Jesus is alive! Because we can know Jesus we can know life. But what is this life? There is a big difference between merely existing and truly living.
What if discovering true life involved moving your life out of the center of your focus? It is more blessed to give than to receive. God wants your life to be awesome, but this truth comes with a trick. The truth is God wants your life to be awesome. The trick is God wants you to provide an awesome life for others rather than to pursue an awesome life for yourself. This will make your life awesome.
I’m not just talking living a life that prefers others who are among us but others who have yet to be born.
We serve a God who thinks generationally and if you think circumstantially, you cannot understand because much of what is happening to you right now has more to do with who is coming after you than it does with you.
John 14:18-21 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. 21 Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.” NIV
Because I live, you will also live!
What does it mean to live as a result of Jesus being alive? This is not just finding life because we believe in Him. This is realizing that the very life of Jesus who is risen from the dead produces life within us! Because He lives we also live!
In April of 2000, there was a terrible car crash in Japan. Sadly, a man died in the accident. When the police came to examine the body, witnesses at the scene said they recognized the car and though the injuries disfigured the body, they also recognized the dead man. He was a 60-year-old local shipbuilder. This man’s family was contacted and a brother-in-law was able to come to the scene. "Yes," he said, "That’s him. That’s my brother-in-law." He took the tragic news back to the family. Calls were made. The family quickly gathered that very afternoon at the home of the widow. There they were immersed in mourning: weeping, embracing, sharing memories, making funeral plans the entire day until the front door opened and the man walked in, home from a hard day’s work wondering why all the relatives were at his house.
It was not a case of resurrection but misidentification. The man at the car crash was not the man they thought he was, so the family called the police and told them to start their identification process over, because the "dead man" had just walked into their living room.
It would have been interesting to have been in that living room to see the change that came over the family when they realized their loved one was not dead after all: from tears to smiles, from devastation to elation, from mourning to dancing. They must have felt like death had been defeated in their home.
Imagine what the disciples must have felt when they realized Jesus was alive. Because He lives they lived from an entirely different confidence of life. They had to be infused with a joy, a strength and life beyond belief.
An eternal perspective was awakened within them.
Because He lives, we live.
What is the life Jesus wants you to experience? I’m not talking about the kind of life you can find in this world. We can’t help but long for something more even if we’ve experienced everything this life has to offer.
Jim Carrey said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”
We all long for something more because we were born for something more than the life of this world.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 …He has planted eternity in the human heart… NLT
We were born for more than the pursuit of a moment. The best moment the world has to offer is still just a moment in comparison to eternity that your heart longs for.
Your eternal design leaves you in a state of futility until you embrace God’s eternal purposes for your life which are only discovered in Christ.
Because He lives, we live.
Easter brings us into a greater understanding of the pain of Friday and the silence of Saturday. Jesus tried to explain what we see so clearly, but they were processing pain and confusion not rehearsing what He’d said about life beyond death.
We may live in a fallen world, but we serve a Risen King!
Winston Churchill planned his own funeral, which took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral. He included many of the great hymns of the church and used the eloquent Anglican liturgy. At his direction, a bugler, positioned high in the dome of St. Paul’s, after the benediction intoned the haunting melody of Taps. The melancholy air gave the universal signal that Churchill’s day had come to an end. But as soon as Taps had ended, Churchill had instructed another bugler, placed on the other side of the dome, to play Reveille: It’s time to get up in the morning. That was Churchill’s testimony that the last note of his time on earth was not Taps, a final end, but Reveille, a new beginning.
There truly is a life Jesus wants us to explore that is a life beyond our temporal lives.
Because He lives – we can live.
We Bring GP2RL Action Point:
Pursue God’s presence in places of prayer this week asking for a deeper understanding of the life Jesus desires for you to live.
SPIRITUAL WELLNESS: BECAUSE HE LIVES
DISCUSSION GUIDE
Click here for a downloadable pdf file of this guide.
It is time for a spiritual wellness check. We’ve entered into a season where God seems to be stripping away many of our misguided pursuits pointing our attention to the things that really matter. When the sons and daughters of God possess a healthy perspective fruitfulness results and the world becomes a better place.
We bring God’s presence to real life in every realm of society and on every level of community.
God’s plan is for us to hear his voice together as a family. This is why we start each group with the first question:
DISCUSSION QUESTION:
1. Where are you reading in your Bible and what are you sensing from God?
John 14:18-21 I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them. NIV
DISCUSSION QUESTION:
2. Share your spiritual journey of how you came to an awareness that Jesus is truly alive.
The lives we live shouldn’t merely be the result of our believing in who Jesus is. This scripture says it is because he lives that we will also live. He is alive and it’s his life in us that brings us into the true meaning of our existence.
DISCUSSION QUESTION:
3. What do you think it means to live because he lives, or to have a life that actually results from the very life of Jesus, our Risen King?
Philippians 3:12 “…I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” NIV
God has a specific purpose in mind for your life. It takes daily devotion to be completely and totally available to His desires.
DISCUSSION QUESTION:
4. Take a few minutes together to discuss how often, when and where you plan to meet with God this week to walk out the Action Point.
We Bring GP2RL Action Point:
Pursue God’s presence in places of prayer this week asking for a deeper understanding of the life Jesus desires for you to live.