You are God’s building. Because of God’s grace to me, I have laid the foundation like an expert builder. Now others are building on it. But whoever is building on this foundation must be very careful. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one we already have—Jesus Christ. [1 Corinthians 15: 9b-11 (NLT)]
Two members of our small group attended Easter service at a Christian church in another town. Imagine their shock when the pastor began his sermon by saying he didn’t believe in the resurrection. Thinking his statement had been made for shock value, they patiently waited for him to make a case for Christ and defend the truth of Easter. Unfortunately, he only offered a feel good message about new beginnings. I was reminded of their story when another pastor mentioned his experience when a youth pastor. After one of the teens complained that he talked too much about Jesus, he was called into the senior pastor’s office and told that Jesus just should be a “side dish” in the church youth group!
As for the resurrection—can it be Christianity without the risen Christ? Without Easter, we just have a man who said some beautiful and wise things and was killed for his words. While He may have had a great message, he was either delusional or a liar. In the early church, an Apostle was someone who had personally known Jesus both before that dark Friday and after that glorious Sunday. Without the resurrection, Peter and the rest of the Apostles were equally delusional or liars who perpetrated a fraud with their claims of an empty tomb and their witness to the risen Christ. Without the resurrected Christ, everything that happened after the crucifixion and much of what happened before is suspect. When we read Acts, we find that the essence of every sermon preached is the resurrected Christ. Without the resurrection, how can we believe Jesus was God in flesh? Without the risen Christ how can we believe in the Holy Trinity, the resurrection of the dead, or the truth of the New Testament?
There are plenty of authors who make excellent cases for the resurrection and I’ll leave the Christian apologetics to them. Believing in the resurrection doesn’t mean we totally understand it, can explain how it happened, or know exactly what the body of the risen Christ was like but we don’t need those answers to believe in the risen Christ. Jesus is the cornerstone of Christianity and, if Jesus is still dead, so is our religion
As for a “side dish Jesus:” side dishes are optional and you can take as much or as little as you want or skip them altogether. They’re like the Brussels sprouts or green beans at Thanksgiving dinner. Jesus, however, is not a side dish; along with God the Father and the Holy Spirit, He’s the main (and only) course! Rather than a turkey, our Triune God is more like one of those Turduckens: three meats (turkey, duck, and chicken) rolled into one. When you slice through it, you get all three—each one equally delicious and equally essential. If we are going to call ourselves Christians, it seems that both the resurrection and Jesus are fundamental to our faith.
I don’t know about that doubting pastor from Easter but I do know a little about that teen who thought there was too much Jesus in her youth group. Her youth pastor refused to back down and, rather than put Jesus in a side dish, He kept the risen Christ front and center. The teen who objected to the main dish Jesus? Shortly after that meeting, she accepted Jesus—not as an optional add-on but as her Lord and Savior!
Scripture often referred to Jesus as the cornerstone: the foundation upon which the church is built. The cornerstone of a building gives it a reliable and firm foundation; it is indispensable and prominent. May the risen Christ remain indispensable and prominent in our witness as we build His church!
The Lord does whatever pleases him throughout all heaven and earth, and on the seas and in their depths. [Psalm 135:6 (NLT)]
Yesterday I wrote about Albert Einstein. The physicist was famous for his ability to replace complex scientific ideas with real-life scenarios called gedankenexperiments (thought experiments). For example, imagine that you have an identical twin. Immediately following birth, he is launched into space and travels through the universe nearly at the speed of light. When he returns, he’d be in his teens while you’d be planning your retirement. Time moved slower for your twin because the closer to the speed of light something travels the slower time moves for it. Never having studied physics (and not caring to start now), I think his scenario demonstrates the theory of relativity!
In Pieces of Eight, columnist Sydney Harris tells the story of a dinner party at which an elderly Albert Einstein was seated next to an eighteen-year-old girl. Unaware of his identity, she asked the famed professor what he did for a living. “I devote myself to the study of physics,” he responded. Shocked that he still studied physics at his age, she told him she’d finished her physics studies the previous year! Without a doubt, Albert Einstein knew more about physics than anyone else of his time and yet he continued to study physics until his death. Harris’s explanation is that the physicist recognized that what he didn’t know far outweighed all that he did.
Back in January, many people made resolutions to read the Bible. If you pledged to read the entire Bible this year, good for you. Like many who make that resolution, however, you may already have fallen behind schedule and are tempted to quit. Having tried to do it in a year, I feel your pain. After finally getting through Leviticus, Jeremiah nearly did me in with his doom and gloom. It’s not just the reading that takes time; it’s the understanding, the digesting, of what we’ve read that can slow us down. After all, there’s no point of reading it if we don’t understand it! I could read the words in a college astrophysics text but, if I didn’t understand them, I’d know no more about astrophysics on the last page than I did on the first. This year, I’m reading the Bible in chronological order and, in spite of my goal to do it in a year, it will probably take longer. For those who are discouraged or soon will be, I thought I’d rerun a previous devotion for you.
On the days his restaurant is closed, a French chef friend works in his kitchen to make gallons of demi-glace. Hundreds of pounds of veal bones get roasted along with carrots, celery and onions. After deglazing the roasting pans with wine, he adds tomato paste, seasonings and water and simmers the concoction. At some point, he strains out the solids and continues simmering (and straining) the hot broth. More than twenty-four hours later, his stock has a rich brown color and a gelatinous consistency. After all of that simmering, less than one gallon of thick sauce remains for every ten gallons of liquid he added. Chef packages and sells this richly concentrated sauce to other restaurants that use it as the “mother sauce” or backbone of their own sauces.
Devotions of the Heart 