Easter Sunday

He is risen! What wonderful words to hear. I can remember as a child, this was the Easter Greeting that everyone would exchange. I didn’t fully understand what this meant, but I knew that it meant that something big had happened, beyond all the Easter candy and treats, beyond all the gathering of family, even beyond the dinner of ham and other dishes that only seemed to come on that occasion. I knew that Jesus had risen from the dead, and that was a wonderful thing, because it always saddened me that He had been put to death. What I didn’t grasp was that He had also purchased my own rising to life through what had happened. He had paid my debt for my sins, both those I had committed up to that point, and those I would commit in later years, and He had paid for all of this with his most precious blood, and now after having done that for me, He had risen so that I too could one day rise and be with Him then, and live a new life now .

What we often fail to grasp sometimes about our Lord’s resurrection, is the ramification that it can have on our daily existence as well as our spiritual and eternal existence in life with Him. You see, when He purchased us with his body and blood on the cross, He freed us in that He restored our relationship with the Father. When He broke the bonds of death and rose from the dead, He broke the bonds that hold us captive as well. This is true of our hope to rise to life with Him one day, and it is true of the bonds that hold us captive in so many ways while we live here on earth. If I told you that you didn’t need to worry any more about all the stuff that takes up so much of your time right now, would that seem like a good thing? If you didn’t have to worry in the same way about bills, job problems, your physical body, your taxes, where you live – what if none of these things were as big a concern anymore? That would be freeing wouldn’t it? Yet what we sometimes fail to realize is that we have been freed from being overly hung up on this by our Lord’s resurrection.

If we live in such a way, that we place Christ first in all things, and truly keep our focus on doing what is pleasing to Him, and abiding in His loving embrace, we can truly be freed from worrying about all this stuff the way we sometimes do now. It is a matter of priority and perspective. When our Lord rose from the dead, He opened to us His home in heaven, and the eternal life that is where we truly belong. The things of the here and now should seem transitory to us if we truly grasp this, and because of that transitory nature, their perceived importance is drastically altered. This alteration brings with it peace and perspective to live life in such a way that we are not so absorbed with these temporary matters and can see beyond them. We can focus on loving God and one another the way we were meant to do. We can place our efforts into doing what is pleasing to God, and will benefit His other children. We can offer prayer as we ought to, because our actions and thoughts will be focused on God and will be prayers in and of themselves when we live like this. We don’t have to be bound in the temporal any longer, we have been freed to be what we are supposed to be, children of the spirit. Yes we are physical creations, but that is only part of our nature, our truer selves are designed to be attuned to God and to seek Him always, this is the natural state for us and where we are happiest. Living in light of our Lord’s resurrection aligns us with this truer nature more fully and so our natural state becomes something new. We can shed the old self with its burdens and emerge as children more fully of spirit who possess the lightness and love that comes with that nature. Jesus Christ has given us this gift of a new life through His resurrection – Happy Easter!