The Secret Behind the Resurrection

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There is a principle for all us woven into the story of the resurrection. This principle came into play because at the peak of despair Jesus did not forget who he was. It’s surprisingly easy to forget who you are. I was reminded of that this week while watching the Big Short, a docudrama about the financial crisis stimulated by the failure of the mortgage industry. It was a revealing movie. In the throes of the crisis you got to see who people were at their core, for good or evil. In contrast, Jesus’ triumph had everything to do with his heart and motivation and those two things set in motion a series of events that would change the world forever.

The Passion in the Passion

Today, everyone is encouraged to follow their passion. The word passion is everywhere with the promise that it will allow you to feel alive. If you Google the word hundreds upon hundreds of possibilities will emerge. You can take your pick! You can discover: A Passion for Chocolate, A Passion for Fashion, A Passion for Fly Fishing, A Passion for Windsurfing, A Passion for Hunting, and A Passion for Jazz. You name any activity and someone has a passion for it. The possibilities are endless.

Part of the appeal is that people love enthusiasm. It’s almost as if we think it’s appropriate to get excited, be enthusiastic, have a passion for anything in life . . . as long as it’s not God. And we often are passionate about everything . . . except God.

This was part of Jesus’ problem. He had a passion for his Heavenly Father and this made people feel uncomfortable. They didn’t like being out done when it came to true religious fervor. I am sure his mother, relatives and childhood friends asked, “Do you need to be so extreme? What’s wrong with doing time in the temple on the Sabbath like the rest of us?”

But Jesus was crystal clear about living with passion because his faith didn’t rest on an intellectual understanding of the Mosaic Law, but a living relationship with God which couldn’t help but show itself in every interaction. A man walked up to Jesus one day and said, in essence, “I’m busy. I don’t have time to read the book, and I missed the movie when it came out. Can you give me the three minute YouTube version of what you are all about?”

Jesus said, “absolutely”:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these.”  – Mark 12:30–31

You can feel the passion in Jesus’s words. The repeating word is “all.” Jesus’s summary was absolutely clear. He was saying, “We are to love God, serve God, love and serve people with everything we have.” I am to give it all I have. He was saying, put some passion in this direction if you want to experience life the way it’s meant to be.

Jesus didn’t mince words. He said he would rather have you be cold or hot than lukewarm: “So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth” – Revelation 3:16

That is pretty intense! If you read on to the rest of the chapter, it makes sense. It was really an attempt to nudge people out of complacency.  Sound familiar?

“And you don’t realize that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. So I advise you to buy gold from me—gold that has been purified by fire. Then you will be rich. Also buy white garments from me so you will not be shamed by your nakedness, and ointment for your eyes so you will be able to see. I correct and discipline everyone I love. So be diligent and turn from your indifference.”

The reality is, we spend a lot of time caught up in things that don’t matter.

God loves passionate people!

When you look at people who have made the most impact in the world, they were not necessarily the smartest, wealthiest, best educated, or most beautiful. But they did have one thing in common: they are people of passion.

Passionate people are world changers. Think of Bill and Melinda Gates, the Hillsong United, Spielberg—these are all passionate people. They said, “There are things that matter. I want to make my life count, and I’m not going to waste my life on trivial things.”

Passion energizes life. It’s what makes you alive. Without passion, your life becomes dull, drab, boring, and routine. The problem is that passion is easy to lose.

find your passionHere is a universal equation: NEW = PASSION! When you get something new you automatically take care of it. Think of your first new car. It was, no doubt, well cared for but over time you forgot its value and it became the mobile carrier of your stuff.

You have your first child whose every minuscule development is recorded and cataloged, and then along comes numbers two and three and the volume of pictures dramatically decreases in inverse proportion to the number of kids!

New restaurants are packed. New iPhones sell out. People wait in long lines to see new movies.

