The Resurrection of Jesus, Everything Rises and Falls With Leadership, The Sin of Cowardice
The Disciple-Leader Newsletter #70
Discipleship
“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.”1
Tim Keller
Was Jesus resurrected? This is the most important question of your life.
Along with Tim Keller, Elder D. Todd Christofferson expounded on how deep the implications of this question are.
“Consider for a moment the significance of the Resurrection in resolving once and for all the true identity of Jesus of Nazareth and the great philosophical contests and questions of life. If Jesus was in fact literally resurrected, it necessarily follows that He is a divine being. No mere mortal has the power in himself to come to life again after dying. Because He was resurrected, Jesus cannot have been only a carpenter, a teacher, a rabbi, or a prophet. Because He was resurrected, Jesus had to have been a God, even the Only Begotten Son of the Father.
“Therefore, what He taught is true; God cannot lie.
“Therefore, He was the Creator of the earth, as He said.
“Therefore, heaven and hell are real, as He taught.
“Therefore, there is a world of spirits, which He visited after His death.
“Therefore, He will come again, as the angels said, and ‘reign personally upon the earth.’
“Therefore, there is a resurrection and a final judgment for all.
“Given the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, doubts about the omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of God the Father —who gave His Only Begotten Son for the redemption of the world —are groundless. Doubts about the meaning and purpose of life are unfounded. Jesus Christ is in fact the only name or way by which salvation can come to mankind. The grace of Christ is real, affording both forgiveness and cleansing to the repentant sinner. Faith truly is more than imagination or psychological invention. There is ultimate and universal truth, and there are objective and unchanging moral standards, as taught by Him.
“Given the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, repentance of any violation of His law and commandments is both possible and urgent. The Savior’s miracles were real, as is His promise to His disciples that they might do the same and even greater works. His priesthood is necessarily a real power that ‘administereth the gospel and holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God. Therefore, in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest.’ Given the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, death is not our end, and though ‘skin worms destroy [our bodies], yet in [our] flesh shall [we] see God.”2
To summarize that quote, if Jesus was resurrected, everything changes! So, was Jesus resurrected? Is it a cool story or is it historical? And how can you know?
I’d share two suggestions.
First, and most importantly, ask God. Exercise faith, read the scriptures, and seek revelation. The Holy Ghost testifies of truth and there is no truth more important to know than this. It is the keystone of Christianity. If the resurrection didn’t happen, Christianity crumbles. The Holy Ghost would love to testify concerning Christ’s resurrection.
Second, I think it’s important to realize that the resurrection is historically verifiable. I will share some resources in the footnotes that you learn more about that.3
Simply put, Jesus resurrection either happened or it didn’t. It’s real or it’s fake. There is no fuzzy gray area or middle ground when it comes to this. I witness that it did happen. He lives. He is a resurrected, living, perfected Being. But you have to find that out for yourself. If you aren’t sure, you shouldn’t wait any longer to find out. There is nothing more important to gain clarity on.4
Leadership
“Everything rises and falls with the level of your leadership.”5
John Maxwell
Every action, every goal, every decision, and ultimately, every outcome6 is a measurement and reflection of your leadership.
This is true both intrapersonally and interpersonally.
You are either leading your life or being led.7 This is doctrinal. The Book of Mormon teaches, “There is a God, and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.”8
This is also a scientific case for this.9
William George Jordan articulated this truth in a way that really resonates. He wrote: “Man has two creators,—his God and himself. His first creator furnishes him the raw material of his life and the laws in conformity with which he can make that life what he will. His second creator,—himself,—has marvelous powers he rarely realizes. It is what a man makes of himself that counts … Man in his weakness is the creature of circumstances; man in his strength is the creator of circumstances. Whether he be victim or victor depends largely on himself.”10
Everything rises and falls with the level of your leadership.
Mental Performance
“The greatest sin you can commit against your own life, is to know what you want - and not act.”11
Kim Stafford
What keeps you from acting? You might have different answers for different scenarios. But the deep reason for most scenarios is that you just lack courage.
