The Rescue You Didn't Earn | Easter 2026

Pastor Pat opens Easter Sunday by reading Romans 5:8 together with the church and calling it the center of this year’s theme: rescue. Then he tells a story on himself. Years ago, as youth pastor, he took student interns to Maunalua Bay with paddleboards. Two of them shared a board, and the wind carried them almost a mile out toward the shipping lanes. A tour boat finally picked them up. Pat admits their parents only heard the story about 12 years later.

The greatest rescue story in history, he says, starts in a manger, continues on a cross and keeps going with an empty tomb, and that resurrection power lives in us now. We know the facts of Easter. It’s the why that changes us, and we have to rehearse it because comfort makes us forget how desperate we once were.

“But God” turns lives in a new direction. “While we were still sinners” tells us our true condition. Our culture says be your own hero and grind hard enough to save yourself. The gospel admits we were lost. Sin means missing the mark so badly that every attempt to fix it makes the mess worse. Jesus ate with people he wasn’t supposed to eat with and said the sick are the ones who need a doctor.

Pat tells a second paddleboard story. He took his 68-year-old mom out on the bay at sunset, the wind picked up, and she was too exhausted to paddle back. A man on a jet ski with a rescue sled rode past, and Pat didn’t ask for help. The man circled back and asked, “Bro, you need some help?” This time Pat said yes. On the beach his mom told him she honestly thought she was going to die. Pat still doesn’t know what kept him quiet the first time, maybe pride.

God makes the first move. He demonstrates his agape love, a love that doesn’t depend on our effort and never quits on us. Pat compares it to a parent running toward a child who is afraid in the dark.

He gives three responses. Rest in the rescue. Retell it, so your kids hear what God rescued you from. Receive it, because a gift you earn is a paycheck. He closes with John Harper, a widowed Scottish preacher on the Titanic, who put his daughter in a lifeboat, swam from person to person asking “Are you saved?” and gave his life jacket to a man who said no. Then Pat invites the room to receive the rescue.