What do you do after Easter? It’s a valid question for ministers. You spend a lot of time getting ready for this Sunday that celebrates the whole reason you exist as a Church – the Resurrection. Then reaching that mountain top crescendo what do you do? It seems kind of anticlimactic to say that “I guess you just climb down the mountain”. That has always been a question I wanted to ask someone who climbed Everest, after you plant your little flag on the tip top of the highest point on Earth what do you do for an encore? The choir practices for weeks on the music, pastors work every point and illustration, the kids hunt eggs and learn the true meaning is the lamb and not the rabbit. So, after this work on Resurrection Sunday what do you come into on Post Resurrection Monday?
We’ll there is something more to it all. We don’t just accept the reality of the gift of salvation, stay awake in the pew and then wait for the hearse to pick us up. After justification there is sanctification both $50-dollar words that mean salvation is a journey. Now we are once saved always saved and headed to Heaven be sure of that Biblical teaching. However, between the joy of the empty tomb and the expectation of the second coming is the transformation here on Earth where we become more like our Lord every day. The Bible tells us in Romans 8:11 And if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then He who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through His Spirit who lives in you. (HCSB). To me that isn’t just a promise for eternity but a blessing of real vitality here while we live on Earth. Jesus promised us that life without him physically here was going to be great because God wasn’t going to be in Heaven or in the person of Jesus, but God was going to come and live within us through the presence of the Holy Spirit. So, Easter is the first step in a journey that is like no other. For us God isn’t a golden idol in a temple or some unknowable blah in the Cosmos, but our God walks with us and talks with us. He isn’t just watching us he lives within us.
We will take some time over the next few months to journey through what that means. I hope you will join me in this journey and discover what a great God we have and how he wants to transform us into his presence here on Earth.