Prayer:
Thank God for the abundant life we have been given through Jesus Christ, who died and rose again, proving he is Lord. Pray for opportunities this week for everyone in the community of Grace Community Church to be witnesses to the abundant life God has given us through his Son.

Spring Men’s Retreat – Friday, May 4 and Saturday, May 5 (click here for details)

Baptism Service – Sunday, May 6, 11:55am

Final Community Groups – Wednesday, May 9, 6:30pm

Volunteer Emphasis for Summer and Fall Ministries – Sunday, May 13 and Sunday, May 20

Missions Prayer Gathering – Sunday, May 20, 6:30pm

Fifteen years ago I read the paragraph below. Will God be gracious to give us this gift of revival in our lifetime? This is what we plan to pray for at our next Fifth Sunday Corporate Prayer Gathering. Will you join us?

Scott

“Revival I define as a work of God by his Spirit through his word bringing the spiritually dead to living faith in Christ and renewing the inner life of Christians who have grown slack and sleepy. In revival God makes old things new, giving new power to law and gospel and new spiritual awareness to those whose hearts and consciences had been blind, hard and cold. Revival thus animates or reanimates churches and Christian groups to make a spiritual and moral impact on communities. It comprises an initial reviving, followed by a maintained state of revivedness for as long as the visitation lasts. Taking the early chapters of Acts as a paradigm, and relating them to the rest of the New Testament, which is manifestly a product throughout of revival conditions, we may list as marks of revival an awesome sense of the presence of God and the truth of the gospel; a profound awareness of sin, leading to deep repentance and heartfelt embrace of the glorified, loving, pardoning Christ; an uninhibited witness to the power and glory of Christ, with a mighty freedom of speech expressing a mighty freedom of spirit; joy in the Lord, love for his people, and fear of sinning; and from God’s side an intensifying and speeding-up of the work of grace so that men are struck down by the word and transformed by the Spirit in short order, making it appropriate pastorally as well as theologically to baptize adult converts straight after they have professed faith. It is true, of course, that there can be personal revival without any community movement, and that there can be no community movement save as individuals are revived. Nonetheless, if we follow Acts as our paradigm we shall define revival as an essentially corporate phenomenon in which God sovereignly shows his hand, visits his people, extends his kingdom, and glorifies his name.”
-J.I Packer, A Quest For Godliness

The resurrection of Jesus led to the founding of the church of Jesus. And the teaching of the church recorded in the New Testament shows us that the resurrection shapes how the church thinks and lives.

The Apostle Peter was a man profoundly impacted by the resurrection. He despaired because he denied Jesus. Jesus died before Peter had the opportunity to be reconciled to him. It was after the resurrection that Jesus showed Peter that he was still loved and that he still had a place in the ongoing work of God. Peter had a new and living hope.

Peter wrote a letter to Christians who were struggling with the hardships of being believers in this world. He told them that they have been born again to a living hope (1 Peter 1:3). What is the living hope? It is hope in the living Christ and his salvation for us. It is hope born in the hearts of people made spiritually alive by God. It is hope that produces a new kind of thinking and living in the world. When God gives us the new birth through the resurrection of Jesus, living hope is born in our hearts.

This living hope resides in the community of Christ known as the church. When we gather together this Sunday as a local congregation we do so with living hope.

Scott

Our Living Hope

“In his great mercy God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” 1 Peter 1:3

The Christian hope focuses not only on our individual future (the resurrection of the body) but also on our cosmic future (the renewal of the universe). On the whole, however, we Christians tend to think and talk too much of an ethereal heaven and too little about the new heaven and the new earth. Yet the whole of Scripture is shot through with this wider and more material expectation. Scripture begins with the original creation of the universe and ends in its last chapters with the creation of a new universe. And in between, the perspective is overshadowed by this Alpha and Omega, this Beginning and End.

The first outspoken expression of this is God’s word in Isaiah 65: “Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth” (v. 17). Then Jesus himself spoke of the palingenesia, literally “the new birth,” but translated by the NIV “the renewal of all things” (Matt. 19:28). In the rest of the New Testament the three major apostolic authors (Paul, Peter, and John) all allude to the same theme. Paul writes that the whole creation will one day be liberated from its bondage to pain and decay (Rom. 8:18-25). Peter prophesies that the present heavens will be replaced by a new heaven and earth, which will be the home of righteousness and peace (2 Pet. 3:7-13).

Next, John writes that he saw the same replacement, together with the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God (Rev. 21:1-2). And in the same chapter John writes that the kings of the earth and the nations will bring their glory into the city, though “nothing impure will ever enter into it” (Rev. 21:27). We need to be cautious in our interpretation of these verses, but they seem to mean that human culture will not all be destroyed but, once purged of every taint of evil, will be preserved to beautify the New Jerusalem.

To sum up, just as in the resurrection of the body, so in the renewal of the universe, the old will not all be destroyed but will be transformed. This is our living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead (1 Pet. 1:3).

For further reading: Romans 8:18-25

John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 285.

The Resurrection of the Body

“The Lord Jesus Christ . . . will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” Philippians 3:20-21

Christ’s conquest of death also indicates the nature of resurrection. Firstly, the risen Lord was not a resuscitated corpse. We do not believe that our bodies will be miraculously reconstituted out of the identical material particles of which they are at present composed. Jesus performed three resuscitations during his ministry, restoring to this life the son of the widow of Nain, Jairus’s daughter, and Lazarus. One understands the sympathy that C. S. Lewis expressed for Lazarus. “To be brought back,” he wrote, “and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.” But Jesus’s resurrection was not a resuscitation. He was raised to an altogether new plane of existence in which he was no longer mortal but “alive forever and ever” (Rev. 1:18).

