Daily post for Easter Monday, April 6, 2015

Daily lesson for Easter Monday, April 6, 2015, comes from Acts 2 verse 24:

"God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it."

I love this Scripture. 

It was not possible for death to hold Him.  There was too much life in Him. Death had to let go.

The power that raised Jesus from the dead was the very power of life itself. There was more power in the life of Jesus than there was in the death of Hades. Resurrection was a foregone conclusion.  A miracle?  Yes.  But also a matter of natural law; you just can't keep a good man down. And goodness itself will always prevail in the end. "Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again."

The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is alive in all of us. It is the power of the cosmic Christ -- the atomic God-power we were each born with and which waits to be discovered. This is the essence of all spirituality.  It is the awakening of our divine nature within us. It is Easter for and in all.

Yesterday in his Easter prayer of invocation, one of our pastors quoted a portion of the following words of Baptist preacher and civil rights hero Clarence Jordan:

"The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church."

God did raise Jesus from the dead.  God wants to raise us up also. The stone has been rolled away, and the tomb door is wide-open. Resurrection life is available to all; and it is impossible for death to hold us back.