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Happy Easter everyone!   So here is another year of Easter egg hunts, chocolate bunnies and fake ‘grass’.  By the way, what do all these things have in common?   They all have nothing to with the meaning of Easter.  While it is fun to have these things and do these things, (without intentionality) they symbolize nothing about Easter.  It is not my desire to spoil your fun.  However, may I suggest to you to exchange this temporary fun for everlasting joy.  This joy is beyond comprehension, and it is when a person embraces Jesus as their Lord and Savior, and in this embrace a captivation of amazement appears when one truly sees Easter and the three days prior as what they really are for all of us.    

Let’s start with Good Friday.  What is so ‘good’ about Good Friday?  It is, after all, a day to remember the death of Jesus. It is good from the sense that, after that day, all eternity changed for our ‘good’.  Good doesn’t describe how good Good Friday really is.  Good Friday should be ‘Wonderful Friday’, or ‘Gods’ Greatest Gift Friday’, or ‘Jesus’ Love for us Friday”, or “Ultra Magnificent Friday”.  Jesus sacrificed His life for our sakes. He paid our sin penalty. He died, so that we may live”.  His death allows us now to come to God clean of our sins, not because we are, but because He is. Close your eyes and think about that for a minute.  Can you fully wrap your arms around that?  I can’t.  My puny brain will never fully understand that.  I sit here amazed and so very thankful that our…

”God loved the world so much that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life”
    (John 3:16 NIV)

The Son came not to live, but to die. Not just any ordinary death, but the most treacherous death imaginable.  Jesus was God in human form.  He was spat upon, kicked, struck, humiliated and blasphemed. He was whipped to an inch of His death, not with an ordinary whip, but with one that had beads of lead on the tips, so to inflict the maximum amount of damage. A Roman Flagrum was a deadly weapon in itself.
Why would God do this?  John answered this question above.  ‘For God so loved the world”.   That, is cause for a joyous celebration. That should bring us to our knees in thanksgiving, in praise and in adoration to God for his most wonderful love gift.  Yes, this is a love gift.  See what is says in John 3:16?   ..He gave His one and only Son…  

So, trade in your plastic Easter eggs for a truly eternally wonderful gift. As “whoever believes in Him is not condemned ...”  Condemned to what?  Look at verse 18, as it tells you …Condemned to a life of darkness, to a life and death of eternal separation from God. To a life where darkness is loved more than light and where one stands condemned already because they do not believe in the name of God’s one and only Son.
Light and dark, these are hard to understand terms.  Do you remember as a kid, going into a dark closet, turning on a flashlight and making weird faces with the flashlight?  Before the light was turned on, it was pitch black, you couldn’t see anything.  You could place your hand right in front of your face and not see it. Many in the world today walk around  in a dark closet, first of all because they chose to.  The darkness is appealing to them, they enjoy the darkness.  But remember that same closet scene, when you turned on the flashlight, how super-bright it was?  The contrast was intensified by the blackness around the light.  God is our ultra light.  Gods’ people are the light of the world.  Oh how the smallest ‘flashlight’ is so bright in a dark world!    The darkest dark, can be brightened by the smallest light.  (In fact, that is the whole purpose of this website)  One can see light and dark more clearly when they are together and understand just how opposite they are. 

Easter is celebrated to remember Jesus’ resurrection day, the day He conquered forever the darkness.  Jesus won the ultimate victory. No surprise here right?  Of course Jesus wins!!  And we win the victory with Him.  God raised Jesus from His death.  This is the reassurance of our own resurrection and the knowledge that our deaths are not the end. 

“I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will have live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? “
   (John 11:25 NIV)

“Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead and said to his sister. “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the Glory of God”.
   (John 11:40  NIV) 

See the joy statement in that sentence?  Would it not bring us complete and unfathomable joy to know that we would see the glory of God?  The glory of God is described to be a wonderful light, incomprehensible to human intellect. (It is also described in other ways,
such as, in the simplicity of a flower, or the pillar of fire, or in the vastness of the universe itself, since God made it all)
 This glory is without any boundaries, without any ways in known physical science to explain it.  It is be wonderful, beyond description and understanding.  And Jesus tells Lazarus’ sister that she would see the Glory of God.  Lazarus’s sister saw her brother raised from the dead. Is this resurrection the Glory of God? I would say, yes it is. If so, resurrection should be a magnificent thing, as it would encompass the glory of God.   We see a glimpse in Revelation 21.  The new Holy City is described.

“the city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the Glory of God gives light and the Lamb is its lamp.”  
    (Revelation 21:23   NIV)

There is that word ‘Light’ again.  Easter is about light- the light of God.  It is about the indescribable Shekinah glory, and our entrance into this great mystery.  But this Shekinah Glory is where God is, and don’t you want to be where God is?  Well folks, He has opened the door for you and me.  That should fuel your feelings of joy, and it should be contemplated, meditated upon and experienced this Easter and every day afterwards.

I hope that you have a wonderful “God loves me so much Friday” and a joyous “God wants me to share His glory with me-Easter”.

Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All Rights Reserved.

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