Editor:  This week is Easter Week, also called Passion Week and Holy Week.  During each day this week, Every Day with God will focus on some of the events involving Jesus on the different days of this week, which ultimately led to His death and resurrection. 

Read Matthew 28:1-10

Perhaps, the three most hopeless letters in the alphabet are, “DNR.”  They stand for “Do not resuscitate.”  Those letters are placed on a wristband of fallen soldiers on the battlefield.  They’re used in hospital rooms. 

Panic, fear, and uncertainty because of the coronavirus produced a sense of hopelessness in our world over the last 24 months. It’s not only in the time of a pandemic that the fear of death disturbs us, however. Author Max Lucado wrote, “Death. The bully on the block of life. He… badgers you… he taunts you…: you, too, will die someday.”

Resurrection Sunday reminds us that Christ has conquered death, that He has opened the way for us to experience new life here and now, and that a glorious eternity awaits us. 

In fact, because of the resurrection of Jesus, we can experience hope in several ways:

1.  We can know the hope of complete forgiveness.

Almost everyone would say, “I have a hard forgiving myself for something I did… or I have a hard forgiving someone else.”  Sometimes it’s both!  The resurrection of Christ guarantees that His death accomplished all that the Father required for our forgiveness.

Because Jesus conquered death through His resurrection, God the Father offers us the hope of complete forgiveness.  The Apostle Peter wrote: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead”(1 Peter 1:3)

•   We can live with purpose and direction today.

When we trust what Christ accomplished for us, God’s indwelling Spirit changes who we are at the core of our being. We become a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).  We can be the people we were created to be, the people Christ died for us to become.

Jesus promises His people fullness of life.  “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10).  It’s so easy to get caught up in the cares and concerns of life that we forget what Jesus promised us. This fulness of life is the birthright of those who know salvation through faith in Christ.

The Hope of Easter likewise should impact how we live. Paul encourages us, “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

• We can also have the confidence of eternal life.

Christians will enjoy the resurrected life just like Christ did, with glorified bodies raised in power (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). We suffer in this life with pain and illnesses.  But in the life to come, you and I will not suffer.  Jesus just said, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who live” (John 11:25-26). Those who are in Christ know that death is not the end for us.

This is our great hope. This is what sustains us in times of suffering and doubt. The Hope of Easter frees us to live life because we no longer need be haunted by that cosmic bully – death.

Because of the resurrection of Christ, there’s coming a day when God will “Wipe away all tears from our eyes, and there’ll be no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain, for things will have passed away” (Revelation 21:4). 

That gives us hope!

Bob Fetterhoff