Welcome to the Reformed University Fellowship at UNCW Podcast! Each week, we will post the messages from our RUF Large Group meetings at UNCW. This year, we're examining the Gospel of John to learn about the words and work of Jesus.

At the very beginning of the gospel of John we read, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it …  The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” It's no accident that John reminds us in chapter 20 that Mary comes to the tomb early on Sunday morning, while it’s still dark. The new day of God's victory is here, but it doesn’t feel like daytime yet.  The reality of the new day is not yet experienced and felt. In John 20, John is proclaiming a new reality– the fact that because of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead… Jesus reigns over everything– he has conquered and is fully in control over creation in a way that we haven’t yet seen. But that fact of Jesus’s Lordship takes time to sink in– both for his followers and also for us. In this passage, John shows us how Jesus meets his disciples in their unbelief and calls them into deeper trust in him. 

QUOTES: 

“Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven …The point of the resurrection…is that the present bodily life is not valueless just because it will die…What you do with your body in the present matters because God has a great future in store for it…What you do in the present—by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself—will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it…). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.” — N.T. Wright

“The resurrection introduces something radically new into the fabric of the universe and into our understanding of the possibilities and limit of our world, transforming the Christians way of inhabiting reality . . . The resurrection of Christ is not simply proof that there is life beyond death, nor again is it simply proof that the cross was effective and that all those who trust in Christ can have their sins forgiven. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the first glimpse of the shafts of breaking dawn that will one day flood the sky with brilliant light in the new heavens and the new earth.” - Tim Keller 

‘Grace is a provision for men who are so fallen that they cannot lift the axe of justice, so corrupt that they cannot change their own natures, so averse to God that they cannot turn to Him, so blind that they cannot see Him, so deaf that they cannot hear Him, and so dead that He Himself must open their graves and lift them into resurrection.’- G.S. Bishop

“In most cultural narratives, the problem is "out there" and we are the answer. In the story of Scripture, we are the problem and Jesus is the answer.” — Jeremy Treat

“The resurrection means not merely that Christians have a hope for the future but that they have a hope that comes from the future. The Bible’s startling message is that when Jesus rose, he brought the future kingdom of God into the present … In the resurrection we have the presence of the future. The power by which God will finally destroy all suffering, evil, deformity, and death at the end of time has broken into history now and is available— partially but substantially—now. When we unite with the risen Christ by faith, that future power that is potent enough to remake the universe comes into us.”— Tim Keller 

“How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”― G. K. Chesterton