The Three Empty Things We Celebrate Today

Joyous Resurrection Sunday to you!

God downloaded some thoughts to me to share with you concerning this day. This is not a lone event. It is a culmination of many events.
But of three in particular.

God is a Triune God- Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
He created a triune man: Spirit,soul and body.
Jesus ministered for 3 years. (Word, Spirit, Deed.)
When God created man He said "it is finished"

by the fact that He rested on the 7th day.
When Jesus completed His assignment, "He said It is Finished" and He now sits at the right hand of God.

When we celebrate Resurrection Sunday, called Easter by many, we need to see the Triune God and the Triune Events that are tied together. We celebrate the empty tomb, but that is only 1/3 of the picture. The whole picture is this:

We also celebrate an empty manager. He came as a baby, but He grew to Manhood in the grace, nurture and admonition of the Lord. He grew so you can grow in the same things.

We celebrate an empty Cross. Because although He was and is our sacrificial Lamb, he did not remain on the cross. Every prophecy was fulfilled and HE met every requirement to be the Perfect Lamb that takes away the sins of the world. But He is no longer on the cross! He nailed our every weakness, transgression and sin to that cross. But He tells us to pick up our cross, that we may nail our "self" to it, and die that He may live in and through us.

And we celebrate an empty tomb.

As my spiritual son Peter in Pakistan so aptly put to me in his Resurrection greeting:

"There is no other tomb in this world which is empty but one and it's Christ's."

Amen! We celebrate an empty tomb. We bury our old man and we rise in newness of life. We are severed from our past and loosed into our future in Christ.

We see that the natural events, the circumstances of life and death, are all subject to this man called Jesus. We see that even when hopes were dashed, and fear set in, it did not and can not stop the fulfillment of God's plans and purposes for us. We can hinder or help the flow of God in our lives, but ultimately God is bigger than and greater than any pitfall we hit, any error we make, any lie of the enemy. We didn't "help God" to get ourselves saved, and we sure can't help Him to keep us, or to perfect us.

What we can do is yield to Him, to speed up the process, or rebel and slow it down. But if we are truly His, then He is already at work in us, doing and willing of His Good Pleasure FOR us. It is His good pleasure to see you healed, to see you whole, to see you blessed, to see you prosper; Spirit and soul and body! It IS HIS good pleasure to give to you the keys to the Kingdom, to teach you what they are and how to use them. That is His good pleasure to you.

So, this Sunday, recognize completely and fully that we are celebrating an empty manger, an empty cross AND an empty grave and receive the gift of each into your own life. Hallelujah! Glory to God in the highest!

Amen.