GIVE

Sermon Guide

Come to Me | I am the Way, the Truth, the Life

Teaching Text

JOHN 11:21–26

“Lord," Martha said to Jesus, "if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask."

Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again."

Martha answered, "I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day."

Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?"

Sermon Recap

This Sunday, Pastor Keithen opened his sermon with a compelling story from a few weeks ago when he went to visit a high school on the Upper East Side for an “Ask the Pastor” session. The submitted questions from the teens ranged from suffering, to science, to abortion, and bodily autonomy. But when he got in the room, the students went off script. Every question they actually asked was about who was and wasn't going to heaven when they died, and in all of it, not one of them asked a single question about Jesus.

That observation kicked off the heart of this sermon: Most people, including many Christians, assume the whole point of the faith is to go to heaven when you die. Pastor Keithen traced how we've inherited two unsatisfying answers to the question of eternity: secularism, which tells us death is the end and nothing we do ultimately matters, and a kind of religious gnosticism, which tells us the physical world is bad and the goal of faith is to escape it. Neither is what Jesus taught.

In John 11, standing outside the tomb of His dead friend, Lazarus, Jesus doesn’t offer Martha comfort through a better destination. He weeps, raises Lazarus bodily from the dead, and before he does it, says the most shocking thing anyone in that world had ever heard: I am the resurrection and the life. In this shocking claim, Jesus is making the claim that he is that God, and that the hope Martha had been deferring to was standing right in front of her.

Our eternal destiny, as Jesus describes it, is not transactional but relational. He doesn't say no one gets to heaven except through me. He says no one gets to the Father except through me..Because resurrection is true, it changes how we live now. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, our labor in the Lord is never in vain. Every act of love, every ordinary Monday given to God, is being woven into something that lasts. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is already at work in us.

Pastor Keithen concluded with the challenging question: how would you live if you knew death wasn't the end? Fearless and free.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  • When you imagine "eternity" or "heaven," what image or feeling comes to mind? Where did that picture come from?

  • Read John 11:21–26 aloud together. Then discuss:

    1. What words or phrases stand out to you, and why?

    2. Martha already believed in a future resurrection. What did Jesus correct or expand in her understanding?

    3. What do you think it would have felt like to hear Jesus say "I am the resurrection" in that moment of grief?

    1. Pastor Keithen said that when Jesus is treated as a ticket to something we want, we'll walk away when something we want more is on the line. Have you ever experienced faith that felt transactional? What was it like?

    2. How does thinking a “resurrection of the body” as opposed to “an escape for your soul” shift your understanding of what salvation actually is?

    3. "Eternal life is knowing God, and it starts now." What would change about how you approach your work, your relationships, or your daily life if you really believed this?

  • Pray together that God would make the resurrection feel real and not abstract, that the same power that raised Jesus would come alive in how you face your fears, your work, and your future.

    Pray for anyone in the group who is grieving, that they would encounter Jesus the way Martha did — not with easy answers, but with His presence.