What Easter Should Mean?

      Does Easter mean to you only the wearing of a new hat, a new frock and the studying of fashions as worn by others? Do you let it bring to your little ones only the rabbit's nest of colored eggs or the fluffs of yellow chicks? Does it strike no higher chord in your being than the fact that spring is at hand and you must have light and becoming apparel?

      Easter is more than all these. It is the force in nature that brings the leaf, the bud and at last the glowing blossom from the clod. It is the resurrection of the life of those things we call inanimate because they cannot talk to us; how much more than the springing into being of the good that may be dormant in our hearts?

      What the little ones should be told this Easter morning is that the life of the world itself is new; that the grave cannot hold within its confines the mighty spirit of growing things. So I beg of you to not dwell too largely upon the sadness of the cross and the crown of thorns, but rather upon the glorious truth that those were but small in comparison with the glory of Christ's rising. 

      If the remembrance of the freeing from the tomb means anything in teaching Christianity it means the beauty of the resurrection; It means that the very spirit of "Christ risen from the dead" is to be carried out in real life; that joy and fresh, glowing happiness are to be taught and believed in. Gloom has no place on Easter day. What is past is past; troubles that have come are gone; pain that has been suffered and cured is to be forgotten, and this is the meaning that Easter should bring into every mother's morning greeting to her little ones.

      "You were ill yesterday, but you are well today." You are to live as if the sun was newly born, the skies newly washed in their sunny blue, the stars but just freshly placed to shine to give you pleasure, the moon sailing like a beautiful round globe for your eyes to see. All these mean a keener enjoyment, a better understanding, and you will find response in each small body and loving heart of the practice be the teaching of the Golden Rule, not only today, but all the year. by Emma Irene McLagan, St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

A powerful worship song from the album "Glorious" by CFNI
Watch more Kari Jobe music videos at http://www.godtube.com/artist/kari-jobe

Citizens Of Heaven

       And when now the dignified forms of another world appeared before their raptured vision, when they beheld the pillars of the old covenant in conversation with Jesus-namely, the majestic lawgiver, Moses, and the mighty prophet, Elijah-must they not have felt already as the citizens of another and higher sphere, as members of that blessed assembly of the just who are gathered on the other side, at home with the Lord? In such company it is no wonder that Peter exclaimed in ecstacy: "It is good for us to be here." It seemed to him as if he was greeted with the salutation of the world to come: "Now, therefore, we are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God." Ephesians 2: 18-19 Charles Gerok, D. D. (Germany)