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4/11/21 - 2nd Sunday of Easter - Acts 26:19-29 - Doubt Is Rolled Away!

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The Easter Season

After forty days of repentance and prayer, the Church bursts forth in jubilant praise at the Resurrection of our Lord. The Bride of Christ welcomes her Bridegroom back from the dead. Easter is as the pinnacle of the Church Year, the oldest festival and season celebrated by the worshipping Church. For a full week-of-weeks (49 days) the Church celebrates the resurrection of Christ on the Sundays of Easter which culminate on the 50th day, Pentecost.

The Sunday - Jesus’ Resurrection Rolls Away Doubt!

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First Lesson: Acts 26:19-29
Paul looks like such a loser. He is in chains. His prospects of accomplishing anything in this appearance before the high and mighty are slim and none. Nevertheless the reality is altogether other than appearances. Paul is the one who has everything in the message he has brought; the high and mighty have nothing. In fact what they appear to have gets in the way of what they could have, peace with God through the light made known in the resurrection of Christ. But how sad! They think themselves too clever, too powerful, to bow before the Crucified. His peace and his peace ambassador make no sense to them, and they reject both. May none of us make that tragic and damning mistake! Peace is God’s to give in the work and message of Paul; warfare against God is however still in the power of man. Your peace is not in your outward beauty or strength or possessions or health or anything else; They are indeed as gifts of God, but not substitutes for peace with God.

Second Lesson: 1 Corinthians 15:12-22
People think that the cemetery is peaceful. Apart from Christ’s resurrection the cemetery is anything but peaceful. It is the testimony of our utter defeat in the war against God that sums up life apart from Christ. Ah, but with the message of Christ in the gospel lesson, the cemetery can indeed be peaceful. Those who died in Christ already have the enjoyment in heaven of that peace which passes all understanding. No resurrection of Christ means no peace with God in this life and no gospel or blessed resurrection for us in the life to come. Ah, but Christ is risen! Peace is ours through all eternity!


Gospel: John 20:19-31
Jesus’ Easter greeting is much more than just the Hebrew Hello! (Shalom!). He does not merely wish what the word expresses; he gives it. And then he gives it again. And then he gives it to them to give to the world. What an amazing thing! He is so anxious that they get peace which they should then give. What unfit vessels they were when he called them. How unfit they still are. But that’s just as well! All glory goes to Christ and the power he plants in the Word. He comes to us in Easter, with his peace. He’s so anxious that we get it and get it yet again in the face of all that is in us which contradicts his peace: the warfare of our nature against his Word, the successes of the devil and the world in their assaults upon the soul, and on and on. Peace with God and peace with Jesus himself was the last thing that the disciples might have expected to hear and receive from Jesus that day. But now, the very first thing the disciples hear from the mouth of the risen Savior is: Peace! That’s even his message to Thomas and now with an exclamation point behind it to us who have not seen but by the power of the Word have nevertheless believed.

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