Easter Message: Prologue to Eternal Life and Everlasting Bliss

"If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." In other words, without a hope for resurrection and everlasting joy with Christ we have nothing else. Now, if Christ is raised, and I believe He is, and if trusting him means that we will be raised with Him, then this life is just a brief prelude to eternal life with Christ and ever-increasing joy with Him. And if that is true, then like Paul, John, Peter and His early followers, we are no one's fool. His early followers live's of radical, risk-taking, sacrificial love is not to be pitied. Pity not them that rise with Christ.

Jesus says in Luke 14:13-14, "When you give a reception, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous." Do you see the effect of believing in the resurrection – really believing, not just saying you believe it? Without the resurrection we tend to want our pleasures here and now, and so we avoid risk and danger and difficulty and pain and discomfort and frustration; and so our love is tame and bland and weak and cautious and timid.

But, Jesus says, if you believe that your joy in the resurrection will make up for a thousand losses and self-denials and sacrifices and dangers and risks here for the sake of love, then you will love people without a view to what you can get out of it here. It will be sustained by the joy set before you. And that will be the kind of love that we all dream about from time to time.

We were made for it. Christ died and rose again to make it possible. Come to Him. Trust Him. The Bible says, "If you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved". Saved from sin. Saved from judgment. Saved from a life of mere self-serving indulgence.

"If in this life only we have hoped in Christ we are of all men most to be pitied." But since Christ has been raised, and since by trusting in him we will be raised with him, then this life of radical, sacrificial love is not to be pitied. Pity not them who rise with Christ.