All people of faith start out this way, too. You get passionate when you first learn there is a purpose and deep meaning or significance to your life, but over time things become mundane. The challenges seem greater than the rewards and before you know it you have hit the doldrums where nothing moves you! Rev. Moon had this piece of advice for this:

“A life of faith is not aimless. A life of faith is like gathering the equipment required to reach a mountaintop, the summit of the highest peak. Hence, when faced with an obstacle, we should not make a detour around it. Instead, we should proceed through the obstacle. When faced with hardships, we should determine not to give up, and be ready to face even greater difficulties. With an indomitable spirit we should strive to discover the subjective self that can digest all difficulties.”

What is this “Subjective self” like? How do you take charge of your spiritual health?

Five Essentials for a Resurrected Life

  1. Keep young at heart

An amazing quality of children is their sense of wonder. They never grow tired of something. It doesn’t matter how many times a story had been read to them, it is as fresh as the first telling. They have an innocence that allows them to be available to the wonder of the world. This is why Jesus said, “Unless you become like little children . . .” (Matthew 18:3).

It’s true that we need to “grow up” and to “mature,” but maybe we have lost something in the process that God never intended for us to lose.

We need to discover that God is younger than we are! He is more playful than we are. He is more alive and creative than we are. He is more full of life and energy than we are.

We come to the realization that we are the old, grouchy ones and God is the young, adventurous One. That is the exact opposite of what most people believe about God and most people of faith believe about spirituality. Rather than somebody becoming a Christian, and then becoming more religious and uptight and judgmental and opinionated and harsh, they should naturally become more open and alive.

  1. Embrace the ultimate contradiction

If you take Jesus seriously, he had some pretty confronting things to say:

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”  – Matthew 16:25

We are so afraid to live this even though “Life confined to the self is a prison, a joy-killing, neurosis-producing, disease-fomenting prison.” – Eugene Peterson.

Today, a cross is a piece of jewelry rather than an instrument of torture and death. At the time of Christ, there were days when hundreds of Jews were crucified. They were publicly displayed where people would have to walk. Scholars suggest that when Jesus said, “Take up your cross,” he could have been standing near one of those crosses, maybe looking at it. Everybody knew he meant, “Be ready to die.”  The point is not to die but to go over the peak of death and the fear of death.  Rev. Moon spoke of this many times:

“Heaven made limitless efforts to enable us, human beings living with our earthly human hopes, to go over the peak of death with new hope and to live with reverence for the eternal world. Therefore, people who live a life of faith should not live by embracing only earthly hopes but should live dreaming of the eternal world of hope that can conquer even death. To achieve this aim, we practice our life of faith continuously.”

The amazing paradox is this: dying to self looks like it leads to a life of emptiness and loss. In reality, dying to self leads to a life of joy and freedom. If you were to ask Rev. Moon what is the core of his philosophy or way of life he would say, “Living for the sake of others” because that is God’s way of being. This is where a life of faith starts.

  1. Be ready to go out on a limb

If you want a healthy spiritual life then you need to have a daily relationship with God. That means there has to be a lot of give and take. You have to learn how to trust God. There is only one way to do this and that is to go beyond the limits of your own ability. It’s easy to depend on yourself or what you know but the trouble is you don’t know everything. There is more to learn. God has a habit of nudging people out of their comfort zone. Unless you are ready to budge you will not learn all there is to know. You can read more about going out on a limb in Miracles, by Eric Metaxas.

  1. Keep future focused

The only people I know who have sustainable, positive, long-term joy and passion are all people with one thing in common—they believe God has amazing plans for their tomorrow. Why? Future focus creates passion.

That leads to a very critical question: Do you have any future dreams?

I love being around people who have expectation for their future! They believe God is alive, the resurrection really happened, God is still going to work, and God is going to work today and tomorrow. Psychologists know, what a person believes about their future is more important than anything that has happened in their past, or anything that is happening in their present.

Today, Easter is a global holiday. Even if you are not Christian you know about Easter. If we went back in time 2.000 years you would see the few followers of Jesus did not have a lot of hope. If they considered their past, they would have focused on their persecuted efforts and the extreme prejudice of the leaders of Israel. If they thought of their present they would have wondered, where do we go from here?

