Tuesday, April 15

Peter 3:18

Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

Devotion

The central message of the resurrection story summarized so succinctly in this verse is that Christ was put to death in the flesh, once for all of us, the worthy and unworthy, in order to bring God’s message of forgiveness through the spirit.

How do we even begin to understand what this means for us? When I reflect on the rest of the Bible to this point, it seems to me that God has been trying to send us a clear message about His presence in our lives, His love for us, and His charge that we will love our neighbor, and yet we struggle to understand this simple message and translate it into action. Jesus has been sent to deliver God’s message and to teach by example. God asks Jesus to make this final sacrifice to demonstrate for all of us, the “righteous and the unrighteous,” His love for us, and forgiveness for our sins. In the final act of Jesus’s life God asks that we re-experience Christ’s suffering during Holy Week. It seems to me that our task during Holy Week is to live through Jesus’s experiences as he suffers on the cross for our sins, and to understand on a personal level what this means for us. I believe that God wants me to make this personal. So my job is to ask: what do I do with this message? How will my life be different having experienced the resurrection?

Prayer

Dear Lord help us to prepare for the message of Easter; to be ready to receive the Good News of Jesus Christ, that God forgives us for our sins.

ScriptureRelease video putting the text to picture and words

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeNaJn7G7nU

Carol Kaffenberger