Decoration Day

Have you ever been to a Decoration Day?  In many rural cemeteries it is a day to clean up and decorate the graves.  Then the families of those buried there share a pot-luck, picnic type meal together.  Usually there is a business meeting to go along with it.  I am old enough to remember going to a few Decoration Days at the Pilot Grove Cemetery outside Yoakum when I was younger.  This may seem like an odd event but I saw in the local paper this week that there will be a cemetery Decoration Day in our area.  They still survive.

I had a pastor friend in a nearby church when he and I were both pastoring our first churches.  The Decoration Day in the cemetery in his rural community was an annual event, always on a Sunday.  It was so big, the church did not meet for worship that day.  When all the people told my friend about this, he did not know whether to believe them.  He showed up for church ready to preach on that first Decoration Day Sunday.  Sure enough, no one came.  They were all out at the cemetery.

What happens when God buries someone?  I am not knocking Decoration Days, but look at what he did with Moses, "He buried him in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is.'  Deut. 34:6.  He seems to be a God more focused on the living.

Recently I read this from Dr. Jim Denison, "Today Muslims visit the remains of Muhammad in Medina.  Baha'i visit their founder's body at the Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, Israel.  Buddhists go to the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka, where the tooth of the Buddha is kept.  Confucians visit the remains of Confucius in his hometown of Qufu, Shandong Province, China.  But no one can visit the corpse of Jesus, because it has never been found."

God does not seem to have a long term plan for his people's graves.  He certainly doesn't have a decoration day here on earth, he never calls a business meeting to deal with our graves.  God has an even better plan for his people's resurrection.  I will take a resurrection day over a decoration day any day.  But how do we use the resurrection of Jesus on a daily basis?  Can we?  The answer is, "Yes."  God wants to give us a daily dose of resurrection power.  Have you had yours today?  That is what we will talk about Sunday.

for the journey...

Tim

Relentless Redemption

The resurrection of  Jesus shows the relentless redemption of God's plan.  If you have been worshipping with us these past Sundays at Northside, you know that we have been looking at the power of Jesus' resurrection from 1 Corinthians 15.  Paul says there that without the resurrection of Jesus, which points to our bodily resurrection, there is no point to Christianity.  Everything stands or falls on the resurrection.

But because there is a resurrection of all believers in Christ, we have an understanding of the lengths the power of Jesus's resurrection will go to change us - the measure of this relentless redemptive plan of God.  Every place where sin has stained, scarred, wounded or warped - in every level or sphere of life where sin has brought death - the power of the resurrection of Jesus works to bring a resurrected life.  Someday we who belong to him will see it all worked out even to the very molecules of our physical body as we are raised with an eternal body that will live forever.

Not only do we see the relentless redemption, we see this overwhelming victory of the resurrection and how far it goes.  Historian Philip Schaff wrote: 

This Jesus of Nazareth, without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed and Napoleon; without science and learning, he shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of schools, he spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a sing line he set more pens in motion and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art and songs of praise than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times.

The power of his resurrection and the victory it brings is not yet fully seen.  It is still working in you and in me.  Someday we will see it whole, complete and finished.  For now though, we can know it is at work even if we cannot see it.  This post will go out on Saturday, the nameless, sad, silent Saturday between Good Friday and Easter.  But on that Saturday, and on this one, God was and is still at work and his relentless redemption keeps pressing on.  Let us let it and let us rejoice in it.

for the journey...

Tim