Resurrection Sunday 2022: God’s Plan of Transfer Through the Last Adam

This Resurrection Sunday message teaches that Easter is about more than a ticket to heaven. It is about God’s plan of transfer. What Adam lost when he fell, Jesus, the last Adam, restored through the cross and the empty tomb, and righteousness given as a free gift is what moves believers out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God’s Son. The pastor traces that plan from creation to the resurrection and shows how it reaches every believer today.

Below you will find the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, the Scripture behind each point (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps you can take this week.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was preached at NTC Ministries on Easter 2022 and posted on April 19, 2022. It runs about 41 minutes and ends with the whole congregation, along with those listening by radio and online, praying aloud to receive what Jesus purchased. The pastor says he loves preaching at Easter because there are a hundred elements to share, but he chooses one: God’s plan of transfer.

To understand what happened when Jesus was raised from the dead, he says, we need a simple history of the ages: why God created, what Adam was given and lost, and how Jesus came as the last Adam to bring everything back. He keeps the history short and keeps returning to love and righteousness.

The Kingdom of Heaven Is Here

God created a kingdom in this world, the pastor says, and most Christians are ignorant of it. They do not understand how it operates; many do not even know it is here. Yet John the Baptist came preaching that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, Jesus preached the same message (Matthew 4:17), and He sent His disciples out to proclaim it.

He believes in being born again, he stresses (John 3:7). But the church has built a whole doctrine around that one verse and preaches it every service, while some sixty verses speak about the kingdom directly. Paul’s letters explain what took place between the cross and the throne, during those three days. While Jesus walked the earth, nobody understood that. People only knew the Messiah would die, and they expected God to set up a physical kingdom.

Even after the resurrection, the apostles asked whether He would now restore the kingdom. Jesus told them it was not for them to know the times, and sent them to be His witnesses (Acts 1:6–8). That, the pastor says, is us: go and do what we are supposed to be doing.

A Christian does not wonder whether Jesus will really return, he says, because He lives in our hearts. The problem is with people who know of Him but do not actually know Him.

Created in Love and Given Dominion

God created because of love. Love needs an object to be expressed to, the pastor explains, or it is never realized. He illustrates from his own life: when he first saw the girl who became his wife, something rose up in him he had never felt before. It made him act differently and talk differently, and it altered his life. God wants to alter our lives with that same love.

But love has to be returned to be fully understood. Just as God brings two people together, He needed to bring man together with Himself. The pastor describes the Father as the architect, the mastermind who decided how everything would go, with all that wisdom placed in Jesus Christ before anything was created. Jesus, then, was the contractor: nothing was made that was not made through Him (John 1:3).

God also needed a representative on earth, someone who would carry His love and care to others. Parents do the same when they speak well of each other to their children: they represent love. That was Adam’s place. God walked with him in the cool of the day (Genesis 3:8) and told him to pass on what he received.

God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion” (Genesis 1:26). Dominion, the pastor says, is a kingdom term that means to rule. Adam and Eve were to declare God’s goodness and greatness to all the works of His hands. Now the church is back in that place, called to make known the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers (Ephesians 3:10).

Adam Falls; Jesus, the Last Adam, Comes

Adam fell from his responsibility. The pastor distinguishes sins of commission, doing what you should not, from sins of omission, failing to do what you should, and says Adam did both. He was supposed to be declaring God’s goodness and guarding the garden as a place where he and God walked together in intimacy, and he did not. So Adam lost his rule, handing it over by default.

Through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned (Romans 5:12). Not only Adam but everyone born after him was separated from the love of God; all have sinned and fall short of His glory (Romans 3:23).

That was never the end of the story, he says, because it was always intended for Jesus to head it up. The world we see now is fallen and corrupted. We admire sunsets, oceans and birds, but this is the corrupted model, not what God originally made. Creation itself waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God, having been subjected to futility not willingly (Romans 8:19–21). All creation, he says, is waiting for you and me to accept God’s love and pass it on.

So God invested Himself in His creation. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son (John 3:16), the One who could never be separated from love because He is love. God purposed in Himself to gather together in one all things in Christ, both in heaven and on earth (Ephesians 1:9–10). When we give our lives to Jesus, we are brought into Him, and in Him we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

That fellowship is meant to flow like rivers of living water (John 7:38), but we have to spend time with Him. Then the key passage: the first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. The natural came first, then the spiritual. The first man was of the earth; the second Man is the Lord from heaven (1 Corinthians 15:45–47). Jesus is the last representative, the last one to rule with dominion.

