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New Year’s Resurrection : Part 3 : Personal Connections

(Author’s Note: This post is the third in a set of three considering the importance of Christ’s resurrection in the Christian’s life. The first and second posts post can be found here and here…)

PERSONAL CONNECTIONS

To make the subject of resurrection and it’s importance in the Christian’s life more personal, I should share some of my own struggles with those same fears of calling and legacy, meaning and purpose.
Immediately following college graduation in 2007, I began work as a graphic designer. My job was a “cushy” one in the sense that it offered great benefits, good pay, and promised to be everything a new graduate could want.
Around this same time, I learned of John Piper’s book, Don’t Waste Your Life. Now, I must first admit that I have NOT read the book in its entirety…but I’ve read enough of it to know the book’s central plea to forgo the pursuit of success as the world sees it and, instead, focus on finding your purpose and success by serving in ways that glorify God. Living a God-glorifying life of purpose certainly isn’t something to scoff about, but there are two major hiccups with predominantly be a Christian striving to “not waste your life.”

First, the appeal to “not waste your life” requires it be possible that you can wast your life, even if you have Christ in it.

Secondly, that the Christian life is more about what you do than who you are.

These two lies dominate much of Christian teaching today, especially teaching directed toward young twenty-somethings. In a stage of life marked by discovery, these early years of independence are often under girded by pressure to “finds one’s calling.” The task of finding a calling is wrapped in language of vocation and suggests that what is we do with our time and how we make a living somehow contributes to our value and worth, or lack thereof.

For me, the pressure to discover my “calling” led me down a path of fear— fear that no matter what I did, I was going to end up feeling like I wasted my life. That no matter what job I took, it wouldn’t be big enough, important enough, Kingdom-changing enough to not be considered a waste. That no matter where or how I lived it wouldn’t be enough.

Add to the struggle of trying to discern my calling I was getting really stressed out about the possibility of dying before I had any chance to do anything worthwhile. Even if I did discern my calling, I feared that people would consider my life a waste if I hadn’t fully accomplished that calling before I kicked the can, so to speak.

It’s in this place of fear that Christ’s resurrections speaks loud and clear of freedom and joy. 

You see, if I believe that I have eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ, I have to believe that I never, ever run out of time. That I have no “deadline” at which point I no longer have a chance to do what it is God has called me to do. The truth is, that our life on earth is just the beginning of a thousand times a thousand years of my life…Yes, we are mortal sinners in flesh, but through faith in Jesus Christ alone, we are truly eternal.

While this mindset could give way to an attitude of laziness, but I think that risk is well worth the gain of complete freedom in the knowledge that our life does not have value because of what we do or don’t do. Our personal worth—and the worth of our life—is not determined by whether or not we accurately discerned God’s calling for our lives and successfully carried it out.

No, the truth of the matter is that Christ’s resurrection allows every believer the freedom and joy to live, knowing that they are enough, by themselves, just as they are.

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New Year’s Resurecction : Part 2 : Personal Reflections

(Author’s Note: This post is the second in a set of three considering the importance of Christ’s resurrection in the Christian’s life. The first post in the series can be found here…)

I’ve been struck by the resurrection of Christ, and its importance in our daily life, for quite some time. When we say we believe in the resurrection of Christ and that, through Him, we are granted eternal life, what we are really saying is, that somehow or another, those who have faith in Jesus are immortal. Wow! That’s pretty powerful!
But most of our current understandings of death make it anything but something to be anticipated with joy. Instead, Western thought by-and-large deals with death as something “tragic” or, at the very least, to be delayed as much as possible.
In Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, Eugene Peterson summarizes our present obsession with viewing death as either tragic or untimely. He explains:

The view of death as tragic is a legacy of the Greeks. The Greeks wrote with elegance of tragic deaths—lives pursued with the best of intentions but then enmeshed in circumstances that brought a fatal flaw into play and, indifferent to heroism or hope, cancelled the intentions….

Procrastinated death is a legacy of modern medicine. In a culture where life is reduced to heartbeat and brainwave, death can never be accepted as having meaning beyond itself…

It’s this negative view of death that can underline most, if not all, of the other core fears we face. For instance, isn’t the fear of death the underlying fear when we ask ourselves “Am I doing what I am supposed to be doing with my life?” or “What kind of legacy do I want to leave?” and even “How will history remember me?”

