Easter Sunday 2026 – ‘How Our Hearts Burned’: Luke 24

Full Transcript: Easter Sunday 2026: ‘How Our Hearts Burned’

00:00:00 Jesus Christ has risen today. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. You can do better. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Indeed. It is the thing of great praise and it is wonderful to be here and to celebrate this, we’re going to go on a little Bible study, two hour Bible study with Jesus. Wouldn’t you, um, just love to have two hours to hang out with Jesus? Ask him all the questions. That’s with the two people, ClearPass and half brother, friend, wife, perhaps, get to do in our story today.

00:00:29 Uh, it’s set in the afternoon. Jesus, on the Sunday morning, has risen. He’s appeared to a few people, Mary, and as we just heard, Peter and he’ll appear to many more again in groups, even up to 500 on one occasion. But this afternoon, on the Sunday afternoon, there are two people walking back home. And they are depressed. They are down. They haven’t heard all the stories. They’re, they’ve heard glimmers of the stories. They don’t quite know how to put it together, and they are trying to understand it.

00:01:30 I remember speaking to a woman once at Mongolia, woman in Mongolia, and uh, you probably know the, dunno the story, but it used to be part of the Soviet empire. And when the Soviet Empire fell in the 1990, all these countries were badly affected in all sorts of economic ways and all sorts of, but ideologically as well. I remember saying to this, uh, this woman, and she said, we were, we were children at the time, and we believed in the, the, the, the rhetoric, the story of the Soviet Union, of the communist reality of world peace brought about by the communist reality and, and of equality of all people. We believed in that and that it all just disappeared.

00:02:12 We realized it was all a lie. It was, it had no basis such disillusionment, and that she was not the only one. The whole country went through this disaster for a decade of disillusionment, of huge amounts of alcoholism, of all sorts of loss of identity and meaning in life. I can’t help thinking that’s just a little like what this believing group of Jesus followers would’ve felt. We’d hoped for world peace. We thought he could deliver the stuff we’d seen, the things he’d done well, it didn’t turn out that way because of the cross.

00:02:52 Jesus had given years of promise to them in what he said and what he did, and in their hearts they treasure the reality. That had been long for by that people, the Israel Israelites for hundreds, even thousands of years. And it all fell apart. They get home to Emmaus and they beck at him, come in with us. ’cause he’s been telling them the stories of all that he’s done. I guess it wasn’t just him talking, you know, Jesus method is always a kind of conversational thing, isn’t it?

00:03:23 Where he’d ask them, what do you think of this? What do you make of that? How do you put these two things together and they get to their home and they break bread and it’s then that they realize this is in fact, Jesus. Up until then, there’s, it’s a blindness. They don’t understand who it is they’re talking to, and then all of a sudden, oh my goodness, we are encountering that reality. The women that morning in the tomb, they’d said they’d seen him, but we couldn’t believe it. It’s a ridiculous idea. That just doesn’t happen. And yet here it is.

00:03:54 And he says, they said this fantastic little phrase as he opened the scriptures, our hearts burned within us. All of a sudden that desperate disaster, perhaps it was true. It must be true. ’cause here in front of them was Jesus. And as he spoke to them in that Bible study for two hours, two and a half hours on the road, it opened up the possibility. I can’t help but think, well, what sort of stuff would he have said? You can get through a lot in a couple of hours, can’t you? When somebody really knows their stuff and I think.

00:04:30 I’ve just pulled out a couple of ideas of probably what he said, most of which he had taught over the, uh, the three years of his discipleship training program that he had with the disciples. I think of the Garden of Eden, a snake. What must have been the second greatest disaster of the world was when people turned away from God that first time, and Adam and Eve in the garden had been beguiled by the snake and they believed in another thing, not God. And yet that wonderful promise in Genesis chapter three, that that snake would be crushed, that it would, it would strike at the heel of the descendant, the great child of Adam and Eve.

00:05:11 Jesus would strike at his heel, but he would crush the head. A far more dramatic thing really than an egg being crushed. Thanks though, Mel, that was fun. That we are indicated. What’s indicated is that there is a spiritual battle going on when Christ dies on the cross and is raised again. It does transform life and it was promised way back then at the very start of the scriptures or another snake story, which is a positive one. Doesn’t start positive ends, positive starts off with people in the, in the camp under Moses rule.

00:05:44 And they are, they are dying ’cause of a plague of snakes. You have plagues of snakes, I guess you do lots of snakes biting and killing people, and God has a provision for them. He says, Moses, make a bronze, serer the snake. Put it on a pole, sit it up in the middle of the camp and people look at that, they’ll be healed. It’s almost hard, too hard to believe, isn’t it? It’s a symbol of what faith in Christ is. ’cause Jesus used that very story in talking to Nicodemus later on he says.

00:06:10 It just like that happened, that snake was raised up. When I am raised up, whoever looks at me, puts their faith in me, they will be healed eternally. That’s what the cross is, is lifting up. What an amazing story. And Jesus had used that very example in John three, the simple act. Some people, you know, just find that too hard to believe that it could be that straightforward, that it really is in Christ that salvation comes. Some personalities get it fast, others don’t. Some lifes are histories.

