom here on this earth? And how does that look when I have to bow my knee to respect the rulers that God has placed in authority over us here on this world? But when they get out of line. And when they're against God, we have a responsibility to say, no, I'm not going to do things that are contrary to the wills of God.

But we do that in a way that shows our love and respect for God and for each other.

The last thing is that bad theology needs correction. And there's a lot of it floating around. And some of you are listening to it and reading it. Some of you are getting into things that you're watching on TV or online or reading or whatever it might be. And it's things that pull you away from the centrality of Christ as King.

It pulls you into some other mindset and puts your focus on something else. Some of you are very excited to try to figure out end times stuff, eschatological things, which is what the disciples were caught up in. Like, when does Jesus come back? What does that look like? How is he going to do this?

Are they going to build another temple in the Holy Land? Are they going to do all these things? Jesus tells them, that's none of your business. You don't need to worry about those things. You need to focus on what I've taught you.

And as a pastor, I'll tell you what, I could grow a pretty big church if I start talking about all that stuff. People are hungry for it. They want to hear it. They don't care so much that Jesus taught you to love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. They don't like it when Jesus says, hey, if one of those Roman soldiers puts his burden on you, all of his gear, and tells you to walk a mile, go ahead and walk, too.

Like, they don't want to hear any of that stuff. And so when we begin teaching the things that Jesus taught, people are like, I don't know about that. The message of Jesus sometimes isn't very popular. And yet those are the things that we need to be focused on. And yet we get so excited about all this other stuff.

Bad theology needs to be corrected, and the correction is to hear the words of Jesus Christ and to study and meditate on them. So my conclusions are, we need the Holy Spirit. We'll talk about that a bit next week. And Jesus right now is getting his church ready to be continually filled with the Holy Spirit. There's something.

We'll talk about this more. But the Holy Spirit gives us wisdom and power and discernment. He gives us peace. He gives us conviction of sin. He equips us for the mission that Christ has called us to do.

And one of the most beautiful things that Jesus did. And I'll wrap up with this is Jesus said. He said, go into all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all the things I have commanded. And here's what he says. And remember, I am with you to the very end of the age.

That answers all our eschatological which is study of end times things that answers all of our eschatological worries. Jesus is with us. And one day he's coming back. Amen.