Open Your Easter Egg!! What's In It?

So What!

It’s been a couple of week since Easter. Most of us sat in church and listened to that same sermon we hear every year. You know the one: the tomb is empty and mankind is redeemed. Jesus’ victory over sin can now give mankind hope and better than that, He defeated death and now we can live with Him forever!

Great story, all true and it gives us all great hope and comfort as we live in a sin filled world that has nothing to offer a Christian these days. But my real question is, how do we apply this to our lives today? If we say that it is to give man hope, what’s the difference between that and the man centered view that comes out of Roman Catholicism and their “earn your way to heaven theology”, Or the modern Pentecostals with their get a “blessing from God” and “name it and claim it”. If we are to approach God with anything other than to see ourselves as the sinners that we are and give Him glory and enjoy Him forever than we aren’t much different than the people who earn their way to heaven or use God to achieve some kind of spiritual or material gain. Yet every year at this time we seem to reflect on how Christ sacrificed for our well being.

This year I think that we should take a new approach. Let’s look at what Christ did as an example of how we should act. You might be saying right now that most people understand that and believe that but I think that is a false perception of reality. If we could all live by that example of Christ, then we wouldn’t have the problems we have in our own churches. Although we don’t have the problems in the churches today that we have in the secular world we do have a lot. We need to take a hard look at how we are acting and why we really show up at church every week. I think that our self-centered attitudes have taken over and we have lost focus. We do need to look at what the true biblical example is and start by applying it to our own lives. What I mean by that is we need to look into ourselves and quit applying it to others.

This brings us back to the story of Easter. Let’s look at it in the light of how we can use it as an example of how we should live our everyday lives. To understand this we must try to look at every part of the crucifixion and discern whether He was acting in His humanity or as God. We would have to say that when He was paying the sin debt He was acting as God. This shows us that we need to determine when that was. When Christ carried the cross down the Via Della Rosa He could not make it all the way and He was helped by Simon. This proves that He was now paying the sin debt at that time. If this is true then he was acting in His humanity not in His deity. This being true this part of the crucifixion then is applicable as something that we can apply to our lives.

From the beginning the only thing that he really said was that nothing that happened to Him happened because the Father allowed it and He claimed to be the Messiah. He was beaten and tortured beyond what we would consider acceptable but let’s look at our own lives. Is this the standard that we live by? I think that most of us would end up trying to claim some undeserved right to be treated differently. We would actually use that to disguise our own sin. We try to fool others but in the end the only people we fool are ourselves and we end up leaving fellow brothers and sisters in the wake of our path and we act nothing like the Christ who went to the cross fully understanding that it is God who is control not the ones who persecute us.

I would venture to say that some of those that persecuted Christ were part of the elect and did eventually come to a saving knowledge of God. Looking at Ephesians where it says that we are to love our wives the way that God loved the church. We will take that persecution from our wives. And to the women who think that you’re off the hook, the Bible says to pick up your cross and follow Him. To every man, woman and child who loves God I would ask, have you picked up your cross and followed Him?