Happy Easter! Put On Christ
Romans 13:10-14 Put On Christ
Love other people as well as you do yourself. You can’t go wrong when you love others. When you add up everything in the law code, the sum total is love.
11–14 But make sure that you don’t get so absorbed and exhausted in taking care of all your day-by-day obligations that you lose track of the time and doze off, oblivious to God. The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing! God is putting the finishing touches on the salvation work he began when we first believed. We can’t afford to waste a minute, must not squander these precious daylight hours in frivolity and indulgence, in sleeping around and dissipation, in bickering and grabbing everything in sight. Get out of bed and get dressed! Don’t loiter and linger, waiting until the very last minute. Dress yourselves in Christ, and be up and about!
It is almost Easter, and some say we are in the last minutes of our time, that Jesus will be coming on the clouds very soon. I don’t know, but I am sure we should be ready. Paul says, The night is about over, dawn is about to break. Be up and awake to what God is doing…We can’t afford to waste a minute, must not squander these precious daylight hours! … There is a sense of urgency that we must get hold of. It is about the coming of Christ, it is about the salvation of souls…it is the thing that can and will motivate us.
So let’s check into a state of well dressed urgency.
The beginning of transforming power is to PUT ON CHRIST. These words close the chapter and they are remembered by many because they were the words that brought the great Saint, Augustine, to Jesus. He tells the story in his Confessions. He was walking in the garden. His heart was in distress, because of his failure to live the good life. He kept exclaiming miserably, “How long? How long? Tomorrow and tomorrow—why not now? Why not this hour an end to my depravity?” Suddenly he heard a voice saying, “Take and read; take and read.” It sounded like a child’s voice; and he racked his mind to try to remember any child’s game in which these words occurred, but could think of none. He hurried back to the seat where his friend Alypius was sitting, for he had left there a volume of Paul’s writings. “I snatched it up and read silently the first passage my eyes fell upon: ‘Let us not walk in revelry or drunkenness, in immorality and in shamelessness, in contention and in strife. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, as a man puts on a garment, and stop living a life in which your first thought is to gratify the desires of Christless human nature.’ I neither wished nor needed to read further. With the end of that sentence, as though the light of assurance had poured into my heart, all the shades of doubt were scattered. I put my finger in the page and closed the book; I turned to Alypius with a calm countenance and told him.” (C. H. Dood’s translation.) God leaped out of His word and grasped on to Augustine changing him forever. It was Coleridge who said that he believed the Bible to be inspired because, as he puts it, “It finds me.” God’s word can always find the human heart.
Has His word found you?
So the question for us today is: “Are you putting on Christ”? Think of getting dressed yourself…you think about what you have to do and what you have and you carefully put your clothes on. Sometimes I come out and Gail will tell me something I have on does not fit, is wrinkled, or just plain isn’t appropriate. Putting on Jesus is similar, but so much more important. The Bible tells us He always fits well…His yoke is easy…He is always appropriate, He is always what we have to do…we do not have a mission, we are a mission…Jesus always looks good…sometimes we, as His children, brothers, and friends don’t look that good, but we can get dressed easily and promptly and be ready to face whatever comes our way… Dress yourselves in Christ, and be up and about!
I posted the following for Easter last year, but I believe it applies.
Revdocwelch