*Reposted from May 11, 2011
When I was a kid, Easter was exciting because I got to search for a basket, usually full of Peeps and chocolate eggs, eat a good meal, and of course, participate in our church's annual Easter Egg Joust! Usually the only thing from Easter that carried over into the rest of the year was a chocolate egg or two that I would find months later at the bottom of a dresser drawer.
Easter has come and gone, but it's left me thinking about what Jesus' resurrection and the power of the Cross means in my own life the other 364 days of the year. If God did not spare his own Son and if Jesus is truly risen from the dead, what might God want to do in my life? How might the same power that raised Christ from the dead manifest itself in every breath that I take?
When I was a kid, Easter was exciting because I got to search for a basket, usually full of Peeps and chocolate eggs, eat a good meal, and of course, participate in our church's annual Easter Egg Joust! Usually the only thing from Easter that carried over into the rest of the year was a chocolate egg or two that I would find months later at the bottom of a dresser drawer.
I sometimes go through seasons of feeling overwhelming amounts of brokenness about my sin and depravity, and it feels like I'm in the middle of one of those seasons. But lately, God's been constantly reminding me that He's not given up on me.
As Christ-followers, I think we often tend to think about the areas of sin that God is "working on" in a pretty shallow manner. Our perception of our own sin and depravity is extremely lacking. C.S. Lewis suggests we might look at it differently.
"But unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one."
While seeing change in our lives and in our character won't always occur in leaps and bounds, I think we sometimes settle for allowing God access to clean up the "easy" things in our lives, or at least I do, while the deepest, darkest areas of our sin remain closed off due to a lack of faith that He can do anything about it.
But check this out:
"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him."
Paul goes on to say in Ephesians that we are God's own "workmanship," and he prays that the Ephesians might comprehend "the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places."
God is often described as a potter, an artist, and Jesus was a carpenter. The mark of a good artist or carpenter is the pride that they take in their work. A builder or artist with any amount of integrity and pride would never settle for making simple cosmetic fixes if the very foundation of their work was deeply flawed.
I am deeply flawed.
But I have a renewed sense of hope and faith that my God, who is powerful enough to conquer death in raising Jesus from the grave, is not content to leave the darkest parts of me embedded in who I am because He's incapable of doing anything about it.
Its removal may, more likely, will be painful, but I'm confident that God can and will redeem each and every fiber of my being.
And while I realize that there is a spiritual reality that is true of me as a child of God that hasn't completely come to fruition yet in the flesh, gone are the days of just assuming that certain parts of my character will always be there until the day I die.
Because this is the God I know:
"...Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself IN SPLENDOR, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish."
-CK
