Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the President of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: If you have your Bibles with you this morning, would you take those and turn, if you will to the Gospel as John records the 11th chapter.
This is the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but a portion of that story. The interaction between Jesus and Martha just prior to the physical resurrection of Lazarus. Jesus has just arrived, so we'll begin reading at verse 20.
Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went to meet Jesus, but Mary sat still in the house. Then said Martha unto Jesus, lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.
But I know that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. And Jesus saith unto her, thy brother shall rise again.
Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. And Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
Believest thou this?
She said unto him, yea, Lord, I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world. Now turn back, if you will, To Luke, the 24th chapter of Luke, and I just want to read the first eight verses now we're dealing with the resurrection of Jesus himself.
Now, upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning they came unto the sepulcher, bringing the spices which they had prepared and certain others with them. And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulcher, and they entered in and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.
And it came to pass as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments, and as they were afraid and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said to them, it means those men, angels said to the women, why seek ye the living among the dead?
He is not here, but is risen. Remember how he spoke unto you when he was yet in Galilee. Verse 7. The angels are quoting Jesus saying, the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and must be crucified, and the third day rise again. In verse 8 and they remembered his words. Put your hands on your Bible, if you will, please.
Vamos ora Padre benditos celestial. Teremos gracias por tu presensio. Conos otro seineste manana.
Porque.
Lord, we praise you. We worship you. We thank you for your presence with us today. We need you. We need a word of hope from you.
Come, Holy Spirit, in the power of the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the strong Son of God.
Amen. Amen and amen.
I've spent most of my life, more than a half a century, studying the discipline of communication.
What makes it work when it works? Why does it work when it fails? What went wrong?
I know what you're thinking. Some of you. If he spent 50 years studying communication, it seems like he'd be better at it.
But you don't know how bad I might have been.
Here's what I've learned. We're one to take the entire discipline of communication and boil it for a thousand years.
The creme de sauce that would rise to the top is simply four things. The right message to the right party in the right way at the right time.
If you get any of those four variables wrong, it can all go wrong. Really wrong, really fast.
Every married man in the room knows exactly what I'm talking about. Now, you can think that you're transmitting clearly, but it get any of those four variables wrong, and the ice is cracking under your feet while you talk.
I heard about a married couple in Vancouver that were going to come down to San Diego on holiday.
At the last minute, she had to stay behind at her place of business for a board meeting. And so he decided he'd go on to San Diego and await her. He got into the hotel and he thought he would send her an email at her work. But he realized he didn't have her email, her work email, in his contacts.
But he thought he could come close.
How many of you know with email, close is like no good.
So he sent it, but it didn't go to her. It came to an elderly widow, the widow of a Pentecostal minister who had just died the week before.
And when the message came up on her computer, she just fainted unconscious in the floor. Her grown children came in and found her in the floor. And this message was on her screen.
Dearest wife, just got checked in.
Am awaiting your arrival tomorrow.
P.S. sure is hot down here.
The problem with linguistics is. Is not just between one language and the next. It's between one generation and the next. Words. Words are moving so fast, I See a lot of young people here this morning. I just want to prophesy to you that there are words that you use right now. They won't disappear.
You will still use them should you live to be my age. But they won't mean the same thing.
I remember. I wonder if there's anybody here old enough to remember when gay meant happy.
Gay was about disposition, not orientation.
They sing it at Christmas, don We now are gay apparel. That doesn't mean Christmas in drag.
I was speaking to a high school audience one time, thousands of teenagers. And they were so enthused over the message. It was wonderful. And afterward, I spoke to a group of boys, just some guys down front. And the first boy said to me, he said, Dr. Mark, you are one bad preacher.
In my lifetime, bad has come to mean good.
The second boy said, you're not just bad. He said, you're the baddest preacher I've ever heard.
Baddest is not even a word in the English language.
The third boy said, you are not just bad. He said, you are one sick dude.
One can only imagine my level of personal affirmation.
