Categories
salvation

Yes, Christians Really Are Motivated By Christ’s Resurrection

A friend of mine, Jewish by birth, told me he was off to visit family during Passover. Unsure if I knew the history of the holiday, he told me how the Jews were slaves of Pharaoh and was rescued by God via a bunch of miracles. Then he added, “it’s all lies, anyway. Holidays are just an excuse for families to see each other.”

It got me thinking about how people seriously misdiagnose the motivations of true Christianity.

An excuse for family get-togethers? A way for people to be good to each other? Just another religion on a spectrum of beliefs?

Categories
blogspotting christ

Easter Blogging

Jesus Christ Our Lord

The Gospel of Christ

The Physical Resurrection

Dwelling on The Cross and the Empty Tomb

Chronology of Passion Week

Fiction

Categories
pray

Prayer Mondays: Easter

Barring my faulty memory (and if I’m not lazy) I want to post prayers on Monday from all over Church History and then throughout the modern day, and then my own. This one comes from the Book of Common Prayer, on Easter.

Categories
christ

Glory Unstopped

John sits back, lowers the quill, strokes his beard and looks at the drying parchment. The introduction: finalized. The material: organized to steadily reveal flashes of glory. He remembers the means He used to glorify God….

…and he remembers how God the Father glorified Him.

He died of His own volition; Pontius didn’t have a choice in the matter. He died a criminal labeled King and was buried without a dime and yet within a rich man’s tomb—only to have the tomb be vacated.

The sight of that stone, moved aside and for whom? The one who commanded the waters to be still, the one who raised the dead by calling them by name, the one who could make rocks sing if he so wanted; he didn’t need to roll away that stone. After all, he showed up behind closed doors, not once but twice!

That stone was rolled away for us. We could see. An event that none of us saw, but there was the evidence: glory had flashed and death died as God, laid aside his burial clothes as if waking up from a nap, and walked out of closed tomb.

Everything has changed.

We now look forward to that day when he returns in glory and power, thinks John. What a day of rejoicing that will be.

Maybe it will be soon? I hope it’s soon, he thinks as he blows out the candles.

He’s old. He can’t move as he used to. But he remembers these things as if it were yesterday.

You can’t put a cap on this revelation of glory.

Everything has changed.

Categories
christ

Glory Unveiled On The Cross

The whole time that He was here, He kept saying that He wasn’t seeking His own glory. Others received glory from one another, but Him—not seeking to glorify Himself at all. Mindboggling, thinks John, utterly mindboggling.

The one who has the right to stand in the midst of all and demand the glory from His creation, quietly going off to do the work of The Father for the purpose of glorifying Him.

Even before entering Jerusalem, asking the Father to glorify His name.

But oh, the way that the Father would be glorified. As we sat around that table, and Judas—that traitor—ran out to do his dastardly work, our Lord announces that the hour has arrived for the Son to finally be glorified. To be glorified by hanging on the cross! To hear our Lord praying for the Father to be glorified and for He to receive the glory He had before creation—the wonder of it! Ever since the foundation of the world, he’s been somehow (I don’t understand how) involved in a way that necessitated a return back to that previous glory but as a man!

And then that glory to be transferred to us because of what He was doing on that cross: God of the cosmos, creator of the universe, orchestrator of time—pinned to a tree to glorify God, and to give us that glory.

Glory unveiled on a tree as the sky was occluded!