Would You Die For a Lie?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:10] Speaker B: Welcome back to another edition of the Weekday podcast. [00:00:12] Speaker A: Thanks for taking a couple minutes to spend time with us today. Our hope is that these few minutes would offer some encouragement. In John 20, verse 20, here's what it says. It says, after he said these things, when Jesus spoke peace, which we talked about on yesterday's episode, it says he showed them his hands and his sides and. And the disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. So the question today that I really want you to think about, not just to let it wash over you, is this. Would you die for something that you knew was a lie? Would you die for something that you knew was a lie? Not inconvenience, not embarrassed. What I mean is, would you be willing to be executed brutally, publicly, painfully, if you personally knew that the thing that you were dying for was not actually true? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't. And I'm pretty confident that you wouldn't either. But here's what makes the story of the early church so amazing. The disciples, the men who personally walked with Jesus, they ate with them, they watched him perform miracles, and they watched him die. Almost every single one of them was killed for one specific claim. The claim wasn't that Jesus was a good teacher, not that he said some wise things. They died refusing to stop saying that he rose from. From the dead. Here's some of those accounts. Peter was crucified upside down. Andrew on an X shaped cross. Thomas was run through with a spear in India. Matthew was killed by a sword. James thrown from a height and beaten to death. On and on and on it goes. And here's what makes this so significant. These people weren't dying for a belief that had been passed down to them. They were dying for an eyewitness account. They weren't saying, I heard that he rose. They were saying, I saw him. I touched his hands, I watched him eat fish after he was supposed to be dead, dead. And they went to their graves rather than recant that message. People die for beliefs that are wrong all the time. They sincerely believe something that turns out not to be true. But people do not willingly, calmly go to their own execution for something they personally know to be a fabrication. That's not how human beings work. So when I'm wrestling with faith, when I hit one of those seasons where the doubts are louder than the convictions, I come back to this, that those men were terrified on a Friday night. They were hiding behind a locked door. Something happened in the days that followed that so completely transformed them that they spent the rest of their lives, right up to the moment of their death, saying, we saw him. He is risen. You don't build a movement on a lie its own eyewitnesses won't protect. Something happened. And whatever you're working through in your own faith right now, I think that's worth sitting with. You don't die for a lie that you know is a lie. The disciples knew what they saw, and [00:02:51] Speaker B: they lived it out. Have a great day. We'll see you back here soon.