050327 Easter
Easter 2005
As a teenager, I vividly remember rappelling down the side of a cliff for the first time.
You’re secured by a series of ropes and carabineers.
As you walk backwards off the face of the cliff, your immediate instinct is to hug the mountain. But if you try to hug the mountain, you’ll find yourself slamming into the side it, scraping your knee and maybe elbows and chin…
The only way you can really descend smoothly is to lean back as far as you can and look up at sky, so that your legs are at right angles to the cliff. It's counterintuitive, but it's the only way to go down.
When we follow Christ there are times he calls us to move in a direction that seems to run in the face of common sense. Jesus said if you want to become great you must become a servant, he said it’s through giving that we receive, and most dramatic of all he said it’s through dying that we live.
Jesus words about how dying leads to a new life weren’t simply hot air. He proved them on very first Easter Sunday, as he rose from the grave.
On this Sunday Easter we’re going to explore what it means to live through dying.
If you have your Bibles please turn to John 12. Less than a week before Jesus was crucified, Jesus predicted his death and show us how our true life comes through dying:
23Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25The man or woman who loves his or her life will lose it, while the man or woman who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.
Jesus says in vs. 23 that the time has come for me to be glorified.
The Jewish people of Jesus day were expecting that God would reveal his glory through a kind of “symphony of fire” in the skies, but instead God shows us his glory through the ultimate sign of his love for us, his dying on the cross for us in Christ.
In verse 24 Jesus says, I tell you the truth (in the Greek this phrase literally reads “amen and amen”). He begins by saying what he’s about to say is trustworthy and true because what he’s about to say will seem outrageous.
He says the only way to experience real life and fruitfulness is through death.
He says that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground it remains just a seed, but if it dies it produces many seeds.
This truth, of course, was modeled by Jesus in the ultimate way. Jesus was nailed to a cross and after several hours on the cross, he releases his life with the prayer into your hands I commit my spirit… his death opened the door for him to be ushered into a new life…
We tend to think and hope (subconsciously) that this pattern of dying and rising to a new life is applicable only to Jesus.
But in the following verses, Jesus points out that this pattern also applies to us.
In verse 25 Jesus says, 25The man or woman who loves his or her life will lose it, while the man or woman who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
Eugene Peterson in his translation called The Message puts it this way:
Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
The path to true life and fruitfulness come through the gateway of “death.”
Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 15 that resurrection cannot occur without death…
Canadian writer on the spiritual life Ronald Rolheiser says that if we try to hold onto our life the best we can hope for is a resuscitated life, but if we “let it go” we can have a resurrection life...
But letting our life go either at end of our life or by “dying to” various things while we live is scary and difficult.
So where do we find to courage to able to “die” in order to live?
This is where Easter comes in.
What if Christ rose from the dead? This could change everything for us.
It changed everything for those first disciples. As you may recall, if you’ve read the Gospels, when Jesus was arrested, tried, and later crucified his disciples--out of fear for their lives--went into hiding.
They were crushed when their hero was killed and were afraid their fate as his followers might be the same.
But just a few weeks later… these cowering disciples became some of the most courageous people the world has ever seen.
Most of these disciples ended actually dying for their belief in that Christ had risen.
What could have explained their dramatic transformation?
Some people have suggested that Jesus in the cool, damp tomb, revived… he got up, busted free from his burial bandages, moved up the 1 and half ton stone, like Mr. Incredible overpowered, the Roman guards (or 16 highly disciplined, fighting men)… and then claimed he rose from the dead. If this was true, Jesus would have looked worse that Rocky after he fought Apollo Creed in Rock I or Rodney King after he was beaten by the LA police. He would not have inspired a revolution--he would have evoked pity!
But they and many others were convinced that God had raised Jesus from the dead and so they were able to live their lives with abandon knowing God could raise the dead.
No one is more dangerous (in the good sense) alive than the person who is not afraid to die…
If we believe that God can raise the dead, we can let go not only at the end of our lives and believe that we will experience resurrection… but we can “let go and die” throughout our life and experience new life, believing that God can raise the dead.
