Good morning…
I noticed Easter power rising in me twelve hours early. Let me explain just what I mean.
At noon on Saturday, I sat on our couch folding load after load of warm, clean laundry. I had enjoyed a conversation with each of our two college-aged daughters home for the holiday weekend and our seventeen-year-old son who added items to our growing grocery list before getting ready for his afternoon lacrosse game. I had sorted through our family’s no-longer-needed boots to take to the game as a donation, a creative entrance fee into the stadium stands of our opponents. I had waited home as my husband ran with our dog and returned, our daughter ran on her own and returned, and our husband met for coffee with a former student and returned. I shared breakfast with our older daughter before she went to meet our oldest, out-of-college son at a local coffee shop for one-on-one conversation. I cleared our breakfast dishes and, along with the growing collection of dirty cups, bowls, and plates, I transferred them from sink to dishwasher. Our youngest daughter had asked my husband out to breakfast, so, after she woke around 11:15 am, the two of them walked out the door, leaving me with the quiet company of our two dogs.
What does my story have to do with Easter power rising up early?
Well, first. Let’s step back for a moment to recall a recent post about Betty Skinner’s button story. My 93-year-old friend was spiraling down beneath self-defeating layers of negativity when she considered sewing a button onto her husband’s shirt. The Holy Spirit whispered from within, and for the first time Betty heard God personally from beneath her hardened, self-protective layers. If Betty could focus on loving the LORD with all her heart and mind, soul and strength, then God’s love could fill her first before overflowing. She was empowered to sew on the button in love rather than stitching it on with duty, frustration, and penned up resentment.
I totally relate to Betty. For years now I have completed my long “wife-and-mother to-do list” with more passive-aggressive anger and less of God’s abundant love. When Betty told me at first meeting, “Sue, the big ‘I’ must die,” I think she was encouraging me to die, layer by layer, to my many hardened habits of self-centered negativity.
God’s early Easter gift to me was a quiet realization that a few of my outdated layers were free-falling from me to the foot of Christ’s cross. With joy, I greeted my husband and our children as they came and went, came back and went again, leaving me at peace in our humble home. With love, I cleared the dishes and tucked them in the dishwasher. With patience, I washed and folded the clothes of our young adults and their attentive father. With self-control, I refrained from pushing my way into personal breakfast invitations. With gentle kindness, I felt genuine gratitude rising up in me to I watch our maturing family bond in a variety of cool ways.
Could it be any clearer? Our old way of life was nailed to the cross with Christ, a decisive end to that sin-miserable life—no longer at sin’s every beck and call! What we believe is this: If we get included in Christ’s sin-conquering death, we also get included in his life-saving resurrection. We know that when Jesus was raised from the dead it was a signal of the end of death-as-the-end. Never again will death have the last word. When Jesus died, he took sin down with him, but alive he brings God down to us. From now on, think of it this way: Sin speaks a dead language that means nothing to you; God speaks your mother tongue, and you hang on every word. You are dead to sin and alive to God. That’s what Jesus did.
That means you must not give sin a vote in the way you conduct your lives. Don’t give it the time of day. Don’t even run little errands that are connected with that old way of life. Throw yourselves wholeheartedly and full-time—remember, you’ve been raised from the dead!—into God’s way of doing things. Sin can’t tell you how to live. After all, you’re not living under that old tyranny any longer. You’re living in the freedom of God (Romans 6:10-14, MSG).
…Sue…
P.S. As the Spirit leads you, touch six times on the “Previous” link at the top of this post to review God’s Spirit rising up among us this Holy Week, resurrecting us from the darkness of death into the everyday fruits of God’s living Spirit. But the fruit of the Spirit [the result of His presence within us] is love [unselfish concern for others], joy, [inner] peace, patience [not the ability to wait, but how we act while waiting], kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law (Galatians 5:22-23, AMP).