Courage—like love—is in short supply these days, which means it’s in high demand! We love seeing other people be brave. It’s contagious. We go to movies, watch TV, read books, and consume all sorts of media portraying people acting courageously. Someone once accurately observed, “People pay money to see others believe in themselves.”12 It’s true! It’s mesmerizing and inspiring. Maybe because it’s so rare.
C.S. Lewis wrote, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.”13
That’s a true statement. One neuroscientist wrote, “Our nervous system leaves no fossil record of our thoughts, feelings or ideas, except those which are transformed into actions.”14 Courage is the catalyst to transforming thoughts, feelings, or ideas into action. Think about it. Without courage, nothing happens. You might feel love for someone or have an intention to say something kind, but without courage, that intention will never turn into action.
I have a vivid memory being a missionary on a hot summer day in 2016. After a brief conversation with a hostile man on his driveway, my companion and I proceeded to our next destination. As we walked across the street, I had a very strong feeling that I needed to go back and share my testimony with him. But he was angry. He didn’t like us. My exchange with him would end even more badly than the first had. Justification after justification led to me smothering any oxygen that impression was carrying. So we kept walking. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t even tell my companion.
To this day, I think about that moment. Who knows what would’ve happened. Maybe he would’ve continued to be angry. Maybe a miracle would’ve occured. I don’t know. But I do know that I had no courage on that day, and as a result, nothing happened.
Nothing meaningful has ever happened without courage. Think about the big moments in your life.
Job Interview
Asking someone on a date
Proposing
Trying out for a team
Starting a venture
Starting a family
This is a small sample, but none of these happen without courage. Courage is the ultimate litmus test for discerning how worthwhile an action is. There is a direct correlation between the meaning something will have in your life and the courage it requires from you. If you want to have meaningful days, if you want to live a meaningful life, filter your choices by the courage they will require.
Lastly, it serves nobody to play it small.15 Actually, playing it small isn’t just an act of cowardice, it’s an act of disobedience. Consider what Jesus taught: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”16
What are you currently shrinking from? Where in your life have you been hesitating? What has God planted in your heart that you have not treated with the seriousness and courage that He wants from you?
Whatever that is, this is your sign to stop justifying. Stop hesitating. Act.
Maybe one of the reasons Jesus asked us to “become as little children”17 is because children have a belief and imagination requisite to accomplish the goals and reach the heights that God has in store for you. Somewhere along the way, life seems to sully our vision of that. Your work is to become like a child again in how you see yourself and your ability to accomplish the impossible.18
Two statements to end this week’s newsletter:
“A child has no trouble believing the umbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.”19
“Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”20
The Reason for God. Book by Tim Keller.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Talk by D. Todd Christofferson.
The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus. Essay by Benjamin C. F. Shaw
The Resurrection of The Son of God. Book by N.T. Wright.
Evidences of the Resurrection. Podcast by FAIR — Faithful Answers, Informed Responses.
Excerpt from The New York Times Sunday Opinion Am I a Christian, Pastor Timothy Keller? Nicholas Kristof interviews Tim Keller. Published Dec. 23, 2016.
And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?
Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19).
But let me push back. As you know better than I, the Scriptures themselves indicate that the Resurrection wasn’t so clear cut. Mary Magdalene didn’t initially recognize the risen Jesus, nor did some disciples, and the gospels are fuzzy about Jesus’ literal presence — especially Mark, the first gospel to be written. So if you take these passages as meaning that Jesus literally rose from the dead, why the fuzziness?
I wouldn’t characterize the New Testament descriptions of the risen Jesus as fuzzy. They are very concrete in their details. Yes, Mary doesn’t recognize Jesus at first, but then she does. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) also don’t recognize Jesus at first. Their experience was analogous to meeting someone you last saw as a child 20 years ago. Many historians have argued that this has the ring of eyewitness authenticity. If you were making up a story about the Resurrection, would you have imagined that Jesus was altered enough to not be identified immediately but not so much that he couldn’t be recognized after a few moments? As for Mark’s gospel, yes, it ends very abruptly without getting to the Resurrection, but most scholars believe that the last part of the book or scroll was lost to us.
