SYNOPSIS: Jaroslav Pelikan put it profoundly, “If Christ is risen—nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.” What difference does resurrection make? When you take resurrection reality and power out of the church on Sunday and into your world on Monday, transforming faith, unshakeable hope and radical love will be released into your life. Count Bismarck said, “Without the hope of eternal life, this life is not worth the effort of getting dressed in the morning.” But the Bible promises that Jesus’ resurrection is God’s guarantee of your resurrection one day, and that’s something worth celebrating today—even on a proverbial Monday morning!
Project 52 – Weekly Scripture Memory // John 11:25-26
“Jesus said, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.’”
The story is told of Martin Luther, who once spent three days in a deep depression over something that had gone wrong. On the third day his wife, Katie, came downstairs dressed in mourning clothes. Luther asked, “Who’s dead?”
She replied, “God!”
Luther was offended, “What do you mean, God is dead? God cannot die.”
Kate replied, “Well, the way you’ve been acting I was sure He had!”
That was a wake-up call to the great reformer. Luther snapped out of his funk. And Jesus’ claim to being the resurrection and the life ought to snap us out of our funk, too. Jesus is alive, and because he lives, we will live—forever. This business of resurrection isn’t just for Easter Sunday, it is for Easter Monday and every other day of the week as well. The resurrection is our living hope (I Peter 1:3)—Sunday through Saturday—and that’s all that matters. I love how historian Jaroslav Pelikan put it,
“If Christ is risen—nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.”
What difference does resurrection make? When you take resurrection reality and power out of the church on Sunday and into your world on Monday, transforming faith, unshakeable hope and radical love will be released into your life. Count Bismarck said, “Without the hope of eternal life, this life is not worth the effort of getting dressed in the morning.” But the Bible promises that Jesus’ resurrection is God’s guarantee of your resurrection one day, and that’s something worth celebrating today—even on a proverbial Monday morning!
Apparently in the Greek Orthodox tradition, the day after Easter is devoted to telling jokes. Why? They believe they’re imitating the cosmic joke God pulled on Satan in the resurrection. Satan thought he’d won, that he’d gotten the last word, or so he thought. But God raised Jesus from the dead, and salvation and eternal life became the last word.
When you make the resurrection the foundation of your faith, claim the Risen Savior as the basis of your hope, and invite the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead to be your overflowing source of radical love, come Monday you can laugh in Satan’s face when he throws all kinds of garbage at you. You see, no matter what he does, you win! That is the last word. You are living in the power of the resurrection and the hope of eternity!
Even on Monday morning!
Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, “Christ is risen,” but “I shall rise.” ~Phillips Brooks
Reflect & Apply: Charles Wesley wrote what is arguable the greatest resurrection hymn of all, Christ The Lord Is Risen Today. If you know it, sing it every morning this week before you head out for the day. If you don’t know it, it would be a great one to memorize (look it up on your Internet search engine) along with the memory verse.