I want to say just a word about the celebration of Easter. If you’re like me, you probably spent a good deal more time preparing for Christmas than preparing for the celebration of Easter. But think about this for a moment? Apart from the resurrection of Jesus Christ, there is little point in even discussing Christmas.
The Apostle Paul, in a letter to the Corinthian Christians, reminds us that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile (1 Cor. 15:14). In light of that sobering reminder, it is incumbent on us to demonstrate that the Christ of Christmas had the power to lay down his life and the power to take up his life again, thus demonstrating that He was God in human flesh. What I’m saying is that there is nothing more significant than the resurrection of Jesus Christ and because of its centrality to Christianity, those who take the sacred name of Christ upon their lips must be prepared to defend the reliability of the biblical account of the resurrection.
Make no mistake, the biblical account is being undermined in the minds of children and adults alike. Internet lies, like the notion that the resurrection motif was borrowed from ancient pagan mystery religions, circle the globe before truth has had the chance to put its proverbial boots on. Likewise, magazines from Time to Vanity Fair bombard the public with misinformation regarding the resurrection. On the other hand, it’s chilling to read pontifications, like tales about the entombment and resurrection were just latter-day wishful thinking, and the so-called reality is Jesus’ corpse went the way of all abandoned criminal’s bodies—barely covered with dirt, and vulnerable to the wild dogs that roamed the wasteland of the execution grounds.
But what should you expect? Pagans are going to exercise their job description. They’re going to be pagans. The real question is “Are you going to exercise your job description as a believer?” And that leads me to my point—it leads me to my excitement, about the ongoing quest to tackle the problem of biblical illiteracy. In that light, I’ve just completed the second in a series of flip charts. It’s entitled “Resurrection: Memorable Keys to the Greatest F-E-A-T in History.” What is so exciting about this flip chart is that it provides a definitive statement regarding what we believe with respect to the central event in Christianity, and in a color-coded fashion, I follow up with bullet points documenting why we believe what we believe. And again, this is not just any subject. The laminated flip chart that I want to put into your hands is a memorable guide to defending the very subject that empowered early Christians to turn an empire upside-down.
