Rise & Shine

Romans 4:25 “He (Jesus) was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

When you sit down and seriously think that God in heaven sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on that cross to pay the price for our sins, and then rise to life in resurrection, conquering sin & death, that we may rise to eternal life through Him, it becomes overwhelming for the mind to grasp the depth of such love for us. When we repent of our sins and receive Jesus Christ as our personal Lord & Savior, our spirit is regenerated in rebirth from above and we are resurrected from spiritual death and eternal damnation in Hell to eternal life in heaven with God. Our sins are put upon Jesus and Christ’s righteousness thought His sinless life is put upon us through His blood shed upon that cross for us, justifying us … being found “just as if we had never sinned. New life and restoration of relationship with our Maker, Father God, in Christ. That’s what Easter is all about.

Romans 6:2-10 “We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his. For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body ruled by sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin— because anyone who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.”

People do not like to talk about sin and hell because they are not what we were created for and therefore both repulsive in thought and undesirable subjects of discussion. Yet, being the natural condition of unregenerate and unsaved due to unrepentant of sin and rejection of salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Christ for the forgiveness in those sins, its the duty, commissioned by the Lord, to bring the issue to light and speak to the gospel message of life for the lost, for hope and in love. In bondage to sin and condemned to eternal separation from God in the anguish of hell is neither life nor living. The world, the sinful flesh and Satan has blinded so many of the truth and Christ tells us to let our light of truth in Him shine in the darkness of our society and culture, that they may see that truth and find their way to the resurrected Lord that died for them also.

Romans 8:33-35 “Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. Who then is the one who condemns? No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?”

In a secular world looking for love and truth in all the wrong places, every which way but up, may it be our goal this Easter to not only have an answer for the faith that we hold so dear, but to give that answer, that truth of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the free gift of God, to the world that does not know this love and truth. 1 John 4:10 “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.”

Rise and shine,
In Christ, Brian