Don’t forget Jesus this weekend…

Easter is full of distraction. For us who are involved with music and production at churches it is an extremely busy season filled with programming, details and a desire and pressure to make sure all our carefully laid plans come off as well as possible. For children is a time that can easily be about bunnies and baskets. For the rest of us it can easily become a brief remembrance of a often told story; a small bump of religious observance along the road of life.

However, what we remember in Good Friday and Easter is the most essential and profound event of all time. It cannot even be contained in human words. The death and resurrection of Jesus, with all it’s implications, should shake and affect us to the very core of our being. Peter said it this way:

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,”
(1Pet 1.8 ESV)

Peter says that as we see Jesus and believe in him that we will be filled with such a glorious joy that it cannot even be expressed.

I have been deeply convicted lately of my dispassionate, detached, and generally un-affected relationship with Jesus. I am very comfortable preaching the gospel and teaching about the theology and missiology of worship to others. But I rarely, deeply, engage and am affected by that truth in my own life. God has been working on me recently as the Spirit chips away at my hard heart. As I open the scriptures I see the glory of Christ and it is staggering and beautiful. What He has done for us is so deep and profound I am often at a loss for words as how to express it but full of joy and gratitude in response.

As we take time to remember the death and resurrection of Jesus this weekend my prayer is that we do not simply remember the truth and facts of the events but rather that we are moved, shaken, disturbed, grieved and overwhelmed with the glory, majesty and holiness of our Savior.

We should be horrified at the brutality Jesus was subjected to. It should literally make us sick.

We should be shaken with grief and sorrow at the realization that OUR sin nailed Jesus to the cross, tore the flesh from his back and mocked his divinity.

We should be overwhelmed at the loss the disciples must have felt as they watched Him die.

We should be filled with inexpressible at the glory and majesty of Jesus as he conquered Satan, sin and death as he rose from the dead.

If we are not dramatically moved in mind, heart and will and if these revelations and remembrances to not work themselves out in physical response and action as we talk to one another and sing together in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, then I submit that have either missed the truth of scripture or suppressed the work of the Spirit. We have either failed to see the profound truth of the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ (2 Cor. 4:4) or we have suppressed the work of the Spirit in our lives transform us into the likeness of Christ from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor 3:18).

Don’t let this weekend pass you buy in a flurry music and production, bunnies and baskets and religious observance. Take time to behold the glory of Jesus and allow the Spirit to affect you in the deepest way possible that everyone we come in contact with, both as we gather Friday and Sunday as the church and as we are scattered with with family and friends, would see the glory of the Savior in us.

Pastor Tim Smith