The Tapestry class at First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, D.C. has decided to use Spelunking Scripture: Easter for their next study. It’s the fourth volume in the Spelunking Scripture series, and it focuses on the Resurrection and post-Resurrection stories in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Dr. Bill Leonard, Founding Dean, and Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity, was kind enough to write an endorsement for the book, which appears on the back cover.

In the Introduction to the book, I begin, “The resurrection of Jesus is the linchpin of the Christian faith.” Simply put, without the resurrection of Jesus, there would be no Christian faith.

The Easter book contains 12 chapters, based on two texts from Matthew, one from Mark, three from Luke, and six from John. I counted how many sermons I preached on those texts during my 33 years at Village Baptist Church in Bowie, Maryland, and totaled at least 82.

I say, “at least,” because the fire that destroyed the Village Baptist Church building in 2000 burned up all the contents of my office, including the sermons from 1985-1999. Thankfully, I had brought most of those sermon notes home, so I was able to reconstruct the list of sermons from those years.

In the book, I use three sermons for each text to attempt to interpret what those texts could mean for our lives. That means I preached on each story of the resurrection of Jesus at least three times. Some texts I preached on 7, 8, 9, even 11 times. How could I come up with something “new” to say that many times? It’s simply that the resurrection of Jesus is so important for our faith, our manner of living, and our destiny.

The resurrection of Jesus is also the basis for my latest book, The Barefoot Eulogist. The eulogist can speak a “good word” in the aftermath of death because Jesus was raised from the dead. That means this world is not all there is, and this life is not all there is. Death is not the end.

The “barefoot eulogist” can speak a word of hope even in a time of great loss. Easter is not just a season of the year. Easter is the theme of our faith. Easter is the “Game Changer” (which is the title of one of the sermons in the first chapter of the Easter book). Another sermon, in chapter 4 of the book, is titled “Death Was Arrested,” based on the song by Laura Story. In the song Laura sings:

Our Savior displayed on a criminal’s cross
Darkness rejoiced as though heaven had lost
But then Jesus arose with our freedom in hand
That’s when death was arrested and my life began.