I remember early on in life setting sort of a life goal of becoming a really sick dude.
The fourth boy was not content with these low altitude compliments.
He said, you are not just bad, you're not just sick. He said, you are the OG of Crunk.
I have no clue.
I teach the National Institute of Christian Leadership. And one of my students, years ago now pastors a hip hop church, whatever that is.
So I called Tommy. I figured if anybody would know, he would know.
So I said, tommy, somebody just told me I was the OG of Crunk. What would that mean? Oh, he said, OG means original gangster.
So he said, I'm the original gangster of Crunk. He said, that's right.
I said, no, see, what I'm looking for is actually, see, like a definition.
Oh. He said, it means you be off the chain.
I said, yeah, Tommy. What I want to know is, what does it mean? What is he saying? He said, I'm trying to tell you, Dr. Mark. He said, it means you beat a Mac Daddy.
I just decided to leave it alone.
Now, if that is the challenge between us, what is the communication problem of God?
I know you're thinking God has no problems. Sure he does.
The transmitter is perfect.
The message is perfect.
The receivers are all broken.
So God's challenge is that he is trying to communicate a message to all of us through the shattered filter of our own fallen humanity.
So everything we hear from us to us From God.
We are filtering through our inability to understand God.
We used to speak God and Adam and God walked together and talked together in the cool of the evening. Well, they weren't speaking English.
They weren't even. My friend Doran Heiligar in Jerusalem, he says they were speaking Hebrew, but it wasn't even Hebrew. They were speaking God.
But subsequent to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden and then subsequently to that, the Tower of Babel, we. We no longer speak God. We can't even talk to each.
So God is the whole story of the Bible is God trying to get his message, His. His word to us.
That's actually how the book of John begins.
In the beginning was the the Word.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
So God is. That could be translated this way. In the beginning was the communication of God. And God, knowing that we could not receive it verbally, send it to us in flesh.
That communication, that divine communication became human and dwelt among us.
So the answer to the communication problem of God was the incarnation.
The problem was that the answer also became part of the problem.
Jesus looked, walked, talked exactly like us.
And therefore to speak to us, he spoke human.
He had to speak the language of the people around him. But he is thinking in cosmic, transcendent God, but he has to load that onto the boxcars of human vocabulary.
And sometimes the boxcars won't hold the weight.
So the people around him are hearing human words and Jesus is talking at two totally different levels.
Remember the.
The time that Jesus is left behind at. At the temple, at his bar mitzvah, you remember? And his parents, realizing he's not in the group, go back and it says, they're wroth with him. They're angry.
They say, you frightened us. We thought you were in the group. Where did you go? And Jesus says, knew ye not? I must be about my father's business.
And the next sentence is brilliant in its understatement. It says, and they knew not that which he spoke.
Why not?
That's a perfectly easy sin. Knew ye not? I must be about my father's business. Why couldn't they understand it? It's because he's using all those words at two different levels. And at the same time he says, I know that you know stuff, but do you live only at the level of stuff you know? Don't you know anything?
Know you not? I must be about my father's business. Joseph is my father, but he's just my father. He's not my father.
God's my Father and I. Joseph has a business, but he's just a business. My father has a business, but it's not a business.
Don't you know that?
And they knew not that which he spoke.
His whole ministry is littered with stories like that. Sometimes it's quite funny there. There's a moment where Jesus is speaking. A room full of Jewish people, it's packed. And Philip and Andrew come to him and say, there. There are two Gentiles outside that want to come in and speak to you. Should we bring them in?
Here's Jesus answer.
Jesus says, unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it bringeth forth no fruit. But if it falleth into the ground and dieth, it bringeth forth a great harvest.
That's his answer.
I can just see Philip and Andrew leaving the room saying, do you think he meant, like, yes or no?
Because he's saying.
He's saying, look, as long as I'm in the seed pod of this human body, how big of a room can we build?
