We live in a world gone mad.
It’s filled with opportunity, thrills, danger and terror … all at the same time.
The technology that gives us new, wonderful ways to work and play, is the same technology that provides us with new platforms to sling our vitriol at one another. Adults of different social and political persuasions draw lines and take sides. Our kids have new permanent ways to bully and terrorize each other. Loneliness, depression and suicide are on the rise, and exponentially so since covid and lockdowns arrived on the scene.
And we think to ourselves, Something needs to change …
Some of us blame our fast-paced modern life and technology. We long for a slower pace and simpler days of old, but going backwards is not the answer. And it wouldn’t matter how far back you went …
Go back 2000 years to Jesus’ crazy world …
What would it be like to live in a world where criminals, instead of being housed in prisons, were strung up on crosses and lined up along major highways? Where women and children were essentially property? Where soldiers and government officials could confiscate your property or demand services or labor from you on a whim? Where poverty and debt likely meant selling yourself and your family into slavery? Where you were old at age 40 and probably dead before 50?
Every era and generation has had it’s problems, but it’s not an outer problem, it’s an inner problem. The world needs a heart change, but we are incapable of changing our own hearts. It requires supernatural intervention.
A holy God knew this. We are His creation and He created us to be in fellowship with Himself. But, like an adulterous spouse, we turned away from Him to live life our way, breaking fellowship with Him. He’s so pure and holy that He cannot tolerate our rebellious hearts. By cutting ourselves off from Him, we cut ourselves off from the very Source of life and paid a heavy price … now decay and death rule our hearts and lives, and there’s no escaping our inevitable fate.
But He loved us, and He knew that, if a way was made, some of us would turn back to Him … so He made a way … and that’s what Easter is all about. A holy God sent His holy Son, to live out a human life on planet earth. He lived under the same burden of decay and death that every human knows so well.
Just like us, He endured the joys, temptations and sorrows of life here, and then experienced the same fate we’re all doomed to experience: physical death.
Unlike us, He had a pure, sinless heart. He did not deserve the same fate that we deserve. But somehow – I don’t understand it and I can’t explain it – He became sin for us in our stead. Meaning, He paid the price that we were supposed to pay … death. And unlike us, who are powerless to avoid or overcome death, He did overcome death! He is ALIVE! And that’s the Easter story!
That same power that brought Him out of that grave is the same power that we now can access to heal and change our broken hearts. Now we are reconnected to the Source of life!
Now we have peace that the world can’t take away. When you have this kind of peace on the inside, it shows on the outside. It affects the way we think, act, talk, work, and interact with our world. It will flow out of us through our work and life and it will influence the people we interact with.
People will definitely notice that we are different, and some won’t like it at all and will be irritated by it. Don’t be too surprised. For the most part, this world and its inhabitants have their own ways of living. Ways that are opposed to God and His ways.
But others will notice, like it and be drawn to it. Maybe they’ll ask us about it and we’ll get an opportunity to tell His story ... this is how He changes the world ... one heart at a time.
Thanks, Dixie!- Sherry A Mitcham