I read through the book of Acts. One of the things in there that struck me was how often Peter and Paul referred to Jesus' resurrection. They referred to it in a number of different circumstances:
-when they were seeking to encourage others, they referred to it as a source of hope for the future
-when they were seeking to prove that Jesus was the Messiah, they referred to it as a sign from God
-when they would raise people from the dead, they would point to it as the model and forerunner of what God wanted to do with all humanity
The resurrection... something that I don't think we reflect on theologically or practically these days. As in: what is the significance of the resurrection, and how should it be influencing our worship of God today?
Well, here are a few of my thoughts.
1. If the God we worship has the power to raise people from the dead, then we should be seeing him do the equivalent today. I think a literal application is more than appropriate here. After all, we shouldn't shrink back from the idea of someone being raised from death to life if we are ok believing in a God who created existence from nothing and that he raised Jesus from death to life.
But as strange as it sounds, I don't think this literal sense would be the most compelling application for today. I think that in our day, age, and culture, we would be so suspicious of a literal resurrection story that it would almost be meaningless. Sad, but perhaps true.
For our culture today, I think a more compelling resurrection application would be God raising people from being dead in their sin to alive in the life of his Son. Addicts, pedophiles, murderers, adulterers, cheaters, pornographers, the gluttonous, the greedy, and the immoral being someone absolutely and positively changed forever and ever--transformed into loving, humble, gentle, passionate followers of Christ. Those are the stories that would grip us and open up our eyes to the reality of Christ resurrection: that God now has the authority and ability to raise men and women from being dead in their sin to life in Christ.
We should be hearing stories like this all the time. We should be a part of stories like this all of the time. We should be experiencing stories like this in our lives on a regular basis: being taken from death to life. Perhaps not momentous, earth-shattering, miraculous, testimony-shaping stories all of the time... nevertheless: God's community should be riddled with resurrection stories large and small. If not, something is dangerously wrong.
2. If the God we worship has the power to raise people from the dead, then our corporate worship needs to reflect our awe at this authentic reality. The songs we sing, the sermons we preach, the environments we create, the transformational moments that we move people into--all of them, all of them, all of them needs to have a little taste of this awe of the One who has the power to raise the dead to life. Of course, this awe can be expressed in a million different ways, ranging the spectrum from quiet reverence to ear-splitting anthems, according to how God is moving his churches to communicate his life-giving message. Regardless of the method, if our corporate worship does not open up the non-churched, unbelieving, unrepentant, deadened eyes of those who do not yet know the resurrecting power of our living God, then what is the point of our gatherings?
Perhaps you might insert the word "edification" here, as though a gathering that didn't help the non-churched see the resurrecting power of God in Jesus may be of some sort of value to those already in the flock. In my opinion, nothing could be further from the truth. This is where the unredeemed and the redeemed come together in solidarity: we all need to be reminded of the resurrected reality of life in Jesus. We all need to be pointed back to the source of our life, Jesus Christ. We all need to be overtaken once again by the presence of the Spirit of the resurrected Jesus who is not dead but alive and working and moving and loving and forgiving and saving and redeeming and freeing and pursuing.
This power works in the same way on those inside and outside of the church. It is the great litmus test, if you will, of whether or not our corporate worship is actually doing anything or worth anything at all: the unbelieving will come to believe in the resurrected living Jesus, AND the believing will believe again as if for the very first time as they are freed from their sin and transformed into the image of the resurrected Son. BOTH of these things must be happening for a local church to be doing its job by the power of the resurrected Son.