Skeptics should consider another surprising aspect of these accounts. Mary Magdalene is named as the first eyewitness of the risen Christ, and other women are mentioned as the earliest eyewitnesses in the other gospels, too. This was a time in which the testimony of women was not admissible evidence in courts because of their low social status. The early pagan critics of Christianity latched on to this and dismissed the Resurrection as the word of “hysterical females.” If the gospel writers were inventing these narratives, they would never have put women in them. So they didn’t invent them.
The Christian Church is pretty much inexplicable if we don’t believe in a physical resurrection. N.T. Wright has argued in “The Resurrection of the Son of God” that it is difficult to come up with any historically plausible alternate explanation for the birth of the Christian movement. It is hard to account for thousands of Jews virtually overnight worshiping a human being as divine when everything about their religion and culture conditioned them to believe that was not only impossible, but deeply heretical. The best explanation for the change was that many hundreds of them had actually seen Jesus with their own eyes.
I witness that He does live! He is resurrected! And He loves you.
YouTube video by John Maxwell.
An obvious caveat here is that there are certain events that you can’t control. Viktor Frankl had no control over being put in a concentration camp. But his outcome was much different than others due to how he lead himself and others. See Man’s Search for Meaning
You are either leading your life or being led by the natural man. “For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” Mosiah 3:19
^ This doctrinal truth goes along great with the scientific thesis put forth in footnote 9.
2 Nephi 2:14; emphasis added.
Elder David A. Bednar commented on this, “In the grand division of all of God’s creations, there are things to act and things to be acted upon. As sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father, we have been blessed with the gift of agency—the capacity and power of independent action. Endowed with agency, we are agents, and we primarily are to act and not only to be acted upon.”
Yale Professor of Psychiatry (and Latter-day Saint) Sam Wilkinson recently published a book titled Purpose. In it, he writes extensively about how God-directed evolutionary and biological processes point to the purpose of human existence. Below is a premise he puts forward in his book:
“Nature seems to have created within us competing dispositions. What evolution implies about human nature is one of the key reasons that it has been (and still is, to many) so unsavory and difficult to accept. It’s easy to imagine a narrative in which only the selfish, aggresive, and cruel survive. Yet the picture is complex. Several evolutionary mechanisms—including reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, kin selection, individual and perhaps even group selection—have pushed and pulled us in different directions. As a result, selfishness, aggression, and cruelty are unfortunate parts of human nature. But so too are altruism, coooperation, and kindness. This is what I will call the dual potential of human nature … (and) it would seem that the purpose of our existence (or at least one such purpose) is to choose between these competing natures. To choose between altrusim and selfishness, cooperation and aggression, love and lust. In language that has largely been discarded, a fundamental purpose of our existence is to choose between the good and evil inherent within us. Life is a test.”
For a doctrinal version of this idea, see In The Strength of The Lord by David A. Bednar.
^ For more on this book see the following:
Exploring Life’s Great Purpose by BYU Magazine.
Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence by BYU’s Wheatley Institute.
Higher Power. Article by Sam Wilkinson in Deseret Magazine.
The Kingship of Self-Control. Book by William George Jordan.
I also love this mindset he shares on how to lead yourself: “He must live each day as if his whole existence were telescoped down to the single day before him. With no useless regret for the past, no useless worry for the future, he should live that day as if it were his only day,—the only day left for him to assert all that is best in him, the only day left for him to conquer all that is worst in him.”
Locsha Road. Book by Kim Stafford.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6855275-people-pay-money-to-see-others-believe-in-themselves
The Screwtape Letters. Book by C.S. Lewis.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” - Quote by Marriane Williamson. Taken from Keith Karren’s BYU Speech Ultimate Health: God’s Gift and Our Personal Responsibility.
You Can Accomplish the Impossible! Article by President Russell M. Nelson
Quote from Do The Work. Book by Steven Pressfield.