Well, Easter our most victorious day of the year has come and gone. But the reality of Easter never leaves us. Beginning early next year, the momentum leading up to Christianity’s celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus will begin anew. There is so much attached to the resurrection and most people identifying as Christians never fully get in touch with the realities of it.
Easter, for many, many people is a time for new dresses, suits and such which will enable them to attend an Easter worship service in style although in today’s worship environment that doesn’t seem to matter as much. It’s a time for family gatherings and Easter Egg hunts with all the children and grandchildren. Somewhere in the midst of it all, the real meaning of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, loses a great deal of its focus and importance to many people. This is sad to say but it is true and has been true for a long time.
The deep, penetrating truths concerning our celebration of the resurrection we call Easter are lost on most people. The age-old story of redemption is what we are really dealing with but many never know it. The resurrection of Jesus imprints everything in a profound way which is lost to a great extent in the midst of our Easter egg hunts and celebrations. The sad thing is that many people hardly have a clue about how the resurrection of Jesus is suppose to affect our lives. Many people, quite honestly, don’t think they have done very much wrong in the first place so why dwell on the value of redemption? They figure that being in worship on Easter Sunday and Christmas is enough for them to be identified as a Christian. That is the extent to which people have minimized the value of what happened on what we celebrate as Easter Sunday. The Resurrection happened and that changes everything whether people know it or not. The most important event in the history of mankind is reduced to something that is an event which, if Easter worship is attended, qualifies a person to tell others that they are a church member as if that qualifies them for heaven and it does not. Churches are filled with people who are not saved and will never know anything better than being a member of a particular church. Sorry, but church membership does not qualify a person for heaven. Something deeper must happen to a person’s spirit before heaven is available to them. They must acknowledge that Jesus is God’s Son and that God raised Him from the dead…Romans 10:9-10. Once a person commits their life to Christ, the provisions of the cross and the resurrection are theirs. So, belief in the resurrection is necessary for salvation and the assurance of heaven when one dies.
But there is more. One cannot say they accept Christ and his atoning work and then live as if nothing ever happened to them. A person is given a new spirit and a new life to live when they are saved through Christ and His work. Let’s look at it for a minute. One way a person can know they are saved is that God’s Spirit brings a love for a pure life in obedience to Him. Before one is saved, they are not concerned about spiritual matters and their relationship to God by the way they live. A person is not saved by the way they live but the way a Christian lives is driven by the fact that they are saved. The new spirit God puts in a person at salvation drives them to want to be obedient to God and the Bible. One way to know if a person is saved or not is that they no longer WANT to sin. They have a desire to stay away from sin. And when they do sin, they know they have a Advocate with the Father. When and if sin comes to a Christian they want to get it fixed as soon as possible and then continue their good relationship with God. They do not have this desire before salvation. They may want to be good before being saved but salvation, and only salvation, makes them capable of pleasing God.
So, Easter is a foundational stone in our ability to live Godly lives. The cross and the grave go hand in hand. The price for your salvation was paid on the cross and your assurance of salvation was procured when Jesus was resurrected. The resurrection was God’s way of proving that all He did through Jesus, including redemption for all who will accept it, was true and genuine.
So, What’s Next?…..A person will have a different view of the events on Easter morning than they ever had before. They may have fun with the kids hunting Easter eggs, but they realize that that is a secular part of it all. They put no salvific value in hunting eggs. But that same person will have a holy spot in their heart every time Easter and the resurrection of Jesus are brought up in conversation or thought. It will have a real bearing on life. How a person acts is affected. How they look will also have a different bearing. What they do in their lives will be radically changed. So, that’s what is next! Let’s see a different person who loves the Lord and salvation so much that the secular meaning of Easter never crosses their minds. They reserve Easter and Christmas as something special which is unaffected by what the world likes to do with both of them. It is a time when the miracle working action of God reached out of heaven and touched events here on earth and we are allowed to know about it and can go to the very spot where it all happened. The tomb of Jesus will make a person hallow the place where it all happened and it will also make them have no doubts about it all. The world can have its opinions and doubts but the empty tomb screams out a testimony about what God did on Easter Sunday morning all those years ago.
So, What Now? A changed life is what! A new way of walking. A new way of talking. A new level of commitment that changes life. A new appreciation and commitment to worship the God of this universe who guaranteed Redemption by raising Jesus from the death on Easter Sunday morning.
Think on these things. It’s all the truth.
Wm F. Harrell…4-24-2025
