Sermon quotes on resurrection
Paul Chappell
Because of the empty tomb, we have peace. Because of His resurrection, we can have peace during even the most troubling of times because we know He is in control of all that happens in the world.
Charles Colson
I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss
We want gain without pain; we want the resurrection without going through the grave; we want life without experiencing death; we want a crown without going by way of the Cross. But in God’s economy, the way up is down.
Timothy Keller
If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said.
Timothy Keller
If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.
Bernhard Langer
To a Christian, Easter Sunday means everything, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
William Law
Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God’s goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.
Martin Luther
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
John MacArthur
The truth of the resurrection gives life to every other area of gospel truth. The resurrection is the pivot on which all of Christianity turns and without which none of the other truths would much matter. Without the resurrection, Christianity would be so much wishful thinking, taking its place alongside all other human philosophy and religious speculation.
Lesslie Newbigin
The resurrection is the revelation to chosen witnesses of the fact that Jesus who died on the cross is indeed king – conqueror of death and sin, Lord and Savior of all. The resurrection is not the reversal of a defeat but the proclamation of a victory. The King reigns from the tree. The reign of God has indeed come upon us, and its sign is not a golden throne but a wooden cross.
Lesslie Newbigin
It has never at any time been possible to fit the resurrection of Jesus into any world view except a world view of which it is the basis.
Wolfhart Pannenberg
The evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.
Eugene Peterson
It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.
Cornelius Plantinga
To speak of sin without grace is to minimize the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the fruit of the Spirit, and the hope of shalom.
John Stott
We live and die; Christ died and lived!
Lee Strobel
I went to a psychologist friend and said if 500 people claimed to see Jesus after he died, it was just a hallucination. He said hallucinations are an individual event. If 500 people have the same hallucination, that’s a bigger miracle than the resurrection.
N.T. Wright
Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.
Surprised by Hope
N.T. Wright
The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, HarperOne.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is love that believes the resurrection.
N.T. Wright
Resurrection in the first century meant something physically, thoroughly dead becoming physically, thoroughly alive again, not simply surviving or entering a “purely spiritual” world, whatever that might be. Resurrection therefore necessarily impinges on the public world.
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, HarperOne.
Dorothy Sayers
God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead.
Eugene H. Peterson
The practice of resurrection is not an attack on the world of death; it is a nonviolent embrace of life in the country of death. It is an open invitation to live eternity in time.
Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ, Eerdmans.
Timothy Keller
The biblical view of things is resurrection, not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had, but a restoration of the life we’ve always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.”
The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 32.
John Stott
Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus Christ is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection. It was the resurrection which transformed Peter’s fear into courage and James’ doubt into faith…It was the resurrection which changed Saul the Pharisee into the Paul the apostle and turned his persecuting into preaching.
Robert Townsend
If you don’t believe in the resurrection of the dead, look at any office at quitting time.
N.T. Wright
There is no form of early Christianity known to us- though there are some that have been invented by ingenious scholars- that does not affirm at its heart that after Jesus’ shameful death God raised him to life again.”
Taken from The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright Copyright (c) 2015 by N. T. Wright. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Robert Farrar Capon
God did not come to love the loveable and improve the improveable, but to raise the dead.
The Foolishness of Preaching (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
Donna Barber
Jesus penned his protest sign in dirt at the feet of an adulterous woman. He inspired men to climb trees so they could see over the crowds. He disrupted many parties and vandalized the temple. He publicly called out religious leaders and challenged the young ruler who was part of the top one percent. He led a march into the city from the back of a donkey; he led a die-in on the cross on a hill. But his ultimate defiance was of hell and death itself when he rose, with all power, from the dead. In doing so, he freed us to live out lives of resistance. In fact, he commands it through his mandate to love.
Bread for the Resistance: Forty Devotions for Justice People, InterVarsity Press, 2019.
Charles Henry Brent
The first and best illustration of the effect upon personality of death is found in Jesus Christ. After his reappearance from the grave, he is unaltered in character, tone of thought, and fundamental tal relationships. What strikes one forcibly is the absence of anything thing like a break in the continuity of his personality.
Sermon: “The Last Great Adventure.”
Thomas Keating
Every movement toward the humiliation of the false self, if we accept it, is a step toward interior freedom and inner resurrection.
Leon Morris
The cross is the victory, the resurrection is the triumph…The resurrection is the public display of the victory, the triumph of the crucified one.
Still Looking for inspiration?
Consider checking out our illustrations page on Resurrection.