Don’t stop now! Don’t think that Easter is over, now that you too realize the tomb is empty and Christ is alive and risen! As miraculous and powerful as this news is, it is just the beginning for all of us. When Mary Magdalene ran with the news of the day, and Jesus’ followers had the opportunity to absorb what had just happened, the power that God unleashed on Easter morning — and its influence upon the world —was just getting started.

Don’t stop with a gospel story you may know well enough to finish by memory. Everyone who has met the living Christ, by faith, has something with which to run. What began that first Easter with Mary, and the others, continues. The Jesus the world put down, God has raised up to lead us to live out a value system that is still foreign to many, and often endangered in a world of “might makes right”; where the rich get richer, where the weakest and least among us so often suffer under the domination of others, and true peace is given little chance.

There is so much more of Easter to be recognized and offered — more good news values that we can live out enthusiastically; more of God’s Kingdom character that we can show others on a daily basis. There’s so much more of Easter that we have yet to share with wholehearted joy; so much more of the sustaining grace of God and lasting peace of Christ that we can give, if we are among those who choose to follow him today.

When Matthew was getting set to close out his own gospel record, telling us that the women who arrived first, hurried to tell others what they had discovered, Matthew adds this wonderful descriptor — they left the empty tomb “afraid yet filled with joy”. No doubt in our lives, even as we live out the beginnings of an Easter faith, there will be time enough for both. But please don’t let this stop you for living it fully right now, for Christ’s sake.

Enthusiastically in Christ,

Pastor Craig Rumble