The pastor says that when he realized his wife actually loved him, it was the closest thing to a born-again experience you can have without God. Seeing God’s plan fulfilled, he says, takes that kind of intimate fellowship with Jesus Christ.

This leads to a correction he considers vital. If you polled Christians, most would say the ultimate goal of Christianity is going to heaven. We do go to heaven, he says, and there will be a wedding there. But that is not the purpose of salvation. Jesus spoke of His people inheriting the earth (Matthew 5:5). Why would He take us away if all creation is waiting for us? Detach yourself from the corruption, attach yourself to Jesus, let God’s love flow and change this earth.

Resurrection Sunday and the Gift of Righteousness

Coming as a man, Jesus legally took on Himself the just punishment for sin, not just Adam’s but everyone’s, all at once. Christ suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust (1 Peter 3:18). The pastor has the congregation read it aloud: God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Many people think they are Christians because they know stories about Jesus and went to church a few times. Christianity, he says, is an intimate love affair, a love that rivets us to the One who took our whole penalty just so we could talk with Him and hear from Him.

Under the law, no one could be right with God. Break one commandment and you are guilty of all (James 2:10). People who only ever hear the law, never the kingdom, give up: what is the use? When Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom, Peter, who had a large fishing business, asked who then could be saved. Jesus answered that with God all things are possible (Matthew 19:24–26).

Jesus was delivered up because of our offenses and raised because of our justification (Romans 4:25). The pastor points to Young’s Literal Translation, which he reads as saying Jesus was raised because we were declared righteous. During those three days, he teaches, Jesus died, went to the abyss, preached to those held captive in Abraham’s bosom and paid our penalty. When the payment was complete, righteousness could be released, and that is what raised Him from the dead.

So on Resurrection Sunday we celebrate Jesus coming out of the tomb because righteousness was given to us. Until it could be given, He could not rise. Now hearts, souls and lives can be changed, because people are brought back into right standing with God and can know His love.

The pastor’s favorite verse on this is Romans 5:17. If by one man’s offense death reigned, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. He notes that the Amplified Bible speaks of reigning as kings in life. Everyone can count on doing something foolish this year, he jokes. But much more than all of Adam’s offense and all our mistakes is the gift.

Here is the difference, he says, between someone born again and someone who only knows about God. A child of God has received the gift of righteousness and is right with God, not because he is perfect or better, but because he accepted the gift. It takes faith to keep thanking God for that gift when you have just messed up, because otherwise you would disqualify yourself.

A gift is given freely, not earned. The law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ (John 1:17). Our lives really change, the pastor says, when we accept His righteousness as a gift and stop working to earn righteousness from God.

What God’s Plan of Transfer Brings

Jesus came to bring a complete transfer of righteousness and blessing, the pastor says. Everything was under a curse. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17), and God’s plan is to transfer all goodness, beauty, love, health and provision into the life of the one who believes he has been made righteous. He declares that he is blessed coming in and going out (Deuteronomy 28:6), because he is the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus.

The central text for the transfer is Colossians 1:12–14. The Father has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light, delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption and forgiveness. Without righteousness, he says, no one could be transferred into the kingdom of light or come into the Father’s presence. With it, you boldly come into God’s front room and fellowship with Him.

The table below follows the transfers he names in the message, each traced to what Jesus did.

Healing is transferred too, he teaches. Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would be despised and rejected, a Man of sorrows, wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities, and by His stripes we are healed (Isaiah 53:3–5). Healing comes, he says, because righteousness could only be poured out once Jesus had paid the price.

He loves the story of the two disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:13–32). Nobody had expected the resurrection. Jesus walked with them, opened the prophets to them, then vanished, and they said their hearts burned within them while He talked with them. The pastor compares that burning to late-night phone calls with the girl he later married. That is what love does, he says. Without it, church is boring.

Provision is part of the transfer as well. You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). Jesus humbled Himself and left heaven so He could give us the gift of righteousness.

Love makes people real with each other, which is why believers are told to confess their faults to one another and be healed (James 5:16). And God withholds nothing: He who did not spare His own Son, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things (Romans 8:32)? It pleased the Father that in Christ all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross (Colossians 1:19–20).