We’ve been going through a series on Abraham’s journey of faith. In Hebrews 11 we read that 17It was by faith that Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice when God was testing him. Abraham, who had received God's promises, was ready to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, 18though God had promised him, "Isaac is the son through whom your descendants will be counted. 19Abraham assumed that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again. And in a sense, Abraham did receive his son back from the dead.
Abraham as we see was able to “let go” when God called him to literally give up the life of his son because according to Hebrews 11 he believed that God could raise him from the dead.
When, like Abraham, we believe that God can raise dead, we can “let go” and experience new life—resurrection, greater fruitfulness.
"Is there something we must let go of or “die to” in order to experience resurrection and become a more fruitful person?”
Today (in the second service) Hanako Fuji is being baptized. This week, Sakiko I explained that turning to God, repenting, is the act of turning to God and by turning to God we are turning away from other things. By turning to God, we die to turn from and“die to” some others things, but in that turning and dying we experience a resurrection.
Turning to God involves a big death that leads to life, but throughout our journeys there will various things we must “die to” in order to experience life, various Good Fridays we must face in order to experience resurrection Sunday.
For some of us here, perhaps the thing we must let go of and die to is something in our past that has grip on us.
Ken Nixon is a member of this congregation who works closely with me. He has Ph.D and has taught in dept of education at UBC, U Vic, and in Australia. He’s also served a senior administrator for the government of Alberta.
He’s a accomplished a lot in his life. But his origins are quite humble. He grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. His home had no running water… He went to a one room school. For most of the year, he didn’t where shoes. If there was a poor harvest his family barely eked out an existence.
Some times people who grew up in kind of humble environment and then became a success are ashamed of their upbringing. They try not to make references to their past. If they refer it at all they may describe it as a “God-forsaken, rat hole.” But others, like Ken Nixon, allow there humble background to bless. They’re not afraid of hard work. They’re not above “humble work.”
Sometimes there are things in out past that we are ashamed of.
We may be bitter that we didn’t have certain rights and privileges… the “advantages” that others had… or perhaps we are angry because something we experienced was darker and more damaging than economic hardship in our childhood... We need to mourn and grieve and process that, but there’s come a time where we let it go the anger and bitterness and to die that and let the loss actually rise up and blessing us…by making us deeper, wiser, more compassionate people.
For others of us what we may need to let go of is what we perceive to be the ideal race or ethnicity… I was born about, grew up in white anglo-saxon protestant sections of London, England and Greater Vancouver…. I had friends… but there were times when I thought if I wasn’t Asian, if I was white… life would be smoother, I’d be more popular with girls… At times as a young minister… I thought, gee, if I were white I would be more “successful in worldly sense.”
My friend Elizabeth Archer Klein who lives in Seattle says America is the one country of world where a black man can become a white woman (thinking of Michael Jackson, but that’s not really an option for me and for most of us).
As a young adult, going to back to the county of my origin between my junior and senior year in college, I was able to begin to release the ideal of the particular race and ethnicity and embrace the richness of the past that God in his sovereignty choreographed for me.
For some us here need to die to the ideal of race, ethnicity, perhaps a gender we thought we were “supposed” to be and invite God to resurrect our identities.
It’s as we believe that God can raise something from the dead that we are able to let go of something, a hardship in the past or an ideal and let God resurrect something in our lives.
Some of us need to let go of our die to a dream.
When I was 12 or 13 I was a big B.C. Lions fan. I had a far fetched dream of being a professional football player. I was a reasonably good football player as a teenager. One year I was a starting wide receiver, another year I was starting quarterback on the football.
But I knew I was too small to play at large college—which is really the route almost everyone goes to become pro. I used tell my younger sister who’s a formidable martial artist and a great athlete, and a little on stocky side, “If I had your body, I could be a linebacker in NFL. She’d say, if I had your skinny legs… I could be a run way model…”
For some me it was pipe dream, for some it it’s serious… Boobie Miles was a football player with Permian Panthers, featured in the movie based on the true story Friday Nights Lights. Boobie has incredible speed, quickness, strength… If the movie portrayed him accurately, he moved with a kind agility reminiscent of Michael Vick or Barry Sanders…
He was getting scholarship offers from NCAA division I schools like USC and Florida… he had NFL all over him… But during the first game of the season his senior year for Permian, Boobie took a pitch ran student body right and a defender tackled him on the side of his knee crushing it… he never fully recovers.
