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Easter Sunday – Living for your Risen Lord

Dear BPCWA worshipper, We thank God that we could once again remember and celebrate Good Friday. In last week’s pastoral, we saw how we should take this special week to rekindle our love for Christ as we meditate on His death and resurrection. I hope that that has indeed been your experience over the past week. If so, it would have been a blessed week of renewal. Indeed, it is a Good Friday because our Lord, Saviour, and Master Jesus Christ completed His work of salvation for His people. Today is Easter Sunday. How should we focus our thoughts today and in the week ahead? Christ’s life on earth was short physically but it shone more brightly than any other light ever could. It was over 2,000 years ago that the Son of God walked on the earth. Today, God has given each of us a little period of time on this earth. We celebrate not just a crucified Saviour, but a risen Saviour. The disciples were dejected and fearful immediately after the death of their Master. But when they saw their resurrected Lord, their lives changed. If we say that we are Christians, it means that we do believe that our Saviour died and rose again. Our experience too must be like the disciples in the days of old when they responded to Christ’s resurrection. 

How should we respond?

Live to do God’s will. Let us take the Apostle Paul’s response to the resurrected Lord as an example. As Saul, he was a relentless persecutor of Christians. He consented to the stoning of Stephen (Acts 8:1) and wreaked “havock of the church” (Acts 8:3). But when the resurrected Lord met him on the road to Damascus, Saul became an utterly changed man. His immediate response was to ask the Lord, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”. We say we believe in a resurrected Lord. We sing about it. Then let us, like Paul, respond naturally with the same desire as him – to want to do what Christ wills for us, having known that He died to save us. To Paul, this was the only natural response, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (Gal 2:20). God can use any man . . . even animals and inanimate objects to do His work. But it is the privilege of the sons of God to live to serve God’s purpose. Christ charged Saul with a new purpose for the rest of his life – as the Apostle Paul. It may not be our calling to serve Him in the full-time ministry, but He has a purpose for each of us. After your salvation, has your life’s purpose changed remembering that Christ, the Lamb of God, who died for you? And in His resurrection, He charges each of us with a new purpose for the rest of our life as well. Reflect today if you have fully realised that you are no longer your own. Will you henceforth serve Christ’s purposes alone? Even His specific will for each of us individually, is ultimately to live no more for ourselves, our wants, our lusts, our desires, but to seek to glorify God in everything that we do. We serve a risen Saviour! What a motivation!

Live with heaven in view constantly. The understanding that Christ is resurrected and hence in heaven must cause us to live very differently. The Apostle Paul’s reaction to this fact is seen in Php 3:20, “our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ”. Those who saw the Risen Christ were changed significantly in this aspect. For example, despite having been with Christ’s ministry for 3 years and seeing the miracles He performed, the Apostles fled when He was arrested. Fearful Peter denied His Master three times when a maid said that he had been with Christ. But seeing the resurrected Christ made a drastic difference to him. Peter could exhort the persecuted Christians to “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you” and to “rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy” (1Pet 4:12, 13). Before he died a martyr’s death as foretold by Christ (Jn 21:18), he could calmly stare death bravely in the eye despite “knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed me” (2Pet 1:14). His new priority was no more to save his own skin but to prepare others to know of “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” so that others “may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance” (2Pet 1:16, 15). This is a transformation that is only possible through the empowering of the Holy Spirit, emboldened by the sure reality that death is not the end for a Christian, but a beginning. By the eyes of faith, by the constant reminder to live with our risen resurrected Lord who is enthroned in glory in heaven, we too can and should live as these ones!

Today, we sing the hymn “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today”, but has the doctrine of His resurrection made much difference to your current life? The fact that we have a hope for tomorrow must change our living for today. Christ suffered, died, and resurrected for us so that we could have this hope. It wasn’t just so that we could escape hell. It was so that we would know we serve a risen Saviour and hence live for Him who died for us! Meditate on this always – we do not serve merely a crucified Saviour – we serve a risen Saviour. Make it your life’s purpose to serve your resurrected Lord. Make all your life – your thoughts, your actions, motivations – heaven bound. The life that you live for yourself shall cease to be when your earthly sojourn ends. The life that you live for Christ will be of eternal profit. This life is not just for full-time workers, but for all who call upon the Name of the Lord.

Col 3:1  If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.

Yours in our Lord’s service,
Pastor