Tag: easter

Eastertide

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
            It could very well be that you have never heard of the word “Eastertide,” and maybe not even in your church.  In my judgment, that is quite unfortunate because Eastertide is a significant season in the Christian Year.  It spans fifty days until Pentecost.  Yep, that is seven weeks of bringing the new life we enjoy to the forefront.  Eastertide’s intentional focus is to recognize and celebrate the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, and, thus, exulting in our own new life in him.
 
            Now, you might be saying to yourself something like this: “Why do we need to have some liturgical season about Christ’s resurrection?  Shouldn’t we be living like we recognize this every day?”  Yes, of course we should.  But consider this:  If you only sing songs of resurrection on Easter Sunday in your church; only occasionally, at best, think of Christ’s resurrection outside of Easter Sunday; then, perhaps it is wise to bring a highlighted focus to the resurrection in a special season.  Just as we would likely not think of taking only one vacation day in the year for renewal, so it is necessary to take more than one day to enjoy Easter.  If nothing else, Eastertide gives believers an opportunity to let Christ’s resurrection percolate in our hearts so that we end up becoming people in real life who exhibit an alive-spirit.  And God knows we could use much more of that in our congregations!
 
            If life, eternal life, and the necessity of being alive are all needs we have within particular congregations, then it only makes sense that we would want to take advantage of what Eastertide has to offer us:  a deliberate look at Christ’s resurrection, exploring its implications and impact for us and our churches.  Simply assuming that we all know about the resurrection will not do, any more than my wife simply assuming I love her without looking her straight in the eye and telling her so.  
 
            If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile (1 Corinthians 15:17) and we can only expect a sin-as-usual kind of approach to life with a sort of shoulder shrug that says, “Meh, what’s a guy to do?”  But, instead, we have the hope of life everlasting because Christ has risen from death.  We have the hope of individual renewal and corporate revitalization since we serve a risen Savior.
 
            Therefore this is the perfect time of year to engage in some renewal practices or even make a few simple changes that show signs of life within the congregation.  Here are just a few ideas for lifting Christ’s resurrection into the next few months:
 
Pray for revival.  Wherever there is deadness there is no Jesus.  Christ brings life, so praying to God for revival is a deliberate way of connecting with the Lord.
 
Squarely address things in the church which are death-dealing.  Gossip, back-biting, slander, and an entire host of sins of the tongue kill and murder people.  It brings death.  Simply sluffing-off someone’s acerbic speech as “that’s just the way they are” will not do in the church, unless you want Jesus at arms-length.
 
Promote things which are life-giving.  If sins of the tongue bring death, using our speech for encouragement, love, mercy, forgiveness, and building up one another in the church promotes growth, health, and life.
 
Preach a sermon series on new life.  The church is the hope of the world because Christ is the risen Lord.  Boldly proclaim the truth of the resurrected Christ and how it works in reaching the world.
 
Start that new ministry that you always believed would make a difference.  It is the season to take a risk.  After all, if you have eternal life can you really fail?  Host a new small group in your home.  Transform that unused space in the church building.  If you are a layperson, blow away your pastor by asking him/her in what ways you can bring life to your church (believe me, your pastor will have ideas for you!).
 
Focus on daily habits of spiritual health and life.  If you would not think of skipping meals for days at a time, then think about the erosion to your church that occurs when many individual parishioners do not read their Bibles on a regular basis or pray with any kind of consistency.  Make a plan and stick to it.  It will not only bring growth to your own life, but will impact those around you.
 

 

            Just keeping the word “Eastertide” in front of you for the next few months can be a simple yet powerful way of reminding us that God has called us to new life.  Let the reality of Christ’s resurrection take root in your heart to such an extent that Jesus becomes the greatest influence to all your thinking, speaking, and acting.

Interpreting Easter

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
Perspective and interpretation are everything.  We do not just recognize and know certain facts about things; we have a perspective on those facts and interpret them into some kind of coherent story. 
 
            Nearly eleven years ago my wife and two of my daughters were in a car accident.  We were returning home from my parents’ house in rural Iowa.  A car came from the east on a gravel road and did not slow down but blew through the stop sign, right in front of us.  There was nothing I could do.  I hit his rear quarter panel and his car literally spun like a top and came to a stop.  He and the girl in the passenger seat immediately hopped out of their car without a scratch or bruise on them.  My girls were in the very back seat and were fine.  My wife, however, tore her rotator cuff from the seat belt and the impact.  For me, ever since that day, my back has never been the same.  There are occasionally days when the pain and limitation are so bad that I can barely walk across the room.
 