Saying you are the righteousness of God, he explains, does not mean you are as good as God. It means God gifted you with rightness, so you are as right with Him as He is, and nothing will be withheld. He closes with Paul’s prayer that believers be strengthened in the inner man, rooted and grounded in love, able to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge and filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:16–19).

Living the Resurrection This Week

This Resurrection Sunday message ends with everyone standing to pray: asking forgiveness, confessing that Jesus died and rose, and receiving the transfer of righteousness, health, provision, strength, love, power and joy. Here are practical steps drawn from it:

• Receive the gift daily. When you fail, thank God out loud that He has given you the gift of righteousness instead of disqualifying yourself.
• Spend time with Him. Christianity is a love relationship. Set aside unhurried time to talk with Jesus the way you would with someone you love.
• Stop working to earn it. Notice where you are trying to obtain something from God by effort, and receive it as a gift instead.
• Represent His love. Like Adam was meant to, speak well of God and of your family to the people around you.
• Be real with other believers. Practice the honesty James 5:16 describes, rather than gossip.
• Look at this earth differently. Creation is waiting for the sons of God; ask where God’s love can flow through you this week.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 Most Christians are ignorant of the kingdom
• 0:58 Sixty verses on the kingdom; between the cross and the throne
• 1:58 Is Jesus really coming back? God’s plan of transfer
• 2:57 God created because of love
• 5:09 The Father as architect, Jesus as contractor
• 6:11 Adam the representative; Genesis 1:26 dominion
• 7:16 Adam falls: commission and omission
• 9:24 Romans 5:12: by one man sin entered
• 10:35 Creation waits for the sons of God
• 11:48 Ephesians 1:9–10: all things in Christ
• 13:02 The last Adam: 1 Corinthians 15:45
• 14:21 Heaven is not the purpose of salvation
• 15:33 Jesus took the punishment: 2 Corinthians 5:21
• 17:05 Christianity is an intimate love affair
• 18:18 Romans 4:25: raised for our justification
• 19:40 Romans 5:17: much more
• 21:59 Reign as kings in life
• 24:26 A gift, not wages
• 25:35 Why the tomb is empty
• 26:52 Colossians 1: transferred into the kingdom
• 29:21 Isaiah 53: healing transferred
• 30:31 The Emmaus road: hearts burning
• 32:42 2 Corinthians 8:9: provision transferred
• 35:38 Romans 8:32 and Colossians 1:19–20
• 38:00 Ephesians 3:16–19: filled with God’s fullness
• 39:13 Prayer to receive the transfer

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the pastor mean by the last Adam?

He means Jesus as the final representative of God’s kingdom on earth. Adam was the first, given dominion to rule and to declare God’s goodness, but he lost that rule by not doing what he was supposed to do. Jesus came as the last Adam, a life-giving spirit, to restore what was lost. In the pastor’s words, it was always intended for Jesus to head it up.

Does this mean believers will never make mistakes?

No. The pastor jokes that everyone can count on doing something foolish this year. Being the righteousness of God does not mean being perfect or even better than others. It means you have received a gift that makes you right with God. That is why it takes faith: when you mess up, you thank God for the gift instead of disqualifying yourself.

Why is love so central to a resurrection message?

Because, in his teaching, love is why God created at all. Love needs someone to receive it and return it. Adam was meant to pass God’s love on and failed; Jesus came to bring people back into it. That is also why he describes Christianity as an intimate love affair rather than knowledge about Jesus. Hearts burn, as on the Emmaus road, when He talks with us.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Genesis 1:26 — dominion given to man
• Romans 5:12 — by one man sin entered
• Romans 8:19–21 — creation waits
• 1 Corinthians 15:45–47 — the last Adam
• 2 Corinthians 5:21 — the righteousness of God in Him
• Romans 4:25 — raised for our justification
• Romans 5:17 — reign in life
• Colossians 1:12–14 — transferred into His kingdom
• Isaiah 53:3–5 — by His stripes
• Ephesians 3:16–19 — filled with the fullness of God

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

Watch More Messages

If this Easter message stirred your faith, there are hundreds more teachings from NTC Ministries waiting for you. Browse the full sermon archive and keep growing in the kingdom Jesus opened for you.