We had a fabulous Easter Fun Day at Goldthorpe Railway Embankment and the Salvation Army, under gloriously blue skies and temperatures that felt more like summer than April! Our Easter Trail got people looking for different coloured objects and doing a variety of activities including,

1. planting seeds as a reminder of hope
2. writing messages of love on hearts to hang in the Embankment
3. making daffodil mosaics to remind us that God takes our broken lives and makes something beautiful from them
4. making willow crowns to remind us we are loved and valued by God
5. decorating wooden birds and joining paper chains to remind us that Jesus died to bring us together and gives us peace

We also made an Easter garden and did a variety of crafts inside the Salvation Army building.

Here are some photos from the day.

A big THANK YOU to all who helped, including Lesley and Sadie from Gone Wild Forest School, Becky from the Salvation Army Divisional HQ and Nikki Hickling from JJ’s Chippy who fed us all!

Death-and-resurrection is the package God gave us as the pathway to life; it’s impossible to talk about Easter without mentioning both Good Friday and the empty tomb on Easter Sunday. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the foundation stone of Christianity (see 1 Cor 15), and yet the resurrection is more than a historical fact on which to base our lives; it is the pathway to living a new life, for we too now are guaranteed resurrection because of Christ’s resurrection (see Rom 6:4, Rom 8:11).

Christ’s resurrection has profound implications for our own lives right now:

‘Because You’re risen, I can rise.
Because You’re living, I’m alive,
Because Your cross is powerful,
Because You rose invincible,
I can get up off the floor.’ (‘Resurrection Day’, Rend Collective)

Since Jesus is alive and death has been defeated, we can know forgiveness of sins and redemption; we can know eternal life which begins now thanks to our reconciliation with God. We know that with God all things are possible (Matt 19:27) and so we can live with hope and the security of a future with Him.

Paul talks about God’s Spirit living in us, giving life to our mortal bodies, bringing us alive to Him (Rom 8:11) and about us reigning in life. (Rom 5:17) This happens as we focus on Jesus Christ (Heb 12:2, Col 3:1-2) and put on the armour of God (Eph 6:10-18), not forsaking fellowship with other believers. (Heb 10:24-25) We don’t simply have a great future after death (see 1 Thess 4), wonderful though this news is, but we know the resurrection life starts now. We too have a resurrection story because of Christ’s resurrection story:

‘One word, one touch, one encounter with the King
And my life has never been the same.
You alone get the glory in my resurrection story.
One cross, three days, then You rolled the stone away,
Called my name, now I’m running out the grave.

You alone get the glory in my resurrection story.’ (‘Resurrection Story’, Phil Wickham)

The resurrection of Jesus has profound implications for all of us – it shows us that His sacrificial death was accepted by God, that our sins can be forgiven and that we can have eternal life.

Phil Wickham captures these truths in his song ‘Resurrection Story’ (listen here)

‘One word, one touch, one encounter with the King
And my life has never been the same.
You alone get the glory in my resurrection story.
One cross, three days, then You rolled the stone away,
Called my name, now I’m running out the grave.
You alone get the glory in my resurrection story.’ (Phil Wickham, ‘Resurrection Story’)

One of the things I find so encouraging in the Easter story is how God fulfilled His word through it. Just as with the Christmas story, we see Scripture fulfilled in the events at Easter time: Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey on Palm Sunday (Zech 9:9), Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for money (Zech 11:12-13), the scattering of the disciples (Zech 13:7), the fact that not a single bone of Jesus’s body was broken (Ps 34:20). Two of the seven ‘words of Jesus’ uttered on the cross refer directly to Scripture (Matt 27:46, quoting Ps 22:1 and Luke 23:46, quoting Ps 31:5). Even as He hung on the cross in agony, Jesus’s mind was so saturated in Scripture that His last words reflected His life’s focus.

I find the quotation from Ps 22;1 especially poignant. It is often called the cry of dereliction (‘My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’) Yet as with so many psalms, the prophetic element means it does not remain in despair. This psalm, which also describes the crucifixion in vivid terms (Ps 22:12-18), ends with the powerful declaration, ‘Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim HIs righteousness, declaring “He has done it!”‘ (Ps 22:30-31)

We are part of that future generation foretold by David who can declare with confidence on this Easter Sunday ‘He has done it!’ Jesus has died for our sins and been raised to life; the shame and pain of the cross replaced by the exultant joy of the resurrection. God has done all He promised to do, and therefore we have hope because Jesus is alive forever more.

Easter is a vivid reminder that despair and defeat do not have the last word. Jesus’s cry of dereliction on the cross ends with the continuing declaration that the work of salvation is finished. He has done it! Because He lives, we can face tomorrow. Because He lives, all fear is gone. Because we know He holds the future, we can live with confidence and hope.

May we live with Scripture firmly embedded into our lives so we can be equipped to keep on proclaiming that there’s nothing left for us to do to be saved except to believe in our resurrected Saviour. He has risen; He is alive!

Our thanks to all who came and to all who helped at our Easter coffee morning. In addition to home baking from Stacey, Julie, Bev, Beckie and Janet, we had a table top sale and tombola to raise funds for the Parent & Toddler Summer Trip to York Maze. The 53 people who attended raised a whopping £222! – thank you very much indeed.

We also gave out Easter leaflets and creme eggs:

And we took silly photos of us as Easter bunnies…