Tag: The resurrection

Good News

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Happy Easter Monday! Everything has been leading to this. Jesus’ last week before His death on a Roman cross was action-packed to say the least. Just the things He said and did then have changed the world many times over. But as He always knew, the cross was coming, and come it did. What seemed like a total defeat for Jesus’ fledgling movement turned out to be the catalyst for its total success. On the third day, much to everyone’s surprise, Jesus was alive again. As we finish up our series, A Journey to the Cross with Mark, let’s talk about why this surprising news was just so good.

P.S. This will be the only post for this week. We are taking a few days off as a family. I’ll look forward to being back with you next week!

Good News

Have you ever had something good happen that you didn’t expect? That’s always fun. You’re just humming along, minding your own business, and then, BAM! Something happens to totally make your day. Everybody needs a day like that at least once in a while. What’s even more fun, though, is watching somebody else react to some unexpected good news. If you can catch it right, you can see the dawn of realization come on their face. You can watch as the clouds of confusion gradually lift and they experience the sheer joy of the moment. Videos of little kids reacting to a military parent surprising them with an unexpected homecoming come to mind here. Those things make me tear up every single time I see one. What may be the most fun of all, though, is seeing someone react to something good that they don’t even have a category for until they experience it. In those moments, you can almost watch their brains short-circuit. If they were a computer, their screen would just be flashing a “does not compute” message over and over again as their synapses were trying to figure out how to process the news in ways that will make any kind of sense out of what they are experiencing. And then the joy on the other side of the wall is often the purest, most intense joy you will find. Well, this morning, I want to talk with you for a few minutes about some people who had just this kind of an experience. 

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Morning Musing: John 20:19

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“When it was evening of that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them, and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Jesus’ final week before His death was pretty action packed. And we have studied all of it in nearly endless detail. I don’t necessarily mean that we as a church have, but scholars have done this work several times over. We can pretty well piece together what happened on every single day of Jesus’ last week. 

Except for one. 

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Morning Musing: Romans 5:8

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“But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As we prepare for the great celebration of Easter, there are a lot of different things to which we give our attention. We’ve already covered a couple of them in the last couple of days. Jesus’ death really was necessary because sin really is that big of a problem. We talk through various apologetic defenses of the crucifixion and the resurrection. We talk about the implications of the resurrection. That one alone provides enough material to keep us going for quite a long time. Just when you think you’ve run out of material, more shows up. The ramifications of Jesus’ walking out of His tomb on Sunday morning are vast beyond reckoning. But in the midst of all of these important conversations, there’s one that often gets missed. I want to see if we can thread a needle this morning and talk for just a second about something we don’t often consider: None of this had to happen.

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Why Do We Suffer?

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This week we are in the third part of our teaching series, Confident in the Face of Hard Questions. This will be the most emotionally challenging stop on our journey. This week we are going to tackle the question of why there is suffering in the world created by a supposedly good God. This is a deeply emotional question with intensely personal elements to it. You have perhaps asked this question yourself. You certainly know people who have even if you didn’t know that about them. The answers to this question won’t be easy, but they are good. Let’s dive in together to see what the Scriptures have to say about it.

Why Do We Suffer?

There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding right now in Gaza. There’s an ongoing one in Ukraine. China is still keeping millions of Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps in the Xinjiang Province even though that has dropped out of the news. That is in addition to that nation’s ongoing and vigorous persecution of Christians…who make up a larger percentage of the population than Chinese Communist Party members. Azerbaijan has launched a genocidal effort to exterminate or otherwise forcibly relocate all of the Armenian Christians in a disputed border region between the nations, leading to massive suffering on the part of tens of thousands. Muslims in Pakistan are becoming more and more aggressive in their persecution of Christians in the nation. So are Hindus in India. The two nations don’t like each other, but they both agree that they hate Christians more. A category five Hurricane hit the Pacific coast of Mexico last week from which the recovery efforts have only just begun. A shooter in Maine just last week murdered 18 and injured another 13, some critically. Several people in our own community have had their lives disrupted just recently by unexpected, unwelcome, and scary news that bodes for a very difficult road stretching out in their near future. 

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Peter 1:3

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“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As far as the world is concerned, the way of Jesus is a way of weakness and failure. Well, weakness in a world dominated by what is perceived as strength invites aggressive people to challenge and persecute those who are given the unfortunate label. Those people and institutions and even nations that are thought to be weak are made into targets. They can become scapegoats for all kinds of problems. Eventually they are seen as less than fully human, and once that particular line is crossed in the minds of their adversaries, a whole range of awful things suddenly fall within the realm of reasonable, acceptable, and even good to do to them. The apostle Peter, who had once fully bought into the world’s narrative of strength, opens his first letter by offering praise to God because of the living hope He has given us through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The trouble with a resurrection hope is that it starts with a death. In this case it was a voluntary death that was not resisted. The world sees that as weakness and responds accordingly. How do we live with a living hope in a world that doesn’t understand such a thing?

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