What happened to change a handful of frightened men (the disciples), hiding away behind locked doors in fear of their own lives – men who had deserted their leader, who legged it to save their own skin and denied they even knew Jesus; what happened to change a band of unreliable followers into fearless evangelists; what changed a bunch of scaredy-cats into a pride of roaring lions; from cringing cowards to fearless followers, most of whom later went on to die as martyrs? What happened? Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the disciples, that’s what happened! There is no other way to explain the extraordinary change in the disciples.

People might sometimes die for what they mistakenly believe to be true but people will not willingly die for what they know is not true… yet most all of the disciples were martyred; they willing died for their faith in a resurrected Christ.

Just fifty days after the resurrection – in Jerusalem at Pentecost – Peter with the other disciples beside him, stood up and declared boldly to the crowds: “God has raised this Jesus to life and we are all witnesses of the fact” (Acts 2:32). The resurrection of Jesus is not a conspiracy theory! Why would the disciples make it up? Surely it would have been easier, and made more sense, to honour a dead Jesus as another in the long-line of martyred-prophets so revered by the Jews.

The evidence for the resurrection is overwhelming and conclusive: There is no other plausible explanation for the empty tomb; the lack of a body; the transformed lives of the disciples; the fact that church worship shifted from Saturday to resurrection Sunday. There is no other plausible explanation for the existence of the Christian church, or the evidence of millions of Christians living transformed lives after personally encountering Jesus and receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus is alive. The evidence is overwhelming and conclusive.