00:06:42 Get it fast, others don’t, and yet that’s the reality of what Jesus wants us to know. That by the looking at him on the cross, perceiving what that is about and saying, I will have that forgiveness for myself. That’s what makes the difference in all spiritual existence. That’s what Jesus wanted Nicodemus to know and wants us to know. Another story of Moses where he talks out a prophet who will come, the people who come quite anxious back those days. We’re talking 1400 bc. The people are anxious because Moses has got this fast line to God.

00:07:14 That’s a precious thing for the individual and for the whole community. They think one day he’ll die. How will we cope? She says, don’t worry, God will send another prophet. Who has direct communication with God, who connects with him and a new and a special way beyond even what I do. There will be a prophet. Jesus is that prophet. The prophet who would come. He would be the intermediate who’s come from God and reveals He says it again and again, doesn’t he?

00:07:43 I know the father. If you know me, you know the Father. Here’s that special communicator. The one that we are to look to for all knowledge of God himself. When Jesus goes on the Sermon on the Mount, do you remember that story? He goes up upward or mounted just like Moses did, and he reinterprets the law. He fulfills the law, and what he says and what he does, here’s the new Moses, the new prophet. He’s the fulfillment of that promise from 1400 bc. Or he might have talked too.

00:08:14 He would’ve for sure talked about the sacrificial lamb via Isaiah 53. We’re now 700 bc this incredible prophecy that there would be someone who would come and would die for the people that they might be brought back to God. They though were sheep gone astray, they would be brought back into the loving care of the Great Shepherd. It was one of Jesus’ great teachings to put two halves of Isaiah together in the front. Half of the book of Isaiah is the Messiah who rule overall, who rightly rules overall and in the back half of the book, there is this bizarre.

00:08:48 Suffering servant who will suffer for the people and take their sins away. And Jesus is the first one who puts those two figures together and says, that is me. He does it on the road to Caesarea, uh, Cape uh, Caesarea Philippi. And he’s talking, he’s teaching his disciples and he’s saying that, that the Messiah must suffer. The Messiah must die and then be raised, or the disciples really freak out. Peter can’t cope at all. Peter Peter, he rebukes Jesus.

00:09:18 You always know that’s gonna go badly, don’t you? He rebukes Jesus and says, no, it can’t be because the Messiah can’t be the suffering servant. And yet that’s the very teaching that Jesus is giving. Who do you say you are? The Christ. The Christ must suffer. No, he must die on the third day. No. And only then rise made no sense. And Jesus says, get behind me, Satan. What a thing to say because you don’t understand that the Messiah must suffer.

00:09:52 And yet that is the very message and that is the very career of Jesus, that he, the Messiah, would suffer in order for us to live. He talks about the sign of Jonah, Jonah, three days in the fish. And, uh, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s a trauma for him. And it’s, uh, Jesus says, when people were desperate one day, show us signs. Show us the, show us who you really are. He goes, no, I won’t. Except for this one thing. The sign of Jonah, three days in the tomb is what he does.

00:10:27 This, all these things are fulfilled and many more you’d get through more in a couple of hours of Jesus teaching. That morning the women had seen an empty tomb, and Mary, herself, Mary Magdalene, had met Jesus and came back with that story. There were angels there and they told them he has risen, and they told the disciples and they could not believe it until he then showed himself. What must have been going through all of their heads is they put this thing together that first day, the the trauma of Friday.

00:11:03 The the grief of Saturday and then these bizarre stories that he’s actually done what he said he would do, and now it made sense. And then we are back in the e Emmaus home, this stranger making it all clear as he walked along. And then they realize as he breaks the bread, as he reminds them of the night on the Thursday night, the kind of thing that he said is, you’ll understand who I am. And they say our heart burned with fire.

00:11:34 It was so unbelievably good for us that we should go through those, that that trauma and that disaster, and then have this revealed their hearts burned within them. Well, we would praise the Lord if we heard the stories of many in this room who talked of maybe their heart’s burning, but certainly their hearts softening to the word of God. Certainly as we go through and hear stories of people whose lives had been changed, had been transformed because of the forgiveness of Good Friday and the New life of Easter Sunday, that’d be a wonderful thing to do.

00:12:14 And maybe you wanna share some of those stories informally after, for the first time or for again and again, rejoice in this day. Remember this day? This is a day of true life where true world peace is a chance where new possibilities become ours. When we can look at other people and think for them a, a new prayer, this resurrection day is an extraordinary thing. When Luke wrote his gospel, he intended this for us. He wanted us to get this point that we would be just like those two in that home in, uh, in Emmaus.

00:12:52 And you know what they did? They rushed off. They couldn’t, you know, take him hours to walk there, but they ran back to Jerusalem once they’d met him and they shared the stories. And that’s to a theme in Luke when the penny drops, when the eyes are open, when things become clear, it is not just an intellectual shift. It’s not just, oh, now I understand the story. It’s a whole change life. What a thrill that is. And the invitation to us all today is change our hearts yet again, or for the first time. Enter into this new life that Christ offers. That’s the great joy of this day, Easter Day. Christ has risen. He’s risen indeed. Amen.