How many people can we get in the room? But if I will go into the ground and die and bring forth a great harvest of the worldwide church, then all of the Gentiles in all the world can step over the threshold into the commonwealth of Israel.
But they're only thinking about those two Greeks at the door.
And here's one.
We've had 2,000 years to work with this. But imagine being in the room the first time Jesus says, let the dead bury the dead.
Oh, yeah, that's gonna work.
Sounds like a Stephen King novel, doesn't it?
The Night the Dead Bury the Dead.
But why? It's because he's using life and death at two different levels.
He says, these people are just dead.
Let people that are really dead bury them. You're alive, but you don't need to be messing with death. Let the dead people, they look like they're alive, but they're actually dead. These people are just dead, but you're alive.
This is the struggle of communication. When we talk about the gospel, everything about the gospel, we talk about heaven being up and is. What sense is heaven up? I mean, I use that terminology. I use it at funerals. I want it said at my funeral.
Dr. Rutland has gone up to heaven, but in what sense is it up?
I mean, if heaven is straight up from California, it's straight down from Sydney.
So if you have the misfortune to die down under, you have to circle the globe before you can go to heaven is because heaven is not up geographically, it's up Dimensionally, it's higher, more wonderful, more perfect, more glorious, more marvelous than anything that we have down here.
I mean, we use that terminology all the time, up and down. What about hell itself?
We said, somebody go down to hell. But in what sense is hell? If we sank a drill bit right here and drill straight down, at what point do we pop out in hell?
We don't pop out in hell. We pop out in Mumbai.
So we're talking about two totally different dimensions of communication.
Now we come to the resurrection.
Jesus in his communication with Martha in the passage from John, which we read, you can almost hear, or maybe I'm projecting it onto Jesus, but I believe you can almost hear a slight note of irritation.
He arrives, and Lazarus has been dead four days.
And Martha kind of blames Jesus. If you had gotten here on time, my brother wouldn't have died.
And then she puts the bee on him.
She says, even now.
Even now, I know that you can take care of this.
And Jesus says, you, brother will rise again.
And she says, yes, I know he'll rise at the end of all things in the Resurrection. But listen to what Jesus says. I am the resurrection.
I think there was a slight note of irritation. I know my brother will rise in the Resurrection. I am the resurrection.
I am the resurrection.
This. This conversation about life and death goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden.
The whole thing, the whole story of the Bible is about what real life means and what death means. The whole story of the Bible, it begins in the Garden of Eden.
Satan says to Eve, did God say to you that if you ate that fruit that was in the center of the garden, that you would die?
You will not die. You're not gonna die. God's just jerking your chain. You're not gonna die.
And the woman took of the fruit, and she did eat, and she saw that it was good to eat and good, and she gave it to the man, and he ate. Now, here's my question to you this morning.
When they ate that fruit, did they drop down dead?
No. It's not a trick question. Did they drop down dead?
No. Did they die?
Yes.
So were they dead when they ate the fruit? No. Were they dead? Yes, they were dead.
Because God is speaking about a whole different issue of life, true life, the life which is him. Jesus says, resurrection is not just a nifty thing that I do.
The resurrection of Christ, which we celebrate on this Easter, yes, it is the magnificent centerpiece of all Christian hope and theology. Apart from the resurrection of Christ, there is no hope.
But the Point is, it is communicating to us that all that he does is life.
He is the resurrection. It's not just something that he does for us or in us.
So every one of you here has heard this evangelical terminology, which is not bad. It's perfectly good. Have you received Christ as your Lord and Savior?
It's a perfectly good terminology.
However, it really is a bit shallow.
The issue is not just simply to accept him doctrinally. Yes, I believe Jesus died for my sins. Yes, I believe that his blood will forgive me of my sins. It is to receive his life inside of you so that the life of Jesus comes to live in you. And from that moment on, you have both life and death happening inside your body.
Young people can never believe they will ever die.
Young people are all bulletproof.
The problem with young people is that they not only think they will live forever, they think they will live forever. Young.
