A Prayer For The Blessing of Easter

 

Everlasting God, whose power can make the blind to see, the deaf to hear and the dead to be raised from the grave, this week the words, “He is risen!  He is risen indeed!” still ring in our ears.  May this greeting of hope fill our hearts and minds not only on Easter Sunday but throughout the coming week.  The message of Easter should fuel us not only for one day or even for one week but until that day when we stand in the presence of Him whose resurrection we celebrate.  Grant, O Father, that we may not only rejoice in our Lord’s resurrection but may we look forward to that day when our bodies too, shall be resurrected.  Let us declare, as did the early church, “We believe in the resurrection of the body.”

 

Yes, Lord, we truly believe that when we die we go to the present heaven, but we also believe that our bodies will some day participate in our salvation and that they will be reunited with our souls.  The Apostle Paul joins our resurrection with Christ’s resurrection for he wrote, “But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those that are asleep.”  Paul compares our resurrection to that of a seed that has been placed in the ground and which in time brings forth a plant.  He writes, “That which is sown is but a bare grain…but God gives it a body just as he wished, and to each of the seeds a body of its own.”   In time the seed breaks through the earth and becomes a plant, with the same DNA as the grain which was sowed.  

 

Father, we believe in the resurrection of our body because we believe that Christ physically rose from the grave and that His resurrection was the first fruits of our resurrection.  His resurrection started a chain reaction which will take place when He  returns to establish His kingdom on  the new earth.

 

Lord Jesus, we confess that Christ’s resurrection is a mystery, but  so is our own.   We realize that many are quick to ask, “How can the body which undergoes decomposition and decay, and even  cremation, be reunited with our souls?”  One much brighter than I has written, “Our dead bodies return to the dust and that dust is blown into the river and that puddle of water tumbles into the sea, that ebbs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still God knows in what cabinet every seed-pearl lies, in what part of the world every grain of every person’s dust is hidden; and at the end time he will whisper, he will hiss, he will beckon for the  bodies of the saints and in the twinkling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, will be set down at the right hand of God in a glorious resurrection.”

 

Father, we already witness the fading of the mind and the deterioration  of the body.  Each day brings us closer to the last enemy.  Grant that the glorious message of Easter will be the fuel that propels us ever forward to the fulfillment of our faith.    

 

Thank You Jesus.  Amen