A proper, Christ-centered response to this question requires every believer to remember, as Peterson points out, that death, particularly Christ’s death, is ‘for us and our salvation’. In other words, if we truly, truly believed that, through Jesus, we have eternal life, these questions no longer have any place because they are all temporal questions, questions stuck in our view of our lives as something with a beginning…and an end. These questions emphasize an understanding of death as something that is final, as “the worse case scenario” for any situation.

Truly believing in the eternal life promised through faith in Jesus reminds me where I really need to focus is trusting and obeying Jesus in a moment by moment sort of way…because, somehow, through faith in Jesus Christ, there will always be more moments.
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New Year’s Resurrection : Part 1 : Theological Considerations

(Author’s Note: This post is the first in a set of three considering the importance of Christ’s resurrection in the Christian’s life. I intended to post this series at the beginning of the new year (to explain the first paragraph), but hemmed and hawed over it for much too long…)

We are just now finishing up the first week of a new year. 2012 done, packed away. 2013 here, ready to unfold. Like so many others, I’m prone to think about what the past year brought to pass. I think about the  tears and the laughter, the heartache and the healing. The mistakes and second chances; the misgivings and the promises.

No matter how each of those equations turned out (did I have more tears than laughter, more heartache than healing?), the fact remains that the days are past—gone, finished. Past. Aside from the memories, all that remains at the end of a year is the promise of future days—the hope that no matter how good (or bad) last year was, this year can be—will be—better.

For Christians, its customary to celebrate this same hope in the future on Easter Sunday, a day signified by Christ’s resurrection from the dead. Through Christ’s resurrection, Christians believe, death has been eternally conquered and a new age (not just a new year) has dawned, and eternal life is available to all who believe. So while New Year’s offers rekindled hope for the next 365 days, Christ risen from the dead offers hope for eternity.

While on this journey of seeking out the abundant life Christ promises us in John 10:10, I’ve become increasingly convinced that how we understand Christ’s resurrection has absolutely real implications for how we live. So what does it mean for us to live in this hope on a daily basis? To actually experience the promise of new life and live out the tenant of our faith that promises us eternal life?

THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
In my own experience, Christ’s resurrection from the dead is preached but not emphasized, especially when compared to the attention paid to Christ’s death on the cross. I suppose this unbalance makes sense, considering Christ’s death is a capstone to thousands of years of Jewish history (we know how things will turn out) while his resurrection is the first chapter in a future still unfolding (we don’t yet know how things will turn out).

Christ’s death is the culmination of Jewish history and by offering himself as a sacrifice for all mankind, Jesus participates in the God-ordained system (based on animal sacrifice) that allows us, His creation, to return to Him. In this way, Christ’s death provides the final chapter in the story of God’s work through His chosen people, the Israelites. His death answers the all-time question of how a sinful man can ever enter into right relationship with a perfect God. Christ’s death answers the question of redemption once and for all.

But while this final absolution of sin answers the most pressing question of our past, does not yet give us a promise for our future.

Consider for a moment how the meaning of the Gospel would dramatically shift if Christ hadn’t risen from the dead. Sure, we are able to have a hope in eternal life because we’ve now entered into right relationship with Him, but it is this hope, this assurance of days to come that drives the Christian narrative and makes it distinct from all other faith narratives.

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The Abundant Life

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the Parable of the Good Shepherd wherein he promises his disciples that He has come to give “abundant” life to all those who believe (John 10:10 NAS). In Matthew, Jesus is heard qualifying the abundant life as one filled with rest, commanding his followers to “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:29-30, NIV)

I believe in Jesus and I believe these words are His. But truth be told, I’m often persuaded to discount the reality of their implications. All too often, the unending ordinariness of my life breeds a gnawing sense of discontent and a desire for more. More joy. More peace. More beauty. More abundance.

This Beautiful Life is a personal project—a vision and calling, really—to consider what it means to live abundantly, to live beautifully. Not in some far-off future, but in this here and now, tangibly in this world’s reality. It’s about learning to embrace the journey while living in the destination, sensing that somewhere in-between is that “more joy, more peace, and more satisfaction” I so crave.

Welcome to the destination. Welcome to this beautiful life.