Galatians 1:3-5 NIV
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the
present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory
for ever and ever. Amen.
What’s Bothering You?
During my sophomore year in high school I decided I
wanted to become good at basketball. Day
and night I played on any court where I could find someone to challenge. I lifted weights, did push-ups, ran and used a
jump rope with five pound ankle weights to increase my speed and power. Every day I shot hundreds of jump shots and
played against anyone who came to the courts where I was. I played so often that the insides of my
fingers split open and burned with pain.
My basketball became so worn by constant playing that it was smooth as
glass. To play as often as I did, I had
to give up something and it was my homework.
It seemed like a good trade-off for me, basketball glory for a few good
grades. My senior year I finally tried
out for my high school varsity basketball team.
I played hard, took rebounds away from players stronger than me, made my
jump shots and dunked in the practices.
Finally Friday came and the head coach pulled me off to the side to tell
me my fate. He said I didn’t make the
team.
Have you ever been surprised by how things turned in
your life? Have you failed when you knew
you would succeed? Have you tried your
best and it wasn’t good enough? Do you
know someone whose health suddenly fell apart, someone who lost his job when he
was good at what he did? Are you ever
stunned by how badly things go; your planning of no use, your decisions not
working out for you? What do you think
of a world that has so much difficulty?
Do you ever complain about the troubles you face? Do you get upset about the stock market, distressed
over your bad knees, frustrated that a
coworker doesn’t show you the respect you deserve, discouraged with how your
career is going or how your kids are doing in school?
Jesus has told you how it will go for you. “In
this world you will have trouble.” (John 16:33b NIV) If you are expecting everything in your life
to work out nicely, Jesus said it won’t.
Let’s get this out of the way, that success and good health are promised
you. They aren’t. You might not face cancer. You could have a great career. Your children might do very well. But in all of that, you will have
trouble. It will find you and most
likely you won’t be prepared when it arrives.
Jesus however does not just dump this bad news on us without a
promise. “But take heart! I have overcome the world." (John 16: 33c NIV)
God does not look at life the same way most people
do. Nearly everyone cares very much
about finances, health and relationships.
If something goes wrong, you try to fix it. It weighs on your mind until
your trouble goes away. Our Lord though has
a completely different take on matters.
Consider carefully what Christ prioritized during His physical life on
earth. Several things went quite well for
Him. Great crowds came to hear Him
speak, mesmerized by His story telling and insightful teaching. He performed spectacular miracles that
brought health and wellness to vast numbers of people. There was a movement among the Jews to make
Him king after He fed a crowd of five thousand with just two small fish and
five barley loaves. He was a brilliant debater
and charismatic leader. Jesus could have
had as much wealth as He desired. He
could send His disciples off to pluck coins out of the mouths of fish if He
wanted more money. Our Lord was on the
verge of enjoying one of the greatest lives ever and yet he threw it all away.
At the height of Christ’s popularity, when everything
in His life was trending upward, our Lord let it all unravel. He stopped doing miracles. He quit preaching to crowds. He no longer debated with His critics. He let His popularity disappear. He did not concern Himself with His
health. He chose to let His successful
ministry fall apart. What could lead to
such absolute disregard for one’s well-being?
There is something far worse than deadly diseases,
worse than school shootings and child abuse, worse than poverty, sexual
harassment, sweat shops and human trafficking.
It is worse than pornography, corporate corruption and even the threat
of nuclear war. It is the reason why
Christ gave up all the promise His life held.
The great enemy of all of life; of the entire universe was on our Lord’s
mind from the moment He could begin thinking about it. His whole life had one mission and one
alone. He lived to save the world from
Sin. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins." (Matthew 1:21 NIV)
Sin is the source of every evil in the world, from
disease to death; it all springs out of Sin.
Jesus Christ chose for everything to go absolutely wrong for Him, to
take every terror sin brings, whether it was pain, hatred, abuse or sorrow and
suffer it all for one reason. By doing
so, by letting every bit of sin rip His life apart, He took sin out of us. He himself bore our sins in his body on the
tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds
you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24 NIV)
Jesus let His friend Judas betray Him, to even kiss
him on the cheek as he did so. He did
not resist as the Jewish guards arrested Him.
Jesus took quietly every slap on the face, every bit of spit that was
rained down upon Him. Jesus let bizarre
accusations be hurled at Him without defending Himself. The blows on the head, the thorns jammed into
His scalp, the whips shredding His back and chest and legs and arms, all
accepted without protest. Sin wrecked
Him. And more Sin came and battered
Him. Every sin you committed slugged Him
and still He accepted more in His body. The
sins of your neighbors, of your friends, of your relatives long gone, of people
you have never met, of enemies that have damaged your heart, of lovers who have
adored you and those who turned on you, every sin of every person who has ever
been, Jesus let each one come into His body and they all sank into His flesh
and pounded it with the pain of ten billion heart attacks, of ten trillion
broken bones and concussions. Each sin
of every man, woman and child blasted within Him and exploded with pain and
Jesus took them all in without complaint.
The time came, when after so much horror fell upon
Jesus and His body became completely filled with all the carnage of Sin, He
knew it was finished and came out of His body saturated with all of our
sins. The Bible makes it completely
clear that Jesus decided this, that He knew when His work of taking our sin
from us was finished. Later, knowing that all was now completed, and
so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, Jesus said, "I am
thirsty." A jar of wine vinegar
was there, so they soaked a sponge in it, put the sponge on a stalk of the
hyssop plant, and lifted it to Jesus' lips.
When he had received the drink, Jesus said, "It is finished."
With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19:28-30 NIV)
How can we ever thank Jesus enough for what He did
for us! Every sin you committed He took
into His body and suffered for each and every sin. The pain and sorrow each sin brought Him careened
through His body like the echoes of a train wreck screeching in the night. And yet the universe waited in hushed horror
as Jesus’ body of sin lay crumpled in the tomb.
His spirit was gone but the body still remained and with it was our
death, our sorrow, our pain. Another day
came and the body was still there. Our
dying sat with it and the demons with Satan watched and waited. The body was dead. Sin remained within it. But then the morning of the third day the
greatest miracle of all time took place.
The magnitude of that early Sunday morning has been lost to nearly all
across the generations but the Apostle Paul reminds us what we have forgotten.
And God raised us up
with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in
order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his
grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:6-7 NIV) Carefully go
over this one more time. On that day,
that first and greatest of all Easter mornings, on that bright and shining
morning we were raised with Christ from the dead and brought into the
Heavenlies with Him. Before you were
born, before your parents knew your name, before you ever knew you needed a
Savior, Christ and you were raised from the dead and made eternal with
God. We cannot begin to express the
wonder of this. We cannot explain it nor
do we understand it. We just know that
on Easter Sunday, you were raised from the dead along with Christ and you
became glorious as the sun. Let this
sink into you. Literally the Greek text
reads that “He (God) together raised and together seated (us) in the Heavenlies
in Christ Jesus”. Easter Sunday, when
Christ was raised from the dead, we were raised from the dead too and in a
world of death and dying, of sin and suffering, that is nearly
incomprehensible. Easter, that first
Easter of all history is not just the triumph of Christ, it is yours too. For that, we celebrate!
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