TRUE MEANING OF EASTER

 

Robert Dean Steel

Pastor of Cornerstone Community Church

 

     We just celebrated Easter.  To me this is the most wonderful time of the year, and this article is designed to help you understand why.  I grew up in a small town in Alberta.  I went to church until I was thirteen.  My Mom gave me the choice of whether or not I had to go to church which of course being thirteen I decided not to go.  Now I grew up in the time of hippies and the counter revolution.  Growing in my small town in Southern Alberta you were either a hippy or a cowboy.  I chose to be a hippy.  I had the long hair, granny glasses, hippy ideas, and morality.  I dabbled in socialism, cults, occult, activism, eastern mysticism, politics, martial arts and a number of other things.  You do this when you do not have a moral compass.  I wanted to change the world because I didn’t know how to change myself.  That is what people do when they don’t know how or want to change themselves.  They focus on some large issue such as climate change, righting the wrongs of the past, trying to rewrite history, dabble in political correctness, become social re-constructionists, and various other large issues.  I know because I been there, done that and got the t shirt.   

     When I was seventeen two young friends of mine invited me to a young people’s convention in Montana telling me that I was going to meet girls.  Being seventeen and running on hormones I went fully expecting to meet Miss Right.  It was Thanksgiving weekend and on the Friday night I went to a service was nothing like what I grew up in.  My church was a liturgical church.  It featured scripted prayers and an outline which was the same every week.  To an active child it was boring and confusing.  Just before I stopped going to the church my mom convinced our priest to employ me as an altar boy which ended abruptly when I hit my priest in the back of the head.  By the way I heard words coming out his mouth that should have never been said or heard in church. 

     The young people in that service were Jesus people and they really knew how to worship God and experience their faith.  Later that night I asked a young person I was staying with what the service was all about and he said he didn’t know because he was forced to go by his parents The following morning I went to the morning rally in the park of that community and the speaker had long hair and beard so we already had a connection because he looked like me.  It was like he was reading my mail.  He talked about how many of us had tried so many different things to fill our life which I had done.  Then he said, “Why don’t you try Jesus?  It made sense and then he instructed to find a place of prayer and ask Jesus into our heart.  By a tree in the center of that park not knowing how to pray I simply said, “Jesus if you are real would you come into my heart, and He did.”

     When the first Easter came around after my conversion. I fully understood that Easter was about Jesus allowing His body to be broken and His blood to be shed so I could be healed and forgiven.  He died on the cross on Good Friday and rose again on Easter Sunday so all mankind had a way back to God.

I Googled what Easter means and this is what they said.  “Easter is the Christian festival that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his promise of eternal life. Christians celebrate Easter to remember the great sacrifice that Jesus made.”  I like that.  Easter is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes Him should not perish but have eternal life.”  I love Easter and the impact it has on me.  It is a time to refocus, reset and be renewed.  It is a time to be thankful and grateful that God loved us to much to l eave us the way we are.  Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection gives us eternal and abundant life and the beautiful thing it is offered any time and place.  My prayer is that you will be wise like I was on that Thanksgiving morning and accept the offer.