            In the ten years since that accident I have replayed it over a thousand times in my head.  Maybe if only we had left a few minutes earlier or later from my parents’ house things would be different.  Maybe if I had only driven slower or faster.  But there really was nothing I could have done about it.  I have been downright angry more than once, blaming that stupid kid who changed my life.  In those thousand times of replaying the event, I have looked at it from my perspective, my wife’s perspective, the girls’ perspective, and even the dog’s perspective.  But in all those years of replaying the accident in my mind, just in the past two weeks God has given me a different view of that event.
 
            You see, in these past ten years I have been so deep into interpreting the accident from my perspective and my family’s perspective that I never even considered to look at it from the perspective of the driver of the other car.  It was as if God finally tapped me on the shoulder and invited me to see it all in a different way.  When I look at that accident from the other driver’s view, he was driving down a gravel road and was coming to a t-intersection.  There was no road on the other side of that stop sign.  What is there to this day is a large grain elevator.  He was driving at highway speeds when he went through the stop sign.  Had he blew through that sign and not been struck by my car, he and the passenger with him would have been certainly killed because they would have slammed into the elevator.  But, instead, I “happened” to come along and hit him in such a way that his car spun and literally stopped just feet from the grain elevator.
 
            That car accident actually saved two people’s lives.  All of a sudden my chronic low-level back pain and limitation seems a very small price to pay for the lives of two people.  I am now interpreting that event as God sending his servants, Tim and Mary, to a highway where two other people were on a collision course with death.  And he used us to literally stop it from happening.
 
            Perspective and interpretation are everything.  For many of the people in the first-century, the crucifixion of Jesus was just another death.  It all seemed like some tragic accident that Jesus did not deserve.  But it was no tragic accident.  God sent Jesus to the right place at the right time among people who were on a collision course with death.  And he took their place.  It was us who were behind the wheel and driving our lives recklessly, not knowing that we were facing imminent tragedy.  But Jesus came along and took our place.  He absorbed the punishment that we deserved so that we could live.
 
            My car accident was unique to me and to the others involved.  But the death of Christ is universal in its scope, having affected every single person on planet earth.  And God showed no favoritism.  The cross of Christ is for all kinds of people from every nation, every race, and every ethnic group.  We are invited by Holy Scripture to have a perspective on the cross as being able to affect deliverance from all wrongdoing and all misguided lives.  We are encouraged to interpret the resurrection of Jesus as bringing a new lease on life to millions of people.  We are to take those events of Jesus and see them as our redemption.
 

 

            So, then, our part in the whole affair is this:  Everyone who believes in Jesus receives forgiveness of sins through his name.  That is the perspective and the interpretation of the death and resurrection of Jesus that we need.  Our only hope of life beyond the grave is Christ’s victory over death.  Christ is risen.  He is risen, indeed.

1 Corinthians 15:50-58

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
            I had someone mention to me on Easter Sunday how much he enjoys Easter music and Easter cantatas.  He ended the conversation by saying it is too bad we only get to sing resurrection songs once a year.  Here is my proposal:  then don’t just sing them once a year.  In fact, we ought to be rejoicing in God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, in these next several weeks.
 
            All the hopes and expectations of Christians are realized in Christ’s resurrection.  The good news of Easter cannot be contained or limited to a single day (Easter Sunday).  This is why, according to the Christian Calendar, Easter is only the first of fifty days of celebration called “Eastertide” which leads up to the day of Pentecost.  Eastertide is a season designed especially for exploring the new life we have in Jesus and the joyful Christian life we can all experience.
 
            Spring is the time of year that can give shape to the rest of our seasons.  Christ’s resurrection gives us a reason to rejoice; to hope; to persevere; to serve gladly, knowing that our labor in the Lord is not in vain.  Easter is not over; it is just beginning.  Throwing parties for Jesus is in order.  Inviting friends and family into your home just to celebrate life in God will not only be fun, it will be biblical.  Maybe some people outside the church look at Christians as uptight and repressed because we are not throwing the best parties and celebrations. 
 
