It is exciting, thrilling, and marvelous to know that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead; but this truth is just a beginning. That HE LIVES has profound implications in our lives. That HE LIVES means that He is here to be in our lives. His testimony is present tense and not just past tense.

Jesus Christ is present to help His people live victoriously in world systems that tend to defeat. His Life in our lives means that we are enabled to do what we could not do in and of ourselves. We are enabled to love, enabled to live unselfishly and sacrificially, enabled to let God be God in our lives, enabled to “overcome the world” through the faith that Jesus has instilled in us (See I John 5:1-6).

Jesus’ resurrection calls us to experience the life of God right now, today, and to walk forward knowing that our lives and times are in the hands of One who speaks and even death bows. He speaks and we are enabled to rise above the current arrangements and powers, and to live in a new order of things. It is a way of being where the love of God permeates everything and where defeat is a stranger because defeat, like death, must bow when the power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead speaks.

The Resurrection calls us to be who we are. And who are we? We are people who take seriously the claims of Jesus and who live faithfully to those claims. Jesus has changed all life for us so much so that we are never again the same. We don’t want to be the same. We don’t want to go back. We are filled with the life of God and the future awaits us.