Thought for the Week - 4/4/2021

Dear Friends, 

Happy Easter! As we celebrate Easter Sunday, I’m reminded that Easter doesn’t finish on Easter Day but that we enter into the Season of Easter, the fifty days until Pentecost Sunday. We might also want to reflect though that Easter isn’t just about one day or even one season, but all times and seasons are Easter days, because we are ‘Easter People’. The phrase Easter People was brought to my attention a few years back when a President of the Baptist Union took as their theme, ‘Easter People Living in a Good Friday World’. It is a powerful image which helps us to understand what our role as believers in Jesus Christ is to be in the world. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers that they should be like a light that is set on a hill, or as salt of the earth. We’re also called to be yeast in a dough mixture and good seed amongst weeds. The message then is plain and simple, as disciples of Jesus we are meant to influence the society around us with kingdom values – God’s kingdom values. And how do we do this? Well, we know that the world around us is corrupted by sin and that we ourselves are constantly being tempted to follow the world’s ways, ways we might think easier than the path of discipleship, but that ultimately lead to destruction and separation from God. The apostle Paul writing to the Galatians says that ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires’ (Galatians 5:24). In other words we no longer live for ourselves, but we live only for Jesus Christ, and Paul continues, ‘Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit’ (25). So it is about how we live out our lives in the power of the Holy Spirit, recognising the culture we inhabit, but not being drawn into it so that it engulfs us and changes us to its ways, but rather that we stand out, like light, salt, yeast and good seed, because we follow the ways of Jesus, and that is what it means to be ‘Easter People Living in a Good Friday World’. 

Grace and peace,

Neil

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