We have the highest reason possible to celebrate loudly with great passion and joy; to paint the town red; to whoop it up; to raise the roof; to splurge and be effusive with our worship; to hail King Jesus not just today but all through Eastertide because Christ is risen!  He is risen, indeed!
Almighty God, who through your only-begotten son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Thank you for giving me a reason to celebrate with joy my Lord’s resurrection.  May I be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit and give the best party in the neighborhood; through Jesus Christ who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Christ’s Resurrection

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
It is actually possible that some Christians can be laid back concerning the subject of Christ’s resurrection.  Those who have grown up in the church have heard it all before.  They believe it and have signed off on it on their invisible Christian doctrinal checklist.  Yes, yes, Jesus has risen from the grave… now let’s talk about some exciting stuff, like Wisconsin basketball!  When we view Christianity as merely a set of beliefs to hold, it is only logical to have some boredom over the resurrection.  But if we go beyond this and rightly discern that following Jesus is a way of life, then Christ’s resurrection becomes vital, interesting, and wildly significant.  It is necessary to believe in Christ’s resurrection as a real historic event.  But his rising from death was never meant to end there because God has a way of life for us to live into.  God desires us to lean into that resurrection power as the foundation for glorifying him by experiencing a new changed life.
 
            Jesus had in mind to see a community of redeemed people, delivered from the power of sin and death, use their salvation to love God with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength; to love one another in such a way that demonstrates God’s self-sacrificial love by following him together; and to love the world by talking about the events of the cross and resurrection with people wherever they go, just as naturally as we discuss collegiate basketball.
 
            It is the kind of life that cannot be achieved on our own because spiritually dead people cannot make themselves alive.  It is a life based upon the power and love of Jesus Christ.  God does not choose, adopt, and save based upon how lovely we are or how good we are at making ourselves attractive to him.  He loves us because love is who he is – it is all about his giving us belonging as his beloved child.
 
            Timothy Paul Jones tells in his book Proof: Finding Freedom Through the Intoxicating Joy of Irresistible Grace about his adopted seven year old little girl.  It was with much prayer that he and his wife decided that God really wanted them to have her become part of their family.  It was not because she was a sweet child.  In fact, this was actually this little girl’s second family because another family had adopted her and did not keep her because they could not handle her.  She had ended up back as an orphan.
 
            After she was adopted and with the Jones’ family for a while, Dad discovered that her former family went to Disney World every year… without her.  The Mom, Dad, and biological siblings would all go, but they would always leave the little girl behind with extended family.  That meant the girl would have to hear all year about the memories of the family and the see the pictures without her in them.  So, after learning about this, Dad decided that the next family vacation was going to be to Disney World, including the adopted girl.
 
            In the month leading up to the vacation, the little girl began lying for no reason, saying incredibly hurtful things to her siblings, and was just a handful to deal with.  Two days before they were to leave, she said to her Dad: “I know what you are going to do.  You are not going to take me to Disney World, are you?”  In her previous family, she had tried being as good as possible, but it never earned her that trip to Disney.  The little girl had been so terrible in the past few months that Dad had the thought to use the trip as leverage to get his daughter in line.  Rather, he wisely responded to her by saying, “This is a trip we are doing as a family, and you are a part of this family, so you are going with us.”  He went on to say, “You will get consequences for your behavior, but we are not leaving you behind.”
 
            The daughter’s behavior did not change, and the car ride to Florida was awful.  But after the first day at Disney World, there was a breakthrough and a turn-around.  Dad asked his daughter, “So, how was your first day at Disney World?”  After a long pause, she said this: “Daddy, I finally got to go to Disney World… but it wasn’t because I was good; it’s because I’m yours.”
 
            Jesus died and rose again, giving us the grace of forgiveness and a new life not because we were either good or attractive; he did it because we belong to him.  There can be no grace without people who flip their middle fingers at God.  Jesus died and rose again because of our sin; because we needed a Savior.  God’s grace is a farmer paying a full day’s wages to a crew of deadbeat day laborers with only a single hour of work (Matthew 20:1-16).  God’s grace is a man marrying an abandoned woman and then refusing to forsake his covenant with her when she turns out to be a whore (Hosea 1:1-3:5).  God’s grace is the nonsense of a shepherd who puts ninety-nine sheep at risk just to rescue one lousy sheep that is too dumb to stay with the flock (Luke 15:1-7).  God’s grace is the extreme commitment to save people from their own sinful stupidity and stubbornness by sacrificing himself on a cruel cross and rising from the dead just so people can live brand new lives full of peace, love, and joy in a new family of redeemed people with lots of siblings who love each other and want to love the lost world who still does not know what they can have in Christ.
 

 

            A true and real grasp of the grace of God in Christ never results in yawning or boredom; it leads to unending praise and extreme gratefulness.  In the wake of Easter Sunday, the resurrection of Jesus is more than a once-a-year recognition for believers; it is to be a way of life in grasping the power of grace and belonging in Jesus.  It ought to change our lives.