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The Empty Tombs of Easter

4/6/2015

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I was contemplating the tomb of Jesus this week and had the thought in a conversation that I have so many dark tombs in my own life that need emptying.  Have you thought about your own tombs lately?  This holy week is such a good time to think about what is dead in our lives and what needs resurrecting.

My own tombs are places for me that cannot be revived with clever thoughts, sweet sentiments, others’ insights or even my very best rational and willful efforts to transform.  They are dead, aching, rotting sources of sin—covered with shame and fear and degradation.  They are all the longings in my heart that drive me deeper into self.

Without Easter, I am left with those dead and rotting places in my soul, left in the darkness and left with a veil that has never been torn between me and the Holy of Holies.  Without Easter, I am left with only me and the resources I bring to this life.  Facing that reality leaves me hopeless, for my resources are like ashes. 

I am someone who has much joy, much happiness in my spirit, but I also have much fear.  I hate the uncertainty of life, I want things to be controlled, I want safety.  I literally ache for Eden and what was lost in it.  I sometimes can be so consumed by this loss and the fears that bloom in my life because of it that I can hardly breathe.   This feeling of loss of control can lead to a faithlessness that brings me to my knees in despair.

Then, as God has reminded every believer of His from the Old to the New Testament be they in forms of altars and signs and the Communion table—He begs us to remember Him.  Remember Him.  Remember His faithfulness, remember His power, remember His mercies and love, remember His cross, and especially, especially remember the empty tomb.  The power to raise Jesus from the dead is the very power He uses to redeem our deadness.

So what tombs have you been keeping darkened these days?  What in your spirit needs to be brought to life?  If you have never chosen to surrender your life to Jesus, I pray that you will.  For those of us already saved, what have you been holding back from Him that needs to be brought into the light and resurrected?

May the grave clothes and the stench of death we have been clinging to fall off this Easter season, and may the fragrance of our Living Lord, Jesus Christ, envelop us as He clothes us in His righteousness.  The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed. 




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Fruitfulness Amid Suffering

1/29/2015

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The second son he [Joseph] named Ephraim and said, “It is because God has made me fruitful in the land of my suffering.”  Gen. 41:52

I was sitting in a Beth Moore Bible study when God rattled me with this verse.  It has been inside of me before, but it hadn’t been in my soul lately.  Since then, it hasn’t really left.

I think why this struck me so powerfully is because of how painful suffering truly is.  The pain we encounter personally and through others contends against this verse’s truth, trying to tamp it out and swallow it whole.  We often wonder like David did in Psalm 13 if God has forgotten us because the hardship is so great.  We wonder how anyone can survive this world and its brokenness.

 When Jesus faced the darkest night of His soul, He humbly asked that it might pass but then went on to pray the most amazing, costly, holy prayer I have ever heard—“not My will, but Thine be done.”  (Luke 22:42)  In so doing, He showed us how much He trusted His Father’s faithfulness to carry Him through the gaping evil coming after Him.  In the midst of His trial, He opened Himself up in complete vulnerability to the capable hands of His Father.  

But during our suffering, we typically can be found in fetal positions trying desperately to banish any and every hurt from our lives.  It is very hard for us to be vulnerable and open to even God during these times.  The idea of letting Him work in our pain causes us to sweat our own drops of blood.

I have been in some rather wicked lands of suffering just like you have.  That is one thing that unites us all—we live together in this brokenness.  We all bear the burden of Adam and Eve’s taste of sin in the Garden.  Though God’s common grace upholds us all and reveals so much of His beauty still, we all share a common table of sin and its fallout—a world with sickness, death, and temptation. 

Nevertheless (such a faith-filled word), He has not left us at that table.  Redemption sprang forth right after that loss in our Garden.  As He tenderly clothed his wayward children, His restoration had begun.  And over time, He called out a people to show His grace and reveal His mercy and truth, lighting up the whole world with His witness through them.  As He promised to Abraham, the entire earth would be blessed because of the people coming through him (Gen. 12:3); God wanted to redeem not just the Israelites but all people from the very beginning.

Measure upon measure of redemption—the law, the covenants, nature itself with its cycle of  death and resurrection among myriad other graces of restoration— have come.  But, none compare to His Son.  Immanuel—God with us—Who came to be the Lamb for our Passover.  Now, those of us in Christ have been passed over; death can no longer hold us because it did not hold Him.  This is how much God can do through suffering—conquer sin, vanquish death—literally save… the… world.

In the end, we have to face whether we are willing to open ourselves up to our Father, just as Jesus did, to bear fruit in the midst of our own wanderings and devastated lands.  Are we willing to let everything be redeemed— or are there pockets in our spirits we are not willing to open up to His work?  Are we able to trust that His redemptive power is big enough for every evil—internal and external-- we encounter? 

As I have wrestled with this, I want to journey in a way that lets Him rain havoc in my darknesses—both the ones I harbor and the ones with which the Evil One attacks me.  May Yahweh God plow, till, and transform every darkness, planting seeds of hope, redemption, restoration, and peace where once there was stronghold, sin, attack, siege.  May we follow our example and Savior, Jesus— learning, yielding, and allowing Yahweh to bear in us the fragrant, costly fruit that can be reaped in the crucible of every trial. 

But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 5:10-11)

 

 

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    Amy Saylor Gerak-- Idea Wrestler, Mama, Musician, Wife, Friend, Daughter and Sister

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