Every year, Easter arrives and with it comes another opportunity. Not simply to observe a date on the Christian calendar, but to rethink and recalibrate. To return to the weight and the wonder of what was accomplished through the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. The mission of redemption was finished at the cross. The resurrection confirmed it. And every year we are given a fresh occasion to ask ourselves whether we are living in the full reality of what that means.

The tendency in the church is to do with Easter what religion does with most things of power. We strip it of its daily demand and turn it into ceremony. We celebrate it once, observe the liturgy, sing the hymns, and return to ordinary life as though the resurrection were a season rather than a permanent condition. But the resurrection of Christ was not a historical event to be marked annually. It was the opening of a dimension of life that every believer is meant to inhabit every day.

The Daily Reality of Death, Burial, Resurrection, and Ascension

Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:31, 'I die daily.' He wrote those words roughly twenty years before he could say in Galatians 2:20, 'I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.' That gap is instructive. The process Paul described was not instantaneous. It was a sustained, daily dying to self that accumulated into the kind of transformation he could look back on and name. What he experienced was not a doctrine he held but a reality he walked through.

There are voices in the church that will tell you Christ has done it all and you don't need to go through anything. That is half true and therefore dangerous. Christ paid the price once and for all. His sacrifice is complete and sufficient. But he also said in Luke 9:23, 'If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.' The cross he spoke of was not a decorative symbol. It is the place where you die. If there is a cross, there is a death. If there is a death, there is a burial. If there is a burial, there is the possibility of resurrection. And if there is resurrection, there is ascension.

Every believer sits somewhere in that sequence. Some are just beginning to feel the weight of the cross. Others are in the anguish of crucifixion, suspended between the life they knew and the life they've been called to. Some are in what can only be described as the belly of death, waiting for the power of the Spirit to awaken something that feels long gone. None of these positions are failures. They are stages. The journey has both a direction and a destination, and that destination is the city of God.