This next Sunday is Easter and while many may assume that Christmas is the pinnacle of the Christian faith, it actually is Easter. Yes, we celebrate the coming of Jesus and His birth on Christmas. But, it is Easter, it is His death and resurrection that make Him different. There have been many teachers and examples throughout the history of time. But, to the Christian faith Jesus is not a good teacher. He is not an example for us to follow. He is God. And He not only died in our place but defeated death by being resurrected. It is the beliefs associated with Easter that our faith relies on.
In remembrance and in preparing our hearts for this coming Sunday I wanted to think about the Gospel. Why it’s important and what Easter is really all about.
To fully understand the significance of Easter we have to start with the basics of who we are and who God is. At the most basic of levels you need to know that God created you, He loves you, and He wants you to experience life in all of it's fullness.
If you open yourself up to the belief of a God, could you believe that out of all the people in the world he knows and loves you? It can be overwhelming to think about right? It’s kind of fun to think about the six degrees of separation sometimes. Often people like to share how they are connected to someone in the spotlight – whether you went to school with a now famous athlete or knew someone on the Bachelor we like to let people know about our connections. Or, sometimes even just seeing a celebrity we can all of a sudden feel this connection and air of excitement. I remember in middle school I had a friend that saw Orlando Bloom at Disneyland – she had a personally taken picture of him on her cell phone and it was amazing! I asked her if she could send me the picture so that I could have it too. We were excited to have this kind of connection to a big name celebrity. My friend never ever talked to Orlando Bloom, I never even saw him but we felt this special connection. At the time Pirates of the Caribbean was a big deal and Orlando Bloom was every young girls’ crush, he was the prince of Hollywood. Now, God is the King of the Universe. He is a King yet He know you, loves you, and has good plans in mind for you! Imagine someone of this status knowing and loving YOU!
Now, I feel like the word “love” is used a lot today. Because of how we use the word “love” it can lose some of it’s meaning. I love ice cream. I love watching Survivor. I love the mountains. I love playing card games. I love spending time with my friends and family. I love my husband and my daughter. It’s true that I love ice cream but I don’t love ice cream like I love my husband and daughter.
The kind of love it means when we say “God LOVES you” is a deep and sacrificial love. We read The Jesus Storybook Bible to my daughter every night by Sally Lloyd-Jones and she describes God’s love as a “never-stopping, never-giving up, always, and forever love”. It’s a love that is independent of you and your actions. God loves you as you are, period. He loves you enough to seek you out and deeply desire a connection with you. Not because you can bring anything to Him – He is God of the universe after all – but because He loves you and He knows you being in relationship with Him is the best thing for you, it is what you were designed for.
This is God’s great plan – for us to be in relationship with Him. It says in John 17:3 “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”. This is LIFE – This is the meaning, the purpose – to know God. That’s it!
If this is what life is supposed to be, knowing and living in relationship with God, why are most people not experience it? It’s our sin. We don’t give God the proper place in our lives. We are too caught up in what is physically in front of us, caught up in the everyday – jobs, schedules, ourselves. We think…maybe later, maybe when I have kids, or maybe when things slow down and I have more time I’ll think about spiritual things. But, really? You are going to put off the King of the Universe who wants a relationship with you? Our middle school selves wouldn’t have put off Orlando Bloom would they have?
I know that I mentioned the term “sin”. Before we move on, I think this term is important to explain because it’s a term we throw around often, and people may have a lot of different thoughts and feelings associated with the word “sin”. Did you know that the word “sin” was originally used as an archery term? Yes, like Katniss Everdeen level archery. In archery a “sin” referred to any arrow that didn’t hit the bullseye. On a typically archery target the bullseye is yellow in the center of the target. Outside of the yellow circle is a red circle, then blue, black, and the biggest circle on the outside of the target is white. It doesn’t matter where the arrow hits other than the bullseye – an arrow could hit just barely outside of the bullseye or completely miss the target and they are both “sins”. They have both missed the mark. They have fallen short of perfection – not perfection in human terms or standards, but perfection in God’s terms and standards.
It says in Romans 3:23 “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. I think most of us can agree on that. Year after year hearing all of the terrible stories on the news our human brokenness and depravity is becoming more and more clear. What the illustration of the bullseye reminds us of though is that while it may be easy to look at the world and say - yes we’ve fallen short, we are broken and sinful; or yes they’ve fallen short, they are broken and sinful, it doesn’t matter if you’ve completely missed the target or barely missed the bullseye it all is sin. And it all comes with consequence. In comparison you may not think you seem that bad, but you too have missed the mark, you too have sinned.
