This Changes Everything

Dear Worshipers,

“Behold, I Am Alive!” When Pastor David shared his sermon title with me last week during our meeting, it stirred my spirit. I was already thinking about Easter, after all there was a tomb in the choir loft. I already had on my mind the many details of the Good Friday and Easter Sunday services which would tell this amazing story again, but something really struck me when he said this. He is risen! Indeed!

The resurrection lies at the crux of everything we believe. I Corinthians 15 is probably the key passage in scripture about the resurrection. If anyone asks you about it this week, and people are asking, take them here. It is a clear and concise explanation of not only the fact of the resurrection, but the implications on our life and faith.

Paul makes some amazingly and appropriately strong comments in this chapter. In verse 14 he asserts, “ if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” All those Sunday mornings wasted, your faith in vain. How about this in verse 19, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” That is significant. We are indeed a pitiful bunch if Christ is not raised, for we have founded our lives on a lie, and our hopes for eternity on an untruth. But this is not the case at all.

Instead, Jesus is alive, eternally. And so shall we be also through our association with His death AND resurrection. Through His finished work He has the authority to give the life of God to me. I must allow it now to penetrate every bit of me, and be expressed in every way at all times through the power of the Holy Spirit. Oswald Chambers put it this way [April 11 – “Complete and Effective Divinity”]. “ The Holy Spirit cannot be accepted as a guest in merely one room in the house—He invades all of it.”

Is this your experience? Do you feel like you have been invaded? Have you ever had unwelcome guests that just seemed to overwhelm your home? That may bring a bad connotation to your mind, but yet that visceral response is something akin to the feeling your old self will have regarding the “intrusion” of the Spirit. Let us welcome Him in the aftermath of Easter. As Jesus went into the tomb as a dead man and came out a living victor, let us do the same with our sin, dying to it and living for Christ.

After all, Jesus lives and so shall we!

In Christ,

Pastor Scott