In the car with his uncle who’s raising him, Mr. tough guy realizes his dream is gone… He breaks down and says what we gonna now? What we gonna now—I can’t do nothing but play football…
I don’t know what Boobie Miles ends up doing, but if wants to live there must mourns the loss of his dreams… but then it let go so he can experience resurrection…
But, if he holds on to a dream that cannot be--at the very best he experiences a resuscitated life, but not a resurrected life.
Sometimes dying has to do with letting for a relationship…
In Brian Moore’s novel the Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore describes a woman in Dublin named Judith. She’s bright, gifted, attractive and has a successful career and is well connected to friends and family.
She has one problem, she’s approaching menopause and she is unmarried without children.
All the other successes in her life seem meaningless in light of the fact that the one thing she really longs for is denied her: husband and children.
She ends up meeting this man from America. She falls in love with him, but he is not interested in her romantically. He’s only interested in her because of her money and is hoping that they can open a restaurant together.
But Judith is desperate and one night after a date, Judith takes the initiative and proposes. He turns her down.
She goes on an alcohol binge and then has a nervous breakdown and ends up in hospital. She receives good care in the hospital and recovers.
But just before she is to be released from hospital, she receives a visit from her American friend. He’s there with roses, he tells her he was wrong and offers her the roses and he proposes.
But she hands back the roses and says…
Thank you, but no thank you. I am not interested in marrying you and, to tell you why, I need to tell you a story. When you are a little girl you dream about the perfect life you will have. You will grow up to have a beautiful body, meet the perfect man, have wonderful children, live a wonderful home in a wonderful neighborhood. But then when your dream doesn’t happen, you start to revise your dream downward, “He doesn’t have to be perfect” and downward more until you get to point where you’re so desperate you’d marry anyone even if he’s as common as dirt…
Well I learned something by losing myself and re-finding myself. I’ve learned that if I receive the spirit of who I am, it’s doesn’t matter whether I am married or single, I can be happy either way. My happiness doesn’t depend on someone outside me, but upon being at peace with what is inside me.
The story ends with her leaving the hospital, strong and happy and making a paper airplane out of the man’s business card in the cab and throwing it out the window…
She dies, to something and let go and is able to experience a kind of resurrection…
If we are able to die and let go, we too can experience resurrection.
Perhaps the final thing we let go of is our youth and health…
Frederick Buechner, pastor and author from Vermont says when his mother lost her youthful beauty, she was like a millionaire who went broke, she got a unlisted number, holed a herself up in her apartment, leaving only when she absolutely had too… Many people find aging difficult…
Tuesdays with Morrie is about a driven young man, in his late 30s, named Mitch who reconnects with his old professor Morrie Schwartz who’s dying of Lou Gerhig’s disease.
One Tuesday they talk about aging.
Mitch says don’t you wish you were young again? Morrie, who’s 78 says, no. Mitch, says but you never hear people say I wish were old.
Morrie says you know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life--you don’t want to go back.
He says, but I’ve been 22, 32, 65, it was good to be those ages, but now it’s time to be 78.
He’s let go of his youth and health and so even at 78 and confined to a wheelchair because of Lou Gehrig’s, he’s able to really live.
Morrie Schwartz says in Tuesdays with Morrie that once we learn how to die, we learn to live.
Then we come to that point in our lives when we trust God, let go and die and if let go and our lives are tied Christ it’s not truly over it’s just a beginning of something far greater…
D. L Moody, one of the best know ministers of the 19th century, the kind of Billy Graham figure of his day, said one day you’ll read in the newspapers that D.L. Moody is dead, but don’t you believe a word of it…. on that day I’ll be more alive than I’ve ever been before.
When we die in Christ, whether a death within our life or death that terminates our life, if that death is in Christ, we will discover that Life has the final word.
Pray:
Is there something we need to trust God and die to in order that we might experience life?
Let it go… and receive the spirit of a new life.
Benediction: (ALPHA: announcement)
Christ is risen? He is risen indeed!
May the risen Christ bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May he lift up his countenance toward you and give us your peace.
As a teenager, I vividly remember rappelling down the side of a cliff for the first time.
