Skip to main content

Easter Sunday!

            Yesterday was the most holy day of the holiest week of the year.  It is so important to experience Easter each year.  Every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection, but Easter Sunday is the day we take it all in on a deeper level. 

            Now that it has been experienced for this year, it is time to integrate the joy of Easter Sunday into every day that I live.  What does it mean today that Easter Sunday really happened over 2000 years ago?  How does the resurrection of Jesus Christ affect how I live today, and for the coming year? 

            There remains a lot that doesn’t make sense to me about God, His love for this world and mankind.  I don’t fully understand how it is all going to work out in the end.  Easter Sunday gives me a preview.  It shows me that God is up to something wonderful.  He has proven there is a way to fix what is so wrong with this world.  Easter Sunday shows me that everything will happen when I least expect it to happen.  It fills me with expectation and awe.  I don’t have all the answers, but I know there are answers. 

            Paul said it this way to the Corinthians:  Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 1 Corinthians 15:1, 3-4 

            We Christians take our stand on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is the entire focus of Easter Sunday.  It is Christ’s resurrection that assures me of hope.  I don’t have to see how everything will work out because I can see how Christ has worked out.  I can be assured that Christ finished His hard work in this world.  It motivates me to focus on my own hard work.  I don’t have to like the work He has given me to do, but I do need to value it.  If it was important for Christ to come to this earth and do His work, then it is important for me to live like Him.

            If we are thrilled by Easter Sunday so we can be thrilled by cloudy Monday mornings.  Underneath the chores that have to be done, the sad news I will be forced to digest, the rotten smells that are part of living in this world, there is hope in the resurrection.  Christ has risen to heaven.  He leads the way.  He didn’t just live again in His former way contained by flesh like Lazarus and the others who were resurrected from the dead.  He was the first to rise again into the glory of the full resurrection.   We await that resurrection for ourselves and in the meantime we live this life in the hope of glory.

            The day after Easter Sunday is a day to get on with the gift of living.  It is a day to find the highest meaning and intention in the life God has purposed for us on this earth.

Copyright © 2014.  Deborah R. Newman  teatimeforyoursoul.com  All Rights Reserved.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th

Lenten Devotions

First Monday in Lent: Lent—Winter/Spring I took a weekend Silent Lenten Retreat and learned how special the season of Lent (which means Spring) really is. Being in the lovely setting where winter-spring becomes its own season; I discovered that the transformation from winter to spring reveals the transformation of our souls in Lent. We had an absolutely gorgeous weekend to enjoy solitude with God. Lent is a perfect season to see in nature what God is drawing out of us through the spiritual disciplines we focus on through penitence and preparation for Easter. It is the in-between season that shows us a lot about what we are doing spiritually through our focus on confession. From a distance winter can seem stark and ugly. I feel the same way about confession. But if you take the time to see the winter you can see that the winter season reveals realities that get masked over by the growth of summer. In winter you become aware of what needs to be cleared away. In the same way the con

The Troubled Christian Life

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness.  I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit