He came to give us life, and have life to the fullest.
Happy (Good) Friday, friends. It is a good Friday, isn't it? Although I can't help but wonder if on the very first Good Friday, I'm sure no one believed it was good.
I'm sure the people who believed in Jesus, just to watch Him die felt devastated, hopeless and consumed in despair.
We know it's Good Friday because we know what's coming on Sunday-- they didn't.
As a kid, my favorite holiday was Christmas, but as I got older, and I grew more in my faith, I grew to love Easter even more.
What does Easter mean to you?
When did it become more than a celebration of a man rising from the dead? Sometimes I think we need a further explanation of Easter than just the definition, "our sins are forgiven and we can live with Jesus forever." Do we really understand the weight of what that means?
We've never witnessed God's wrath, we can't imagine what life is like outside of earth, and our sinful nature itself minimizes how bad and how serious our sins are.
It's all very hard to fully understand, and I know I may never fully understand it until I get to heaven. But for me, I'll never forget the moment when I realized that Jesus didn't only die for my future, He died for my today.
If you're like me and think very deeply about things, maybe you can relate to this thought. I remember thinking on a walk one day that if Jesus died only so I could go to heaven someday, then what was the point of living right now? What's my hope right now?
I thought, if I'm meant to live in heaven with my Creator forever, what am I doing here?
Not only that, but I remember feeling bad that the hope of eternity didn't always feel like enough to get me through the trials and suffering I am going through on earth right now.
No one knows how many years they'll live on earth, but as a 26 year old woman, sometimes it felt like I would suffer on earth for what felt like forever before eternity got here. That when I realized (with the help of my favorite devotional "New Morning Mercies" by Paul David Tripp) that Jesus didn't just die for my future, He died to give me hope right now.
Jesus died so that even after He left, He would always be with us. That means so much more than just never being alone. It means that the same Holy Spirit that made Jesus full, complete, not lacking anything, giving Him the power to resist temptation, also lives in us!
I don't know about you, but that's hope that can get me through anything. All the things this world says we need in order to be enough and complete, we don't need any of them when we accept Jesus into our hearts. He alone forever fills that hole of something missing in your heart.
His Spirit makes us complete.
We can also have hope that what we suffer through now, God will use for our good and His glory. It makes trials a little less burdensome when I know everything is under the Lord's feet.
The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus reminds me that God really does have a perfect plan with perfect correlating timing as well. And if you're someone who often thinks beyond, He gives us assuring hope for that too; when we leave earth, there's a forever we can't even imagine.
On another note, the gospel of John tells us that Jesus came so we could have life, and not just life, but life to the fullest (John 10:10).
To me, that shows me that even in a broken, confusing, and discouraging world, we can still live with joy. We may just have to look a little harder to see it, and I thank the Lord for that!
How will you live your own unique life to the fullest? How will you thank Jesus for coming to earth-- living and dying-- so we can live a full life?
