Easter 6 Resurrection and Reality--- Checking Out Our World View

[HKHaugan]

How we perceive and process what happens around us from our immediate contacts to the breadth of international affairs is our personal worldview. What we believe determines our worldview, which in turn determines our attitude and behavior.

The Resurrection of Jesus challenges every mind and heart to reconsider each and every concept in our worldview from His spiritual perspective in five ways:

First, His Resurrection reorients our mind to think spiritually. John tells us that the Scriptures were given that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ and by believing have life in His Name. The Bible is our thinking guide. We live in a physical body bearing physical, mental and emotional needs. From birth to death they are constantly demanding satisfaction. Before Jesus, the mind had no sure way of thinking otherwise. What Jesus’ Resurrection did, literally, was to raise and secure the mind as a spiritual thinking instrument with Him at the center. The mind was to be a spiritual servant of God’s mind, to think, analyze, evaluate, choose and decide the way God thinks.

Second, His Resurrection raised and secured the heart as the center of faith. Jesus’ thoughts, concepts, the way He processed experience, were founded in what He believed and who He trusted in His heart. While the mind gathers the information it is the heart in which choice is made. It is the seat of attitude. The question of faith follows, “Is your heart in it?”

Third, His Resurrection raised and secured the spiritual importance of the physical body as the means to share what the mind and heart process. Jesus used His body to be a witness to what the Spirit of God could and should be. He exhibited the grace and love of His Father through teaching, prayer, miracles and final sacrifice.

Fourth, His Resurrection exposed the identity and defeat of our spiritual enemy, the devil and his power of sin. We know the source of sin within, evil without and the means to rise above them---repentance and the security of Jesus’ forgiveness.

Fifth, His Resurrection enabled and secured out restoration to God personally through spiritual rebirth. To be born from above is to be lifted above. To be spiritually reborn is to lift the mind, the heart and the body above the world. To be a reborn child of God is to see the world and ourselves from a new vantage point like when we are in an airplane above looking down. In the Resurrection we take off, rise above the world to see it as it really is spiritually and then land back in it to be the Lord’s servant spiritually within it. That is our secured worldview in a nutshell.