“For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:16-19, ESV).
When I was a teenager, I had doubts about God. So I started looking into other religions and found the Baha’i Faith appealing because it basically holds that all religions are true and that all paths of faith lead to heaven. However, when I read the great Christian author C.S. Lewis, he corrected my loosey-goosey thinking. He wrote that all of Christianity rests on one question: Was there a resurrection or not?
If we cannot answer yes to this, then it doesn’t matter whether there was a literal Noah’s ark, a six-day creation period, or an actual Garden of Eden. If Christ’s resurrection didn’t take place, none of those things would matter at all. But if there was a resurrection, then everything else became possible: Lazarus was raised from the dead, people were healed, sins were removed, and heaven is a reality. That is resurrection power, and it gives us something Paul calls our “blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13).
The more I read as a teenager, the more I came to a firm belief about the witnesses who saw Jesus after his resurrection. “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:6). I began to see the resurrection as not just an additional event, but the culmination and consummation of the work of Jesus’s death for us. The “blessed hope” Paul spoke about was planted in me, and it became a source of life each day.
Friend, if we don’t claim Jesus’s resurrection power in our everyday life, we won’t experience what his resurrection won for us.