May at Grace, 5/1/2012
See below for church-wide events scheduled in May.
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
Words of Grace: Easter Sunday, April 8
Sunday: The Centrality of the Cross
Monday: An Atonement for Sin
Tuesday: A Revelation of Love
Wednesday: The Cross and Suffering
Thursday: The Verdict Reversed
Good Friday: The Assurance of Forgiveness
Saturday: The Resurrection of the Body
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.
Words of Grace: Saturday, April 7
Sunday: The Centrality of the Cross
Monday: An Atonement for Sin
Tuesday: A Revelation of Love
Wednesday: The Cross and Suffering
Thursday: The Verdict Reversed
Good Friday: The Assurance of Forgiveness
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.
Words of Grace: Good Friday, April 6
Sunday: The Centrality of the Cross
Monday: An Atonement for Sin
Tuesday: A Revelation of Love
Wednesday: The Cross and Suffering
Thursday: The Verdict Reversed
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.
Words of Grace: Thursday, April 5
Sunday: The Centrality of the Cross
Monday: An Atonement for Sin
Tuesday: A Revelation of Love
Wednesday: The Cross and Suffering
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.
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