So excited about Easter Week at Apex Baptist! Here's what we've got going on beginning Palm Sunday:
On Sunday, March 24 our Worship Team will be presenting a special time of music entitled "Risen Redemption." Powerful and filled with energy, this will be a worship experience you want to be a part of! We'll also be taking the Lord's Supper together as a fellowship and we'd love for you to come proclaim Christ's death and resurrection with us!
On Wednesday, March 27 we will have a time of prayer and praise in the Worship Center beginning at 6:30 PM. Join us for a reflective time of remembering Jesus' sacrifice and His triumph three days later!
Easter Weekend is going to be super exciting! We're starting a new teaching series called Heroes and we're offering three different worship services: Saturday at 6:00 PM and Sunday morning at 9:00 and 11:00.
With Easter approaching in a few weeks I thought I'd do the same thing on the ABC Blog as we did with Christmas and post some thoughts, quotes, poems--for the purpose of awakening in our hearts a fresh perspective on the Resurrection and what it means for us as followers of Christ.
Here's the first. It's a few stanzas from John Updike's Seven Stanzas at Easter:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!
Easter. A new beginning. With the coming of Spring we're reminded that death doesn't have the last word; it doesn't have the last laugh. There is something Greater, something bubbling up, and ultimately neither height nor depth can stop the Sun from warming the earth. Does it make you want to bang on something loud or take the kids outside and have a parade? To ride the eruption of new life in celebration?
The book of Hebrews describes Jesus as the pioneer of our faith. It also describes Him as the destroyer of death. Why?To free those who for all of their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. Jesus led the way into death, but did He stay there in the Shadows? In the cold and barren wasteland? No, he entered it, but death couldn't hold Him. The power of the grave was no match for the Lifegiver. He burst through and erupted out of the grave into New Life. The way through was forever made for us by our Rescuer.
Is there any reason for us to now fear death? Listen to how N.D. Wilson describes Easter:
"Tragedy isn’t an easy thing to kill. Tragedy must be destroyed by someone willing to be swallowed by it, willing to be broken, torn out of the flesh, but able to return to it. Someone must be able to shatter the tragic from within and exit into comedy, able to rip a hole so wide that a train of souls, a parade, could follow after, banging drums and throwing candy as they strolled into the sun."
We have this promise in letters to the Church of Corinth that just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. Made alive. How? By the power of God. Paul goes on to say in those letters, "Knowing that the One who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus." The hole has been ripped wide open. The promise given.
I've taken Easter for granted for a lot of my life. For far too many years it's been a cultural celebration instead of a promise cherished. That simple statement, "Christ is risen," encompasses so much more than I've lived out in my walk with Jesus. Not anymore. Death has been beaten down. It has no sting. The Lifegiver reigns. The Waymaker has made the way for us out of the wilderness. I'm ready to ride. Let the eruption begin.
