The Best Way to Celebrate Easter

Over the past few weeks, I have been busy getting ready for our church's Easter Sunday. Our day included a church wide breakfast and special AM service. There were specials, videos, a Scripture reading, singing and a message. I was honored to be a part of that service. Everything about it seemed to shout “He is risen!” I was both challenged and encouraged by the many people who served, ministered and attended Sunday.  

As I spent a great deal of time getting ready for that special service, I was often challenged by one thought. Is God really honored if we make a big deal out of one service, but hardly dedicate any other day to Him the rest of the year? I am not against spending time making Easter a service to remember, I am already thinking of way to make next year even better, but how big of a deal is the resurrection to me today? tomorrow?

I am challenged to live in such a way that I make a big deal out of Easter every day of my life. There are so many distractions that the world offers me as a way to escape that duty, and honestly I fail often. There are many unsaved people who will even attend the obligatory Easter service, and I am grateful they come, the challenge is do I come because I am obligated or because I love being here? How grateful am I that He rose again? Grateful enough to live every day for His glory? Grateful enough to make much of Christ and little of me?

This year let’s commit to making much of Easter every day! John 10:10 “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”

How Good Are Your Instincts?

Each month as the board meets here at church, we have been reading and discussing chapters from various books in an effort to help us grow and be more effective leaders. The book we are presently going through is “the Conviction to Lead” by Al Mohler.

Here is one of the quotes that stood out to me this month:

“The Christian leader must have mental reflexes that correspond to biblical truth. When something happens or an issue arises, the leader's mind must activate the right intellectual reflex. Once that reflex is engaged, the process of thought is already far down the road. If the reflex is wrong, the leader is in danger-and so are all those he leads.” (page 34, second paragraph)

How good are our instincts? How quickly can we assess a situation, and naturally reflex into a biblical response? We understand that it takes time to learn a new physical skill, we even continue to work on some of them for most of our lives, but do we realize that we need to be working on our spirituals skills just as regularly?  

This has major implications to every type of believer. If we have not trained ourselves to reflex the right spiritual response, then in a heated and tense situation we have almost no ability to respond biblically. We cannot assume we will just say the right thing, or do the right thing- we all know that we are more likely to do the wrong thing or say the wrong thing. How can we prepare our reflexes to respond rightly? An athlete repeats the same movement over and over so that during competition he doesn't have to think about the movement, it just happens. We need to repeat spiritual truth over and over, meditate, study, listen, read, and engage other godly people in conversation. The more we know of the Word of God, and the better we understand it, the quicker and godlier our responses will be.

We often joke that no one gets to Mountain Home, AR by accident. We live in an off the path place. A serious truth though is that no one becomes godly by accident either. We must choose to go the hard route, to learn the hard lessons, but the result is worth it!