Easter Sunday
New Life
Our culture naturally associates work with worth. We must work for what we have and to have worth, and anything that goes against this notion is hard for us to receive. The idea of receiving something without having to earn it or be worthy of it is so hard to comprehend because our culture and this world are designed on the idea that “the harder you work the more your worth”, and “If I do the right thing, good things will come to me”. These worldly ideas sound great until you find yourself in the position where you make a mistake. Then these ideas tell you: “you have to work your way back up from that mistake”. And to compound the issue, some of these ideas might have real world applications to our relationships with others in various environments. The real crux of the issue comes in the tension between these notions and that we project this human response into our relationship with God.
When we apply this principle of “work for your worth” to the way we view God and ourselves we are left in this perpetual cycle of distance. Isaiah 59:2 says:
“Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.”
It was this distance and separation that our sin created that drove God to bring His redemption plan to Earth through his son. “The Son is the image of the invisible God the firstborn over all creation” (Colossians 1:15).
Jesus came to down from Heaven to do the unimaginable task of restoring the undeserving. “The space between our performance and God’s perfection is the work that Jesus did on the cross”. This counter-cultural foundational truth points us back to the work. But the difference is this: it’s not the work that we did, but what Jesus did on our behalf. We can’t work hard enough or do enough good things to get close to Jesus. All we can do is recognize that it’s not what we did, but what Jesus did and receive that for the beautiful sacrificial gift it is. All our sin, shame and fear are washed away when we believe this and live it out daily. 2 Corinthians 5:17 tells us:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
The main scripture passage today is Ephesians 2, and in this passage, Paul makes a few critical things clear:
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.”
When God created the world, he created everything for his glory and our good. Before sin entered the Earth, Adam and Even didn’t know fear, shame, loss, or pain. Their days were filled with the joys of being in the presence of the Almighty God. But Adam and Eve were given a choice, because only love that is chosen is true love. The choice was to trust God or trust themselves. We all know how that story ends, they chose the very thing God told them not to do, and in that one act of rebellion all the fear, shame, and guilt that they had been protected from became known. The death by sin has affected all humankind in a problem known as “total depravity”. Which means in all of us we have an inward distortion that corrupts our very being. Ephesians 2 continues saying:
“Gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.”
It’s crucial that we understand our nature, because we can’t fully grasp the magnitude of what Jesus did for us without this humility. Once we have this mindset of humility, we can start to understand the grace and mercy that is awarded to us in Christ. “Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
Grace is the unmerited favor of God, not reliant on anything we do. Ephesians 2:8 says:
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.”
This Easter, we each get a chance to either accept this grace for the first time or take a moment to look inward and ask ourselves if we are living this grace out daily. Do we truly believe that God continues to forgive our sins and give us his all-sufficient grace? In the brokenness of the world, the temptation is to view God through the chaos around us. But the truth of the Gospel is that even in that brokenness God is there and he is offering us a lifeline.
The story is about Jesus and when we remember that we aren’t the main character it helps things come into focus. When we run across passages like Psalm 103:8-12 that says:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
How we see God will shape everything about us, and if we see how the way we see ourselves we will walk around trying to earn something that has already been bought and given to us. But if we see him as He is. As a good, good father full of grace and mercy, it changes how we go about our day. And the way we go about our days is how we live our lives.