You’re secured by a series of ropes and carabineers.
As you walk backwards off the face of the cliff, your immediate instinct is to hug the mountain. But if you try to hug the mountain, you’ll find yourself slamming into the side it, scraping your knee and maybe elbows and chin…
The only way you can really descend smoothly is to lean back as far as you can and look up at sky, so that your legs are at right angles to the cliff. It's counterintuitive, but it's the only way to go down.
When we follow Christ there are times he calls us to move in a direction that seems to run in the face of common sense. Jesus said if you want to become great you must become a servant, he said it’s through giving that we receive, and most dramatic of all he said it’s through dying that we live.
Jesus words about how dying leads to a new life weren’t simply hot air. He proved them on very first Easter Sunday, as he rose from the grave.
On this Sunday Easter we’re going to explore what it means to live through dying.
If you have your Bibles please turn to John 12. Less than a week before Jesus was crucified, Jesus predicted his death and show us how our true life comes through dying:
23Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 25The man or woman who loves his or her life will lose it, while the man or woman who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. 26Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.
Jesus says in vs. 23 that the time has come for me to be glorified.
The Jewish people of Jesus day were expecting that God would reveal his glory through a kind of “symphony of fire” in the skies, but instead God shows us his glory through the ultimate sign of his love for us, his dying on the cross for us in Christ.
In verse 24 Jesus says, I tell you the truth (in the Greek this phrase literally reads “amen and amen”). He begins by saying what he’s about to say is trustworthy and true because what he’s about to say will seem outrageous.
He says the only way to experience real life and fruitfulness is through death.
He says that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground it remains just a seed, but if it dies it produces many seeds.
This truth, of course, was modeled by Jesus in the ultimate way. Jesus was nailed to a cross and after several hours on the cross, he releases his life with the prayer into your hands I commit my spirit… his death opened the door for him to be ushered into a new life…
We tend to think and hope (subconsciously) that this pattern of dying and rising to a new life is applicable only to Jesus.
But in the following verses, Jesus points out that this pattern also applies to us.
In verse 25 Jesus says, 25The man or woman who loves his or her life will lose it, while the man or woman who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
Eugene Peterson in his translation called The Message puts it this way:
Anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
The path to true life and fruitfulness come through the gateway of “death.”
Paul points out in 1 Corinthians 15 that resurrection cannot occur without death…
Canadian writer on the spiritual life Ronald Rolheiser says that if we try to hold onto our life the best we can hope for is a resuscitated life, but if we “let it go” we can have a resurrection life...
But letting our life go either at end of our life or by “dying to” various things while we live is scary and difficult.
So where do we find to courage to able to “die” in order to live?
This is where Easter comes in.
What if Christ rose from the dead? This could change everything for us.
It changed everything for those first disciples. As you may recall, if you’ve read the Gospels, when Jesus was arrested, tried, and later crucified his disciples--out of fear for their lives--went into hiding.
They were crushed when their hero was killed and were afraid their fate as his followers might be the same.
But just a few weeks later… these cowering disciples became some of the most courageous people the world has ever seen.
Most of these disciples ended actually dying for their belief in that Christ had risen.
What could have explained their dramatic transformation?
Some people have suggested that Jesus in the cool, damp tomb, revived… he got up, busted free from his burial bandages, moved up the 1 and half ton stone, like Mr. Incredible overpowered, the Roman guards (or 16 highly disciplined, fighting men)… and then claimed he rose from the dead. If this was true, Jesus would have looked worse that Rocky after he fought Apollo Creed in Rock I or Rodney King after he was beaten by the LA police. He would not have inspired a revolution--he would have evoked pity!
But they and many others were convinced that God had raised Jesus from the dead and so they were able to live their lives with abandon knowing God could raise the dead.
No one is more dangerous (in the good sense) alive than the person who is not afraid to die…
If we believe that God can raise the dead, we can let go not only at the end of our lives and believe that we will experience resurrection… but we can “let go and die” throughout our life and experience new life, believing that God can raise the dead.
