Easter changes everything. And this week on the It’s Life Podcast, we are sitting down with three of our pastors for a roundtable conversation about one of the most important questions anyone can ask — did Jesus actually rise from the dead? Pastor Zach is joined by Pastor Z Hall, our new campus pastor at the Fairview Heights campus in Portsmouth, and Pastor AJ, our NextGen and young adults pastor, to talk through the evidence, the implications, and why the resurrection is just as relevant in 2026 as it was 2,000 years ago.
The conversation starts with some surprising data. A recent Lifeway Research survey found that 65% of Americans — not just churchgoers, but all Americans — believe that Jesus physically rose from the dead. That number includes people of different faiths and no faith at all. And while that’s encouraging, our goal is simple: by the end of this episode, we want that number to be 100% for everyone listening.
So what do we actually know? The pastors walk through the baseline historical facts that are agreed upon even outside of Christian scholarship — Jesus was crucified, he was buried, and the tomb was empty. Even the religious leaders who opposed Jesus didn’t deny the empty tomb. They just paid soldiers to spread a different story about it. From there, the conversation builds a compelling case. The women being the first witnesses to the resurrection is one of the most overlooked evidences, in first-century Roman culture, women’s testimony wasn’t considered legally credible, so no one inventing this story would have written it that way. And then there’s the disciples themselves. These were men who scattered in fear the night of Jesus’s arrest, who denied him, who hid behind locked doors. Within weeks, they were standing in public boldly declaring that Jesus had risen and they were willing to be tortured and killed for it. Nobody dies for something they know is a lie.
Pastor AJ brings up the famous CS Lewis argument — Jesus was either a liar, a lunatic, or exactly who he claimed to be. His own siblings didn’t believe in him during his earthly ministry. But after the resurrection, his half-brother James became a follower and went on to write a letter of the New Testament. That kind of transformation doesn’t happen without something real.
But the resurrection isn’t just a historical argument, it’s personal. The pastors open up about what the resurrection means in the hardest chapters of real life. Pastor Z shares losing three parents in eight months. Pastor Zach shares the story of losing two sons during pregnancy, ten months apart, and how God surprised them with new life on the other side of that grief. The resurrection isn’t just something that happened once in a borrowed tomb in Jerusalem. It’s the pattern for how God works — bringing dead things back to life, restoring what feels hopeless, making a way when there seems to be none.
As Pastor AJ puts it, the most powerful apologetic isn’t an argument. It’s a life. The greatest evidence that Jesus is alive today is when the people who follow him actually live like he is. It’s not just church, it’s life. Don’t let this Easter pass without sitting in the wonder of what it means that the tomb is empty. He is risen. And because he lives, nothing is ever the final word.