#9 - Exalting Easter (Part 1) - Making the Most of Easter

Barbara Rainey's Top 10 Interviews

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Exalting Easter (Part 1) - Making the Most of Easter
Exalting Easter (Part 2) - Remembering the Resurrection

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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Making the Most of Easter

Guest: Barbara Rainey

From the series: Ideas for Celebrating Easter (Day 1 of 5)

Air date: March 27, 2017

Bob: We are in the middle of the Lenten season; and yet, many Christians don’t know what Lent is all about. Here’s Barbara Rainey.

Barbara: Lent is to Easter what Advent is to Christmas—does that make sense? Lent is to Easter what Advent is to Christmas. Both of them are times of preparing to celebrate God’s intervention on our behalf—the coming of Christ at Christmas and then the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ at Easter. Both of them are very important holidays, but Easter is the most important.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, March 27th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. We’ll hear today from Barbara Rainey about what we can do, as moms and dads, to draw more attention to the most important day of the year—Resurrection Day. Stay with us.

1:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Monday edition. If any of our listeners are not interested in getting fired up about Easter and the resurrection of Jesus, they ought to go ahead and tune the—turn their channel somewhere else right now.

Dennis: I’m telling you—this is the greatest season of all. I love Christmas—I think Christmas is fantastic. Obviously, Easter would not be possible had not Christmas come first. But this [Easter] is the holiday on which all of the Christian faith really pivots.

Bob: Your wife is joining us this week.

Barbara, I used to think that Thanksgiving was your favorite holiday. Didn’t it used to be your favorite holiday?

Barbara: It did—used to be my favorite holiday.

Bob: But something has happened.

Barbara: It’s not anymore.

Bob: Why?

Barbara: I still love Thanksgiving / Thanksgiving is great fun. But I absolutely love Easter; because I have come to understand it in a way that I didn’t, years ago—what it’s all about and how pivotal it is, as Dennis has just said.

2:00

Without Easter, nothing else would matter. We wouldn’t have Thanksgiving; we wouldn’t have Christmas; we wouldn’t have anything because we would still be in our sin. We would have no hope; and we wouldn’t understand forgiveness; and we wouldn’t understand love. It’s everything. So, to me—because I’ve come to understand that Easter is all about everything that God intended—to me, we need to do a better job of celebrating it.

Bob: It’s interesting—if you read I Corinthians 15, which is that resurrection chapter—

Barbara: Right.

Dennis: Did you look over my shoulder?

Bob: I did not! [Laughter]

Paul begins that chapter by saying, “This is of first importance.” He said, “I delivered to you what is of first importance.” Then he goes on and he says it’s the gospel / the good news. You can summarize the gospel into: Jesus died, He was buried, and He was resurrected—that’s at the heart of our message. He goes on to say [paraphrased], “You take that away, we got nothing.”

Barbara: Right; he said, “If Christ wasn’t raised, our faith is in vain.”

3:00

Dennis: Yes; that’s what I was reading—I Corinthians 15, verse 17-19. If you haven’t read it—to your children; to one another, as husband and wife; or to a friend—you just ought to remind somebody of this truth / it says, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile,”—empty—

Barbara: —pointless—

Dennis: —“and you are still in your sins,”—which means you’re still guilty, as charged, before Almighty God and you are falling under the wrath of God. Then it goes on to say, “Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished,”—they don’t have eternal life / they died—they went to hell! And verse 19, “If in this life only, we have hope in Christ, we of all people are most to be pitied.”

What’s Paul saying there?—if Christ did not defeat death / if the resurrection is not a reality, then we are without hope.

4:00

Bob: We are basing everything on a lie.

Dennis: I mentioned it earlier—all of Christianity pivots on the reality and the historical fact that Jesus Christ lived, died, rose again, and is seated at the right hand of God.

Bob: Barbara, you had the opportunity, a number of years ago, to share with our listeners at an event. You were sharing about your growing burden and passion for the celebration of Easter. It’s interesting to listen back to this because you can see how it’s starting to formulate and take shape in your own thinking. Again, this is from a few years back, as Barbara is connecting with a group of our listeners about why Easter is so important.

[Recorded Message]

Barbara: About a year ago, Dennis and I were listening to a sermon by Tim Keller.

5:00

During the sermon, he quoted this stanza of a hymn; and I had never heard it before. The stanza of the hymn [Thou Art Coming to a King] goes like this—that I memorized:

Thou art coming to a King,

Large petitions with thee bring.

For His grace and power are such

None can ever ask too much.

I just thought: “Wow! I am coming to the King every time I pray.” So often, I come with little things—selfish things: “Lord, help me find a parking place,”—just trivial, dumb stuff; right? But when I heard that that day, I thought: “I’m coming to the King. God wants me to come before Him with prayers that are worthy of Him.” It’s not that He doesn’t want us to pray about small things—I still pray about small things—but it lifted my eyes to the magnitude of who He is and w...