Hello & welcome to Faith Lutheran Church!
At Easter we celebrate that main event and the foundation of our Christian faith: the bodily resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. He who was crucified, dead and buried rose gloriously from the dead that first Easter Sunday morning. Without Jesus’ resurrection, without Easter, there would be no Christian faith. The blessed Apostle, St. Paul, writes: And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! …If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable because that would mean Jesus was just an ordinary man who died an ordinary death. Our hope, our trust, our confidence would be in a meaningless death, one that would not give us any blessing or benefit in the least. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, that would mean that we would not have the forgiveness of sins, that heaven would be shut and eternal damnation in hell would be awaiting us. If we trusted in Jesus for forgiveness of sin, life and salvation and He could not give them to us, our faith, our trust, would be worthless. We would indeed be the most pitiable—putting our trust and confidence in a dead man, living our lives and forgoing some of the pleasures the rest of the people of the world enjoy, completely fooled. But, the apostle continues, now Christ is risen from the dead! Since Jesus did rise from the dead, being raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, it means He did pay the price for our sins, that God’s wrath over our sins has been stilled, that our sins are forgiven, that heaven is opened to us; in short it means that our faith is not futile, is not empty. This is our Easter faith and life: I know my Redeemer, Jesus Christ, lives.
Happy Easter,
Pastor Grabenhofer
PICTURED ABOVE: Pastor Grabenhofer in the pulpit at Faith Lutheran Church.