“He came to pay a debt he didn’t owe, because we owed a debt we couldn’t pay”
Yes, look around and you see all the weekend celebrations for this guy called Jesus coming to the culmination. The celebration is at its peak and come Monday, it’s back to Oh Jesus, cool guy! And that’s pretty much it. The world can picture Jesus how ever they want, it doesn’t change the truth to who He is. Often pictured and interpreted and more often misinterpreted, that’s Jesus for the world.
If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead. And Yeah, He did come back from the dead. Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about. The truth we forget these days is that we are assigned with the tasks of bringing heaven on earth, to live the lives given to us with a sense of belonging to not just this fading earth but towards that eternal kingdom.
“What you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting rose in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself, accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and make the name of Jesus honored in the world, all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make”
I am and await the New Creation because down came Calvary’s Cavalry