Secondly, our Christian hope of resurrection is not merely the survival of the soul. As Jesus himself said, “It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). So the risen Lord was neither a revived corpse nor an immaterial ghost. Instead, he was raised from death and simultaneously changed into a new vehicle for his personality. Moreover, our resurrection body will be like his, and his was a remarkable combination of continuity and discontinuity. One the one hand, there was a clear link between his two bodies. The scars were still there in his hands, feet, and side, and Mary Magdalene recognized his voice. On the other hand, his body passed through the grave clothes, out of the sealed tomb, and through locked doors. So it evidently had new and undreamed-of powers.

The apostle Paul illustrated this combination from the relation between seeds and flowers. The continuity ensures that each seed produces its own flower. But the discontinuity is more striking, since out of a plain and even ugly little seed will spring a fragrant, colorful, and elegant flower. “So will it be with the resurrection of the dead” (1 Cor. 15:42). To sum up, what we are looking forward to is neither a resuscitation (in which we are raised but not changed) nor a survival (in which we are changed into a ghost but not raised bodily) but a resurrection (in which we are both raised and changed, transfigured and glorified simultaneously).

For further reading: 1 Corinthians 15:35-38

John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006),p. 284.

The Assurance of Forgiveness

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” 1 Corinthians 15:17

The second significance of the resurrection is that it assures us of God’s forgiveness. I have read the statement of the head of a large English mental hospital: “I could dismiss half my patients tomorrow if they could be assured of forgiveness.” For all of us have a skeleton or two in some dark cupboard—memories of things we have thought, said, or done, of which in our better moments we are thoroughly ashamed. Our conscience nags, condemns, even torments us.

Several times during his public ministry Jesus spoke words of forgiveness and peace, and in the upper room he referred to the communion cup as his “blood of the covenant . . . poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). Thus he linked our forgiveness with his death.

That is what Jesus said. But how can we know that he was correct, that he achieved by his death what he said he would achieve, and that God has accepted his death in our place as a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for our sins? The answer is that, if he had remained dead, we would never have known. Rather, without the resurrection we would have to conclude that his death was a failure. The apostle Paul saw this logic clearly. The terrible consequences of no resurrection, he wrote, would be that the apostles are false witnesses, believers are unforgiven, and the Christian dead have perished. But in fact, Paul continued, Christ was raised from the dead, and by raising him, God has assured us that he approved of his sin-bearing death, that he did not die in vain, and that those who trust in him receive a full and free forgiveness. The resurrection validates the cross.

For further reading: 1 Corinthians 15:12-20

John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 281.

The Verdict Reversed

“The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior . . . We are witnesses of these things.” Acts 5:30-32

It is hard for us to grasp the disciples’ deep disillusion when their Master was crucified. They had come to believe in him as their nation’s long-awaited Messiah. But ever since his arrest in the garden, things had gone from bad to worse, and their faith had steadily eroded. The Jewish leaders had contrived his rejection to their own intellectual and legal satisfaction. They had committed him to a further trial before Pilate, who in the end bowed to the will of the people. Then he was condemned to the humiliation and pain of crucifixion.

Thus one after another the courts had condemned Jesus. In each case the verdict had gone against him, and on the cross no last-minute reprieve had been granted. So finally his lifeless body was lifted from the cross and carried to Joseph’s grave to be buried. The last straw was when a great stone was rolled across the mouth of the tomb and sealed, and Pilate set a guard, as he put it, to make it as secure as they could (Matt. 27:65).

So that was it: a dead and buried corpse, a sealed and guarded tomb, weeping women keeping watch nearby, and shattered dreams. As the Emmaus disciples said, “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21).

Death had taken Jesus beyond human help. Only a miracle could remedy the situation now. Only a resurrection. And it was by a resurrection that God intervened. As a result, the same pattern developed in the early sermons of the apostles. We find it in the first Christian sermon ever preached (Acts 2), in the second (Acts 3), in the third (Acts 5), in Peter’s sermon before Cornelius (Acts 10), and in Paul’s sermon in Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13): “You killed him. God raised him. We are witnesses.” It expresses the first and most basic significance of the resurrection, namely that by raising Jesus, God decisively reversed the verdict passed on him by human beings and validated him as truly the Son of God and Savior.

For further reading: Acts 2:22-36

John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 280.

The Cross and Suffering

“I want to know Christ . . . and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.” Philippians 3:10

The fact of suffering undoubtedly constitutes the single greatest challenge to the Christian faith. Sensitive spirits ask if it can possibly be reconciled with God’s justice and love. Philip Yancey has gone further and uttered the unutterable that we may have thought but to which we may never have dared to give voice. He wrote in his book, Where is God When it Hurts? “If God is truly in charge . . . why is he so capricious, unfair? Is he the cosmic sadist who delights in watching us squirm?”

Instead, Scripture assures us that our God is a suffering God, being himself far from immune to suffering. We need to see him weeping over the impenitent city of Jerusalem and dying on the cross. I venture to quote something I wrote in The Cross of Christ:

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the cross.” In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his.

For further reading: Hosea 11:8-9

John Stott, Through the Bible, Through the Year: Daily Reflections from Genesis to Revelation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), p. 269.