We’ve been going through a series on Abraham’s journey of faith. In Hebrews 11 we read that 17It was by faith that Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice when God was testing him. Abraham, who had received God's promises, was ready to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, 18though God had promised him, "Isaac is the son through whom your descendants will be counted. 19Abraham assumed that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again. And in a sense, Abraham did receive his son back from the dead.
Abraham as we see was able to “let go” when God called him to literally give up the life of his son because according to Hebrews 11 he believed that God could raise him from the dead.
When, like Abraham, we believe that God can raise dead, we can “let go” and experience new life—resurrection, greater fruitfulness.
"Is there something we must let go of or “die to” in order to experience resurrection and become a more fruitful person?”
Today (in the second service) Hanako Fuji is being baptized. This week, Sakiko I explained that turning to God, repenting, is the act of turning to God and by turning to God we are turning away from other things. By turning to God, we die to turn from and“die to” some others things, but in that turning and dying we experience a resurrection.
Turning to God involves a big death that leads to life, but throughout our journeys there will various things we must “die to” in order to experience life, various Good Fridays we must face in order to experience resurrection Sunday.
For some of us here, perhaps the thing we must let go of and die to is something in our past that has grip on us.
Ken Nixon is a member of this congregation who works closely with me. He has Ph.D and has taught in dept of education at UBC, U Vic, and in Australia. He’s also served a senior administrator for the government of Alberta.
He’s a accomplished a lot in his life. But his origins are quite humble. He grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. His home had no running water… He went to a one room school. For most of the year, he didn’t where shoes. If there was a poor harvest his family barely eked out an existence.
Some times people who grew up in kind of humble environment and then became a success are ashamed of their upbringing. They try not to make references to their past. If they refer it at all they may describe it as a “God-forsaken, rat hole.” But others, like Ken Nixon, allow there humble background to bless. They’re not afraid of hard work. They’re not above “humble work.”
Sometimes there are things in out past that we are ashamed of.
We may be bitter that we didn’t have certain rights and privileges… the “advantages” that others had… or perhaps we are angry because something we experienced was darker and more damaging than economic hardship in our childhood... We need to mourn and grieve and process that, but there’s come a time where we let it go the anger and bitterness and to die that and let the loss actually rise up and blessing us…by making us deeper, wiser, more compassionate people.
For others of us what we may need to let go of is what we perceive to be the ideal race or ethnicity… I was born about, grew up in white anglo-saxon protestant sections of London, England and Greater Vancouver…. I had friends… but there were times when I thought if I wasn’t Asian, if I was white… life would be smoother, I’d be more popular with girls… At times as a young minister… I thought, gee, if I were white I would be more “successful in worldly sense.”
My friend Elizabeth Archer Klein who lives in Seattle says America is the one country of world where a black man can become a white woman (thinking of Michael Jackson, but that’s not really an option for me and for most of us).
As a young adult, going to back to the county of my origin between my junior and senior year in college, I was able to begin to release the ideal of the particular race and ethnicity and embrace the richness of the past that God in his sovereignty choreographed for me.
For some us here need to die to the ideal of race, ethnicity, perhaps a gender we thought we were “supposed” to be and invite God to resurrect our identities.
It’s as we believe that God can raise something from the dead that we are able to let go of something, a hardship in the past or an ideal and let God resurrect something in our lives.
Some of us need to let go of our die to a dream.
When I was 12 or 13 I was a big B.C. Lions fan. I had a far fetched dream of being a professional football player. I was a reasonably good football player as a teenager. One year I was a starting wide receiver, another year I was starting quarterback on the football.
But I knew I was too small to play at large college—which is really the route almost everyone goes to become pro. I used tell my younger sister who’s a formidable martial artist and a great athlete, and a little on stocky side, “If I had your body, I could be a linebacker in NFL. She’d say, if I had your skinny legs… I could be a run way model…”
For some me it was pipe dream, for some it it’s serious… Boobie Miles was a football player with Permian Panthers, featured in the movie based on the true story Friday Nights Lights. Boobie has incredible speed, quickness, strength… If the movie portrayed him accurately, he moved with a kind agility reminiscent of Michael Vick or Barry Sanders…
He was getting scholarship offers from NCAA division I schools like USC and Florida… he had NFL all over him… But during the first game of the season his senior year for Permian, Boobie took a pitch ran student body right and a defender tackled him on the side of his knee crushing it… he never fully recovers.
