Christ’s Resurrection … and Ours

Here is one of the great blessings of Christianity: “newness of life” (Romans 6:4). A Christian is a person who has been changed; made new; “born again” the Bible calls it. He has been given a new heart of love toward God and man. Her eyes have been opened to God, and to His Son, and to His truth. His mind has been changed about sin, and about righteousness, and about the remedy for our fallenness. Her life has taken on a whole new dimension, and direction, and set of desires. He or she has become a new person, spiritually and morally! Christianity brings “newness of life”!

And all of this newness ties back to that first Easter morning! We who are united to Jesus have “newness of life” because Jesus Himself has “newness of life”! “As Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Our new life is bound up in His new life! Our resurrection (spiritually and morally, in the new birth) is tied to His resurrection. He is our trailblazer … such that, because He died for our sins, we die to them, too; and such that, just as He rose from the dead, “we too might walk in newness of life” (emphasis mine).

Do you want to be a new person – spiritually and morally – today?  Such a change comes to those who are united to Christ!  "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).  May that happen for some of us, even today!

Or, if you have been made new in Christ, do you want to "walk", all the more, in that “newness of life”? Well then the resurrection of Jesus is good news! For, if you belong to Him; if you are united to Him, then you are new, and you may walk in that newness, too (Romans 6:4). You don’t have to keep sinning in the same old ways, with no recourse! 

But then let me ask you, also: Do you want, at the end of this age, to have a new body and to walk with new physical life in a new and perfected planet earth? This, too, is tied back to that first Easter morning! Christ is called “the first fruits” of the bodily resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20). And if there is a first fruits, then there will also be other fruits as well, reaped from the earth where they were once buried like seeds. So that, first of all, Christ is risen, bodily, from the dead … and then His people are also given new, bodily, life as well!

And all of this makes Easter, and the fact of Christ’s resurrection, very personal, does it not? Or resurrection – both morally and spiritually (in the new birth), and physically (when Christ comes again) – are inextricably tied to the empty tomb, and to the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter Sunday morning! And that is reason, among others, to celebrate this Easter Sunday (and every Sunday) the risen Savior!