She's probably going to be embarrassed that I do this, but Gail is back.

Hi, Gail!

Gail's my administrative assistant. I knew I would do that.

She's turning all red.

And boy, I tell you, I was so lost last week without her, and you don't realize how much you appreciate somebody until you don't have them.

In fact, I'm going to have her do something right now, actually. Turn off the air conditioning. Thank you. All right.

Before we get started, I want to preface my sermon with a couple of thoughts that I think will be

germane to our understanding and our celebration of Christ's resurrection.

First, the account in scripture that we're about to read concerning the resurrection

of Jesus Christ is a historical fact. Now, I realize that might at first sound like a firm grasp

of the obvious, but I say it because sometimes we think

of the stories in the Bible as just that, Bible stories. We think of the characters in the Bible

as just that, Bible characters.

And in so doing, there's sort of this danger to disconnect the reality from that which we read on the pages of our Bible.

The people that we're going to talk about today, the eyewitnesses, these were real people.

These were men and women like you and me.

And this happened at this time in world history.

I like how one so aptly said it.

There is more evidence that Jesus rose from the dead

than there is that Julius Caesar ever lived.

Think about that.

Charles Spurgeon of this fact wrote, Beyond a doubt, it can be shown that there is as much evidence for the resurrection of Christ as for any fact in history.

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