For This Reason

Key Takeaways

• The Power of God is Personal

  • True spiritual power comes from knowing God, not just knowing about God

  • The Holy Spirit introduces us into relationship with God
    

• The Power of God is Historical

  • The resurrection is a verifiable historical event, not just a spiritual metaphor

  • Four evidences for the resurrection:

    • The empty tomb

    • Hundreds of eyewitnesses

    • The dramatic transformation of the disciples

    • The movement began in Jerusalem where it could be easily disproven
      

• The Power of God is Residential

  • The Church is where God's presence and power now dwell

  • The same power that raised Jesus lives in believers through the Holy Spirit

  • This power can break through the "immovable slabs" in our lives

Study Questions

• Question 1

  John asks whether the power of the resurrection is actually connected to your life. How would you honestly assess whether God's resurrection power is actively working in your daily experience?

• Question 2

  Scripture presents four historical evidences for the resurrection: the empty tomb, eyewitnesses, transformed disciples, and the movement beginning in Jerusalem. Which of these do you find most compelling and why?

• Question 3

  What are the immovable slabs in your life (patterns, fears, doubts, or sins) that you need the resurrection power of God to split open and remove?

• Question 4

  If true spiritual power comes from relationship with God rather than religious performance, how does this challenge the way you approach your faith practices?

• Question 5

  John describes how sin ruptured our relationship with God, each other, ourselves, and creation. In which of these four areas do you most need to experience God's restoring power?

• Question 6

  Jesus warned that many will say they did things in his name, but he will reply that he never knew them. How can you be certain that your relationship with God is mutual and genuine?

Seeking God’s Face Devotional

This year, we’ll be using the devotional “Seeking God’s Face” for our personal daily discipleship, including during our sermon series in Ephesians. Join us in our daily walk and worship!

From Seeking God’s Face Online:

Like Christmas, the fullness of the resurrection requires more than a day to unpack. The Easter season is a fifty-day celebration that ends on Pentecost Sunday (the Greek word pentekoste means “fiftieth”). The Easter season is a time to let the implications of the resurrection sink in deeper, inviting us to realign our worldview and conform our living to the reality that we have been raised with Christ to new life.

Easter is full of joy and the laughter of love—the grave is empty, love has won, Christ is risen! Give yourself over to the experience of that joy—take in the absolute wonder of God’s purposeful plan of salvation. Yet, since resurrection was without precedent, Easter can also be a time of doubt, and so in this season we share with Thomas, and others, the confusion and disbelief about the resurrection. Yet even in doubt or betrayal, Christ our good shepherd restores, guides, and leads us.

The Easter season includes another important but often neglected celebration—Ascension. Ascension is, without question, the wallflower Christian holiday, unnoticed and rarely celebrated. So why not change that and take in the culmination of Jesus’ mission and the clearest unfolding of God’s purposes—a human now is part of the Trinity, the sweet guarantee of our home with God.

After marking Jesus’ ascension into heaven, the church begins a time of concerted prayer, waiting for the gift of God’s Spirit. Ascension and Pentecost turn our attention to the church as the sign of Christ’s continuing presence, the resurrection community as a living witness to the risen, now ascended, Lord. The Easter season concludes on Pentecost Sunday, opening a new chapter in the life and ministry of Jesus, still loving and serving the world, teaching and healing, but now through his people, the church.

This Week’s Liturgy

Call to worship

Leader: Christ is risen!

All: The Lord is risen indeed!

Leader: Glory and honor, dominion and power, be to our God forever and ever!

All: Christ is risen! Alleluia!

Confession of FAITH

Nicene Creed

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty,
‍ ‍Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages,
Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father,
through whom all things were made; who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven,
and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man; and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
and suffered and was buried; and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father; and will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead;
of whose kingdom there will be no end.

And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified,
who spoke through the prophets. In one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We confess one Baptism
for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the age to come.

Amen.

Meditation

“Seven Stanzas at Easter” by John Updike

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as his body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse,
the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths
And fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
It was as his flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
The same valved heart
That—pierced—died, withered, paused,
And then regathered out of enduring might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted
In the faded credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that
In the slow grinding of time will eclipse
For each of us the wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta,
Vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light,
Robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience,
Our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened
in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.

This Week’s Playlist

Looking Ahead

Join us next week as we continue in Ephesians 2:1-10.