Yesterday, on Easter, I staged an Easter egg hunt for my children in the front yard. They wound up with more candy than they needed. But getting candy isn’t the reason why Jesus’ resurrection matters.
Neither does the Easter matter simply because it means the chance to dress up in new clothes and make sure we get to church on time on Sunday morning. New clothes are fine, but they’re not the reason Easter is so important.
Sometimes, it’s easy to confuse the trappings of Easter with the purpose of Easter. If we’re not careful, we wind up thinking that Easter dinner and gift-laden Easter baskets are the whole point of it all, rather than just things that help us celebrate.
We forget that the real reason Jesus’ resurrection matters is something far more and far deeper.
It matters because by it, God signified that He accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf—that our sins could all be done away with if we acknowledge that His sacrifice was for us and receive His gift. This, we know. But we don’t often stop to think that the deepest, most profound reason Jesus’ sacrifice matters to us is because He was showing that we can be resurrected, too.
The Bible tells us that apart from Christ, we are dead in our sins. Not just sinful, but dead. Our physical bodies live and breathe, but our spirit is completely, totally lifeless. And it remains that way until Christ comes into our lives and resurrects us, making us alive together with Him.
If you’ve asked Christ to come into your heart—if you’ve acknowledged His right to rule over you and accepted His loving, generous gift of life—then you are now alive. You’ve been resurrected.
People who are physically dead can’t do anything. Without life, their bodies lie there, unable to rise or to commit even the smallest action. So it is with us when we’re spiritually dead. Our physical bodies walk around, having the appearance of life, but our spirits within us are dead. We are shells of what we could be.
When Christ resurrects us and makes us alive, however, we become capable of all kinds of things. We now have the potential to truly live (in other words, to know Christ), without just going through the motions of life. We can truly love with the love of God, and not just our puny human love. We can rejoice, we can create, we can share with others this marvelous life that God has given us.
There are plenty of people who think that their lives are pretty good without Christ. But they’re fooling themselves, because they’re not truly alive. They haven’t experienced the resurrection power of being made alive in Christ. They may think they’re alive, but in reality, they’re dead.
That’s why Christ’s resurrection matters, moms—not because of chocolate bunnies and fuzzy chicks, but because Christ offers us a resurrection, too. He offers us the chance to rise from the dead into the glorious, abundant life of a relationship with the living God.
If you want to know more about Christ, I’d love to introduce you to Him. Just check out my post on how to know God, or contact me through my website, and we’ll talk. And if you already know Him, I’m so glad to know that you’re alive. I’ve been spiritually alive for most of my physical life now, and I can tell you that there’s nothing better than truly living the way you can when Christ makes you alive. Again, if you want to know more, let’s talk. I’d love to share with you what I’ve learned.
About life.
Ephesians 2:1, 4-5—As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins…But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions–it is by grace you have been saved.
*To find out more about what abundant life looks like for moms, check out Chaotic Joy: Finding Abundance in the Messiness of Motherhood.