In the car with his uncle who’s raising him, Mr. tough guy realizes his dream is gone… He breaks down and says what we gonna now? What we gonna now—I can’t do nothing but play football…
I don’t know what Boobie Miles ends up doing, but if wants to live there must mourns the loss of his dreams… but then it let go so he can experience resurrection…
But, if he holds on to a dream that cannot be--at the very best he experiences a resuscitated life, but not a resurrected life.
Sometimes dying has to do with letting for a relationship…
In Brian Moore’s novel the Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore describes a woman in Dublin named Judith. She’s bright, gifted, attractive and has a successful career and is well connected to friends and family.
She has one problem, she’s approaching menopause and she is unmarried without children.
All the other successes in her life seem meaningless in light of the fact that the one thing she really longs for is denied her: husband and children.
She ends up meeting this man from America. She falls in love with him, but he is not interested in her romantically. He’s only interested in her because of her money and is hoping that they can open a restaurant together.
But Judith is desperate and one night after a date, Judith takes the initiative and proposes. He turns her down.
She goes on an alcohol binge and then has a nervous breakdown and ends up in hospital. She receives good care in the hospital and recovers.
But just before she is to be released from hospital, she receives a visit from her American friend. He’s there with roses, he tells her he was wrong and offers her the roses and he proposes.
But she hands back the roses and says…
Thank you, but no thank you. I am not interested in marrying you and, to tell you why, I need to tell you a story. When you are a little girl you dream about the perfect life you will have. You will grow up to have a beautiful body, meet the perfect man, have wonderful children, live a wonderful home in a wonderful neighborhood. But then when your dream doesn’t happen, you start to revise your dream downward, “He doesn’t have to be perfect” and downward more until you get to point where you’re so desperate you’d marry anyone even if he’s as common as dirt…
Well I learned something by losing myself and re-finding myself. I’ve learned that if I receive the spirit of who I am, it’s doesn’t matter whether I am married or single, I can be happy either way. My happiness doesn’t depend on someone outside me, but upon being at peace with what is inside me.
The story ends with her leaving the hospital, strong and happy and making a paper airplane out of the man’s business card in the cab and throwing it out the window…
She dies, to something and let go and is able to experience a kind of resurrection…
If we are able to die and let go, we too can experience resurrection.
Perhaps the final thing we let go of is our youth and health…
Frederick Buechner, pastor and author from Vermont says when his mother lost her youthful beauty, she was like a millionaire who went broke, she got a unlisted number, holed a herself up in her apartment, leaving only when she absolutely had too… Many people find aging difficult…
Tuesdays with Morrie is about a driven young man, in his late 30s, named Mitch who reconnects with his old professor Morrie Schwartz who’s dying of Lou Gerhig’s disease.
One Tuesday they talk about aging.
Mitch says don’t you wish you were young again? Morrie, who’s 78 says, no. Mitch, says but you never hear people say I wish were old.
Morrie says you know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life--you don’t want to go back.
He says, but I’ve been 22, 32, 65, it was good to be those ages, but now it’s time to be 78.
He’s let go of his youth and health and so even at 78 and confined to a wheelchair because of Lou Gehrig’s, he’s able to really live.
Morrie Schwartz says in Tuesdays with Morrie that once we learn how to die, we learn to live.
Then we come to that point in our lives when we trust God, let go and die and if let go and our lives are tied Christ it’s not truly over it’s just a beginning of something far greater…
D. L Moody, one of the best know ministers of the 19th century, the kind of Billy Graham figure of his day, said one day you’ll read in the newspapers that D.L. Moody is dead, but don’t you believe a word of it…. on that day I’ll be more alive than I’ve ever been before.
When we die in Christ, whether a death within our life or death that terminates our life, if that death is in Christ, we will discover that Life has the final word.
Pray:
Is there something we need to trust God and die to in order that we might experience life?
Let it go… and receive the spirit of a new life.
Benediction: (ALPHA: announcement)
Christ is risen? He is risen indeed!
May the risen Christ bless you and keep you and cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May he lift up his countenance toward you and give us your peace.
posted by Shigematsu at 6:31 PM
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