Sunday is the day that marks the absolute center of our faith: the day that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. Without today, and without that resurrection, Christianity is worthless. It is Resurrection Day!
You can give all you have and be as self-sacrificing as you can be; you can help others and send money to Africa; you can help the oppressed and widows and orphans and countless charities. But – and here is the kicker – but if you do not believe in the resurrection, it is all worthless. You have wasted your time.
Not that you haven’t done any good and made some people better by your generosity.
But the thing is: generosity does not save you. That is because there is nothing that you can do to save yourself and nothing you can do to come to God. The only thing that will save you is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Because he rose from the dead, he can bring you back from death.
Romans 6 says that he was declared to be the Son of God by the power of the resurrection. And by that resurrection he can give you life.
If you do not believe in the resurrection, you do not believe in the center of the Christian faith. And if you do not believe in that, you have stripped Christianity of its power. It has become nothing more than the Rotary Club or the Kiwanis or the United Way.
It has become a great organization to belong to, a fine bunch of people, but in general worthless.
With the resurrection and its power to save us, there has been radical transformation. It makes us greater than anything we could even conceive of by ourselves.
The radical, transformative power of God was shown by the resurrection and is shown in the transformation in our own lives.
If you have come to Jesus and are no different than you were before, you have not come to Jesus.
Because when it comes down to it, that dynamic power changes our very souls. We are moved from service to the devil and being lost in sin to being children of God in Christ Jesus.
That is what we celebrate today. Praise the name of Jesus!
He is Risen!
No comments:
Post a Comment
To comment, post your comment and click the anonymous button. It would be nice if you signed it so I could know who you are.
You are welcome to say anything you want as long as it is nice. If I don't like it, or it is ugly, I will take it off, place it into the garbage disposal, grind it up, and allow it to be flushed into the Gulf of Mexico where it will be eaten by a fish and then excreted where it will lie on the bottom of the ocean until it is covered up by other comments.