It has been about 10 days and any evidence of Easter has been cleared from store shelves. But if you have children at home, they are likely carefully managing the chocolate rabbits and chocolate eggs that they have been enjoying ever since.
Now, if you and I are honest, we’d have to admit that as we walk away from Easter that we are enjoy the chocolate as much as our kids are. One of the traditions at our house is one that I have carried over from my childhood when my sisters and I would make a nest for the Easter Rabbit to place the goodies into.
Later we found out it was my mother who placed the Easter delights in the nest! Anyway, I carried the tradition over to my own kids who enjoyed making those nests too. But this year one of them said, “Dad, aren’t we getting kind of old for this?” I guess so, but oh.... the chocolate! It’s hard to resist!
As good as this is, Easter chocolate is short - lived. Sometimes if we are not careful the real meaning of Easter can suffer the same fate. We can easily find ourselves slipping back into the routine of busyness again.
Routines of life take over, sidelining any faith we have until Easter the next year. But we can take the real story of Easter with us every day. You see, Easter is when God took the worst thing that could ever possibly happen, the murder of His Son on a cross - and use it to create salvation for the whole world, a template of new life.
Perhaps we have heard this before and wonder whether God is really in the business of going to the extreme of loving mistake - making people like us. Does He truly forgive and pardon like the Easter story claims?
Too often we see God as some harsh judge to be feared. We have misconceptions about Jesus the giver of grace, we hide because of the wrong we do. But God longs to shower us with forgiveness and a fresh start. 1 John 1:9 says, “But if we confess our sins, he will forgive us our sins, because we can trust God to do what is right. He will cleanse us from all the wrongs we have done.” And isn’t that what we all long for?
When Jesus died in our place that first Easter and then rose back to life, He was offering a template for us to experience new life to be opened not just once a year, but it is meant to be opened and carried with us every day. What God was offering us at Easter was a chance to change for the better, to be continually transformed into something brand new.
If you take a look around you, you may see marriages that are dying, relationships between parents and children that are dying, friendships are strained. But the supernatural power of Easter is greater.
The same power that raised Jesus to life at Easter is the same power that wants to breathe new life into those relationships ... into you. In Easter, there is hope for all of us. That God is present with us in life’s storms. Easter reminds us that, yes, God is close by and you can walk away from Easter with more than chocolate in your hands. You can walk away with God’s hand in yours. That’s the promise of Easter you can walk away with today, whoever you are!
This column is submitted by Tri-Community Baptist Church in Beiseker.
