The Power of His Resurrection

There is a Russian devotional classic entitled The Way of a Pilgrim. The first line reads, “By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner…” Certainly this anonymous 19^th century Christian was echoing the words of Paul in Romans 7 where he confesses, “I decide to do good, but I don't really do it; I decide not to do bad, but then I do it anyway. My decisions, such as they are, don't result in actions. Something has gone wrong deep within me and gets the better of me every time. It happens so regularly that it's predictable. The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up. I truly delight in God's commands, but it's pretty obvious that not all of me joins in that delight. Parts of me covertly rebel, and just when I least expect it, they take charge. I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?”

Paul goes on to answer the question. “The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does. He acted to set things right in this life of contradictions where I want to serve God with all my heart and mind, but am pulled by the influence of sin to do something totally different.”

The answer, it turns out, is found in the events that took place in Jerusalem a couple millennia ago. We are only days away from focusing on the life, death, burial and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus that we find the ultimate answer to our moral dilemma. Paul referred to it in his letter to the Christians around Ephesus. Early in his letter Paul prays that they would know “what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.” The resurrection was proof that God had accepted, as payment in full, Christ’s sacrifice of himself in our place. In so doing, he secured forever the salvation of those who respond to God’s grace by faith.

We will all continue to struggle between the “now and not yet” of knowing that we are fully saved by Christ’s sacrifice and yet living on in these limited, sin-conditioned bodies with minds that have years of experience in choosing what we think is in our own best interest. This is one reason Paul had to tell the Philippian believers to “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” I’ve always appreciated Paul’s candor. “Not only.” Paul knows we need no command to look out for our own interests. What we need to do is not stop there. We also need to look to the interests of others. The power to do that comes from being in a responsive relationship with God the Father through the Holy Spirit who lives in us.

A bit later in Paul’s letter to the Roman Christians he writes, “In his Son, Jesus, [God] personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn't deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God's action in them find that God's Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life.”

As we look forward to Resurrection Sunday, we need to be reminded that it is not just a Christian form of celebrating Spring. The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ affirms that our sins are forgiven and because our sins are forgiven, we are given the power of the Holy Spirit to move us from what we are to what we can be. May we all know the power of His resurrection.