They look at old dudes like me and they think, what happened to that guy?
It doesn't dawn on them, how old are you, son?
20. Look right up here at me, son. All over the world today, preachers are preaching good news. Good news. I've come to you with really bad news.
Look up here at me. I am your future.
If you live long enough, you're going to look like this.
As you are so once was I.
As I am, you soon will be.
So death is operating inside our physical bodies, hammering away at us the things that happen. The physicality of us is being hit by the sledgehammer of time.
As you get older, that death principle operating within us becomes more and more real.
But if we have received the life, the resurrection power of Christ, that life is also operating in us so that when we come to the moment of physical death, that death gives way to life.
I was in my very first church. I was 22 years old when I went to pastor my first church. A 22 year old boy should not be given a driver's license, let alone a church.
So everything was new. And there was an elderly man in my church that was dying and I had never been in the room with anybody that was dying. He was a great Christian man, a saint of God.
And his death, his dying went on and on and on. His body wouldn't give up to the threshold of death until his family was just exhausted.
So one night I said to them, you go home. I'll stay here with Mr. Charlie tonight, overnight, and if anything happens, then I'll call you.
Laying there, tubes on his nose and all the wires and everything in his 90s lying there. He was dying in the middle of the night. He had strange sounds in his throat, gurgling, like the nurse, the night nurse came in and I said, I think he's dying. She said, he's dying. She said, I'll go call the family. She went out and all of a sudden, Charlie sat up in the bed. Like, they scared the liver out of me, tubed out everything. He just sat straight up in the bed and he looked across at a blank hospital wall and he said, oh, beautiful.
And he lay down and died.
He looked over into life.
Death. If we have received Christ and have his life within us, death simply is the way that we surrender out of this realm and go into the next.
But without that, I mean, the other side is equally true.
That's the challenge of trying to talk to people about quote, unquote, receiving Christ is that you want to say this death is at work in all of us.
When you come to the end of it, whether it's in a car crash or whatever it is, what is on the other side of that?
What does that death give way to?
Jesus says, lazarus will rise again.
Martha says, well, I know he will at the end of time. Everybody but she says, I miss him right now.
I want him right now.
I know he'll rise in the resurrection. Jesus says, I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth on me shall never die.
But listen to this.
Lazarus later died.
Somebody said to me about a miracle. One time happened in a meeting, and they said, I'm afraid it'll just be temporary. I said, all miracles are temporary.
All miracles are temporary. Lazarus. The resurrection of Lazarus was temporary.
Later on, he died again.
I can just imagine when Lazarus got up to heaven, the angel said, oh, are you back?
So the issue is then, when Jesus says to us, when he's communicating to us, he that believeth in me shall never die.
Is he lying?
Because every single one of you probably knows a Christian who believed on Jesus and subsequently died.
Jesus would say, no, no, they just died.
They just died.
They didn't die.
It wasn't the end of their lives.
It was life.
That's the joy and the power and the glory. And the beauty of the resurrection is that the resurrection is at work within us all the time, raising us not simply from the. The last stranglehold of death, but of all those things that are contrary to the character and nature of God raises us from all of that bondage and hopelessness and fear and. And all of the things that are of that, that are of death are about life and that more abundantly.
So that when you hear people say to you about something, this is a question of life or death, say, is it really about life and death, or is it just about life and death?
That'll confuse them.
But it is a great distinction in Scripture.
So here's how I would end this. On this Easter Sunday, believest thou that Christ rose from the dead?
Good for you.
Satan also believes it, and he trembles.
What I'm asking you is what power is at work within you now is the power of the resurrection inside this body, which will decay while you wear it until finally you shuck it off and step either into death as death gives way to death or as death gives way to life.
That's the glorious truth of the resurrection.
We have nothing to fear.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: Foreign you've been listening to the Leader's Notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X @Dr. Mark Rutland, or visit his website, DrMarkRutland.com where you can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
