Resurrection Life part 2
Let's really get into this. Our key verse for this series is John 11:25, but before I quote it again I want to back up and get the previous verse too. "Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day" (John 11:24). That's such a religious mindset. We think something great will happen... in the sweet by and by. We're only interested in the afterlife... at the expense of life itself. So Jesus kind of pretty much stopped her right there. "Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live" (John 11:25). He brought it to the present tense. He said I AM the resurrction AND the life. And He pointed out that, in a very real sense, He IS the last day. It was happening right then. And I know that Jesus's death on the cross is a big time culmination of, well, everything. The finished work. The end of the old and the beginning of the new. But I want to point this out too: In Revelation 13:8 Jesus is described as, "...the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." So, as I said, the cross was the culmination. The fulfillment. But we have to remember that God is outside of time. He sees the end from the beginning. He doesn't operate within our limited human understanding. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. So, in a very real sense, the Lamb has always been slain. The deal about resurrection is not just what will happen when we die... it is what happened when Jesus died. It is what happened when--on, and through, and because of the cross--the old passed away and the new came forth. Because Resurrection Life is not just pushing reset on life as we know it. It is a totally and completely different kind of life. Think about this. Jesus said, "He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live." In our understanding of "death," physical death, where does belief come in? Can your corpse believe things from the cold ground? Or if you're cremated can your ashes believe or unbelieve? So maybe there's more to it than just the end of our physical bodies. Maybe before the cross we were dead even as we stumbled around trying to "live." Maybe believing in Jesus--believing in love--is what brings us out of death and into life. Maybe it's not about an afterlife, but an everlasting life! So my point for today is that we need to stop living in the past... or in the future. It's ok to learn from the past. And it's ok to work towards the future... but all we really have is right now. So even as we're working towards the future we need to have a balance. You can't sacrifice your entire present for a future that may or may not ever happen. What we need to do is really start to see, and feel, and experience, and understand what that difference is between "life" and Resurrection Life. Because it IS a big difference. It is the ultimate difference between, honestly, death and life. God told Adam that on the day that he ate of the tree of death he would surely die. And Adam did. Even though he lived another like 900 years or something. So death isn't just physical death. It's more than that. And it's less than that. Because Jesus defeated death. Death could not hold life down. Jesus died... and rose again. And we, in Him, died--we were already dead in Adam, then we had a second death when Jesus died, which was the death of death--and rose again. To walk in newness of life! To experience everything that our heavenly Father has made available to us. To not only live... but live abundantly! To not only "live" but live... by loving! That's what God wants for us, so that's what He gave to us!