The Final Lessons: A Holy Week PlanShembull

Resurrection

Today we celebrate that Jesus didn’t just die on the cross—He rose from the dead! What was meant to punish and silence (Jesus’ death on the cross) became our freedom because the grave could not withhold Him.

Read John 20:1-29.

He is alive. He is not dead. Does anyone else find this to be insane? Just a day ago he was dead, wrapped in burial clothes and shut up in a tomb.

This is where Christianity shifts from being some good ideas from a good teacher—to life changing faith. If Jesus’s life had been about Him teaching, loving people, and healing the sick, He would’ve simply been remembered for those things. That didn’t happen. The whole world has changed because He didn’t stay dead. What He said and what prophets predicted all was and is true! Jesus rising from the dead eradicates the curse of sin on us!

It seems like foolishness, right? If we rest in our own abilities, we can’t possibly comprehend this. Paul encourages us in 1 Corinthians 2:5, “that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”

In human insight, Jesus dying on the cross, rising from the dead, and all of humanity being redeemed from the weight of sin, well, it is insanity. But God. (I love those two words.) Our God wasn’t just any man that died on a cross, He was Jesus—fully God and man. If He was just a man then his death on the cross would’ve simply been the loss of a dynamic teacher and advocate for the poor and sick.

He wasn’t only fully man; He was fully God too—God’s own son!

This is what makes Easter mean more than what we’ve culturally made it. Jesus died for you, but He also rose for you. He didn’t just pay the penalty for our sins; He came to bring us new life!

This is what Christ has done if we choose to believe in the Cross and that empty grave: “If anyone is in Christ, he is an new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)