Raised: If Jesus Was Raised

March 23, 2026·37 min·2 clips

Death is the last enemy Jesus will abolish.

Dave opens the Raised series by saying four weeks on the resurrection makes all kinds of sense after four weeks on the incarnation, and he sets the whole talk inside that simple calendar logic. He then turns to Adam. Adam's admission that he is, at times, a hypochondriac becomes the springboard for a quick, amused look at how people try to manage fear with ordinary advice and a little internet certainty. The joke does not linger. Dave moves straight to the fear of death and says that no amount of technique can solve it, because the real need is truth and a new humanity rather than a better trick for calming down. Romans 5 gives him that frame. He reads sin and death through Adam as the head of the old humanity, then places Jesus at the head of a new one where the end result is life instead of death. That contrast does the heavy lifting. The sermon keeps returning to the idea that people are caught in a current they cannot simply step out of, which gives the teaching its steady pressure and its pastoral edge. He makes that vivid with a rafting story. On a whitewater trip in Central America, he followed two men who had grown up in the jungles of Ecuador as they swam across the river, and the scene becomes a picture of how much human effort depends on a reality bigger than the effort itself. The image sticks. From there he lands on 1 Corinthians 15 and says the assignment fits because the chapter is already about death and life, loss and hope, and the way resurrection changes the terms of both. Loss stays real. He says life is full of giving things up, full of disappointment, and full of death, yet because of the resurrection loss can be followed by hope and death can be followed by life. That is the claim. By the end, the sermon has moved from a small joke about fear to a direct pastoral promise, and it keeps the emphasis on what resurrection means for ordinary human life rather than on theory alone. The room is sent back to worship. The closing note is simple and firm: because of the resurrection, death will be followed by life. That is where the teaching rests.

As heard by us

Resurrection hope, with a hypochondriac joke and a hard look at death.

This sermon opens by revisiting Adam's admission of hypochondria and sketching the kind of internet advice people reach for when fear starts to take over.

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Why you'd press play

You want resurrection talk that takes death seriously and still makes room for a hypochondriac joke.

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