When we sin we go against our design and what God intended when He created us. When things are used in a way unintended, it can be hurtful for the creation in a way that maybe only the creator, who knows all of the inner workings, would recognize. There are costs. In everyday life we experience this too. At my Mom and Dad’s house there are a lot of old and sentimental pieces. Once when we were visiting, my husband accidentally knocked over a vase. My Dad had just given him a tour of the house and told him tons of the stories behind the decor. When this vase fell the first thing my husband thought of was, oh no! What was the story behind this piece? He knew that while he knocked this vase down unintentionally there were still two costs to bare. There was the physically cost for the vase itself and buying a new one to replace it. But even greater, there was also an element of cost beyond the price tag – the part that doesn’t just go away with an “I’m sorry” or even buying a new one. Hurt – whether intentional or accidental can cause a loss of happiness, reputation, opportunity, memory, as well as other things. These things are costly. They don’t just go away and they can’t just be swept under the rug and ignored. Someone has to bare the cost of those things, someone has to deal with the consequences.
Debt cannot just be dismissed. Either the person that did the crime is punished – they endure suffering, paying for what they’ve done financially and emotionally in how you treat them, how you talk about them, what your relationship looks like going forth. Or, the person that the crime was done against endures the suffering. They refuse payment, they absorb the debt – it will be painful, often their reputation may suffer, relationships may suffer, and there is a deep sense of loss.
It says in Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death”. This death has both physically and spiritual elements to it. It means spiritually that we are separated from God because God is life, therefore being away from God or not experiencing God is death. And then physically it means, you will die and experience eternal separation from God – God being in Heaven and you being in Hell. In rejecting God and not allowing Him the proper position in our lives as Lord, this is what we’ve done. These are our consequences and as we read before in Romans 3:23 – EVERYONE is guilty of this crime.
It’s sobering right? It sounds hopeless. We can try to establish a relationship with God through our own efforts of living a “good life”, being better than most, caring for others, or even religion but inevitably all fail because we sin – we don’t always hit the mark and when this happens once the damage is done – a separation has been made between God and us.
This is where Jesus and the cross come in. All of the cost, we deserved to pay, all of the consequences of our sin God absorbed on the cross. All of the pain, violence, evil of the world and of our hearts was put onto Jesus hanging and dying on the cross. The wages of sin is death. Someone had to die and God demonstrated His love for us by Jesus, God himself, taking the wrath we deserved to bare. God didn’t allow us to bare the financial and emotional cost of our wrongdoings He bore them for us on our behalf. John Stott says it this way, “the essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for us. We…put ourselves where only God deserves to be. God…puts himself where we deserve to be”.
Not only did Jesus die for us. But He also rose again – this is what Easter is about. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead He’s not who He said He was. But if he did, it means God entered into our world, He entered into our stories to save us, to give us another opportunity to have relationship with him and experience life in all of it’s fullness. It means that God cares about us enough to bare the cost only we deserve.
Jesus said “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). There is no other way. You can’t be good enough. It’s not about being better than most. It’s about Jesus. It’s about if you believe Him. It’s about making Him your Lord and Savior; accepting that you failed, you sinned, you couldn’t do it and you needed another way. It’s about accepting His help and allowing Him and what He’s done for you to change your life. It's about giving Him the appropriate position in your life this time as Lord.
This isn’t a light decision, it’s a life changing decision because we are sinners. Our hearts, our desires are not the same as God’s. God wants you to experience relationship with Him and life as it was intended to be. It is promised to be better. That doesn’t mean easier, but better because it will be with God and within our purposes. We also get a new identity, we get to take on the identity of Christ. We get to become children of God, we get the relationship with Him that we didn’t’ deserve but that Jesus did. While Jesus took on all of the wrath, shame, and death belonging to us on the cross, we get to take on his relationship with the Father, His perfection, and the eternal life that belonged to Him.
Our hearts long for this story, don’t they? Being pursued, loved, and saved in a sacrificial way. It’s the making of any great love story or superhero movie. Maybe these desires are written on our hearts because it’s what our hearts need most. Maybe somewhere inside we know we need a Savior and we want to be loved in a sacrificial way like this -in a way only God can love us.
The story of the cross is a simple one, it’s a love story. But, it’s also a complicated and offensive one because it takes a lot of humility to accept our needs for a Savior and that we can’t be Lord of our own lives. It’s a story God needs to prepare our hearts for. And it’s not just a fairytale, it is history and it is the present all at the same time. It’s a story of death and of life. It’s a story of triumph, hope, and new beginnings. It’s what everything before it was working towards and what everything after it points back to. It was the most important moment in all of human history. And your decision about how you think of it and how you think of Jesus is the most important and defining moment of your own life.
I know you may be leaving this post with some questions. If that’s the case please find someone to ask those questions to. Ask someone you know believes these things to be true, or ask me. I’d be happy to help you process through all of this!
Happy Easter! He Has Risen!