With Jesus dead, what kind of hope could they realistically have? After the crucifixion the followers of Jesus recoiled in fear. How could they succeed without Jesus? So they huddled in the Upper Room absorbed by grief and trepidation. Miraculously, the Holy Spirit came to them and showed them their future was more promising than the past or present.

A healthy spiritual life has hope for the future because God is alive and in our lives, and the possibilities are as large as we allow them to be.

  1. You’re better off with a purpose; so ask yourself, “What can I do?”

Never have people had more comforts than in the life we now live in America. And this is only the beginning. With advances in technology, robots will soon take over menial functions liberating us for a life of untold freedom. People with no purpose will have no passion because passion and purpose go together. Passion drives purpose.

We all give our lives to something:

  • Some people give their whole lives to attain status.
  • Some people just want their picture to go viral, giving them fame.
  • Some people give their whole lives to get rich.

The real question is this: “Am I living for a compelling purpose?”

The great thing about people who live with purpose, who are connected, and who have future dreams is that their passion overcomes any obstacle. Max Lucado told a story that illustrates this: https://maxlucado.com/where-do-i-go-for-strength/

I have everything I need for joy

“I have everything I need for joy!” Robert Reed said. His hands are twisted and his feet are useless. He can’t bathe himself. He can’t feed himself. He can’t brush his teeth, comb his hair, or put on his underwear. His shirts are held together by strips of Velcro. His speech drags like a worn-out audio cassette.

Robert has cerebral palsy. The disease keeps him from driving a car, riding a bike, and going for a walk. But it didn’t keep him from graduating from high school or attending Abilene Christian University, from which he graduated with a degree in Latin. Having cerebral palsy didn’t keep him from teaching at a St. Louis junior college or from venturing overseas on five mission trips.

And Robert’s disease didn’t prevent him from becoming a missionary in Portugal. He moved to Lisbon, alone, in 1972. There he rented a hotel room and began studying Portuguese. He found a restaurant owner who would feed him after the rush hour and a tutor who would instruct him in the language.

Then he stationed himself daily in a park, where he distributed brochures about Christ. Within six years he led seventy people to the Lord, one of whom became his wife, Rosa.

I heard Robert speak recently. I watched other men carry him in his wheelchair onto the platform. I watched them lay a Bible in his lap. I watched his stiff fingers force open the pages. And I watched people in the audience wipe away tears of admiration from their faces. Robert could have asked for sympathy or pity, but he did just the opposite. He held his bent hand up in the air and boasted, “I have everything I need for joy.”

His shirts are held together by Velcro, but his life is held together by joy. This true story is remarkable because it shows the power of faith and purpose. With that many obstacles against me, I am sure I might easily fold. Robert Reed succeeded despite his circumstances because he realized life happens from the inside out, and a vibrant life is fueled by passion and purpose.

The power to recreate the world

Jesus found a way to beat the odds and that opens a path for us to do the same.

Jesus resurrected because he invested everything – he gave it his all. He had an innocence that made him incorruptible. He was ready to give up his life and in doing so found eternal life. He challenged that insane contradiction he spoke of. He went out on a limb. He had to put his trust in God. In his darkest days, he kept future focused with a heart of gratitude for everything he was experiencing. It would have been easier to go back to his father’s carpentry business but he knew he had a calling and that caused him to do much with little.

“Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, ‘Christ is risen,’ but ‘I shall rise.” – Phillips Brooks

As we move forward from Easter Sunday into the rest of the year I hope we can use the power of resurrection just as Jesus did to re-create our world. The world at large is under the threat of violent extremism. No wall, no matter how tall can protect you from hate-mongering and resentment. We are called to build a new future, based on the peace that a celebration like Easter represents. It is not just for one religion. Jesus came for the world, and any solution has to prioritize the well-being of the whole world. The world’s future is dependent upon enough people standing up with a resurrection mindset that says, “I am ready to give my all and to value each and every person as a son or daughter of God.” We are in this together.

 

 

 

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