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Bible Studies for Life Lesson for April 4: When Easter Becomes Just Another Holiday
A. Shane Nixon, Director of Church and Community Relations, Baptist Retirement Homes
March 23, 2010
2 MIN READ TIME

Bible Studies for Life Lesson for April 4: When Easter Becomes Just Another Holiday

Bible Studies for Life Lesson for April 4: When Easter Becomes Just Another Holiday
A. Shane Nixon, Director of Church and Community Relations, Baptist Retirement Homes
March 23, 2010

Focal Passages: 1
Corinthians 15:1-4,12-19, 54b-58


If you think about it, really
think about it, there should NEVER be a danger of Easter “becoming just another
holiday.” How could it? Even non-believers find the story to be unbelievable.

Christians celebrate Easter
as the pinnacle of all that faith is. In verses 12-19 of the focal passage,
Paul pushes the Corinthians on this very point. If Easter isn’t special then
our faith, as Paul puts it, is “in vain.”

Last year my children joined
the swim team at the pool where we are members. Neither of my kids had ever had
any formal swim training beyond the introductory stuff they do at the YMCA,
which we took them to as infants.

They learned how to swim,
but that is it, they just learned how to swim. They did not receive instruction
on correct procedure for certain strokes or anything like that.

Early on, after one of the
first practices, my daughter reported that the swim coach told the group they
needed to go back and “emphasize” the importance of the strokes.

She told my daughter and her
teammates that in order to avoid being disqualified, they really needed to know
the difference between (for example) the breast stroke and the butterfly. Her coach said, “Competitive swimming
cannot be about JUST getting from one end of the pool to the other fast.”

Likewise, Easter cannot be
about JUST a nice sunrise service or fancy worship or, worse yet, the family
table for a big lunch.

The New Revised Standard
version of the Bible translates verse 15 this way:
We are even found to be
misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that He raised Christ — whom
He did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.

You may have to read that a
couple of times, but when it sinks in, it really sinks in. To make Easter just
another holiday is to misrepresent God.

Easter is not just a
holiday, something that rolls around the calendar and stops on a Sunday once a
year. Easter is what we believe, it is everything we believe. By claiming the
name Christian, Easter is who we are!