Should there be special "Easter sermon" or business as usual?
If a church is preaching through a book of the bible, say Acts, and Easter comes up, should the pastor stop his sermon series due to the "holiday" and all the visitors and do a special sermon about the resurrection and what it did for us? Or should he just continue with business as usual?
__________________ Erick Bohndorf PCA, KS http://qayaqtraveler.blogspot.com/ Jeremiah 23:16,17, "Thus says the Lord of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord. 17They say continually to those who despise the word of the Lord, It shall be well with you; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, No disaster shall come upon you."
I'm preaching through Romans on Lord's Day mornings, and so this Lord's Day morning I'll be in Romans as usual.
If Christ was raised for our justification, how can something as essential as the resurrection only get face time once a year?
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Ryan Barnhart - Pastor of OGBC
Husband to a beautiful wife, Father to two beautiful girls "But by the grace of God I am what I am." I Corinthians 15:10
"I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms. And in the Great Day my Resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer." - John Paton
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The resurrection gets a lot of attention all year round at our church. Our pastor decided to make the day special by having a baptism, accepting new members and moving our monthly Lord's Table to Easter Sunday. We're going to have a grand time!
__________________ J Baldwin
Keowee Presbyterian Church, PCA
Pickens, SC You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself. Luke 10:27
Since we celebrate the resurrection every Lord's Day, I see no reason why it shouldn't be, as you say, "business as usual."
__________________ ~James Helbert~, Wytheville, VA
Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church, RPCUS TheBibleAlone.com / The Edinburgh Inn "Is this not a brand plucked from the fire? - Zechariah 3:2
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I will be continuing in 1 Kings. In God's providence, I have the marvelous passage in 1 Kings 8:12ff. which deals with Solomon's Temple Dedication prayer.
At the same time, we seize upon opportunities to draw people to the resurrection through our hymns.
"The heart is the main thing in true religion...It is the hinge and turning-point in the condition of man's soul. If the heart is alive to God and quickened by the Spirit, the man is a living Christian. If the heart is dead and has not the Spirit, the man is dead before God." (J.C. Ryle)
Since we celebrate the resurrection every Lord's Day, I see no reason why it shouldn't be, as you say, "business as usual."
We don't really.
We often speak of Christ's death and forget about his resurrection. Even if the Lord's Day is a celebration, we often do not focus on this particular aspect of the resurection of Christ. Most messages get truncated at "Jesus died for our sins." Period. No further.
I see no reason why it should not be business as usual, but I also see no reason why special focus could be shined on the resurrection aspect of the work of Christ.
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Pergamum
"If a commission by an earthly king is considered a honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?"
-- David Livingstone
Since we celebrate the resurrection every Lord's Day, I see no reason why it shouldn't be, as you say, "business as usual."
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Daniel Ritchie
Saintfield, Northern Ireland - Queen's University, Belfast:History/Politics
Member of Dromara Reformed Presbyterian Church of Ireland (Covenanter)
We'll be having a service with our neighboring Japanese-speaking Church (they meet on the other side of the wall). It's the first time in the almost 3 years that we've worshipped together. I'm just happy that we have the opportunity to do so and that many other Japanese will be invited to the area. There's never a bad week to remind of first principles:
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Rich
Okinawa, Japan
WebsiteMaven - Web Hosting Reviews, Guides, and Advice to build and promote your web site. SoliDeoGloria.com - A Community for Reformed Thought and Discussion
What about the mindset of "We have a lot of unsaved visitors that show up for the Easter morning service"
Shouldn't that reality change the message and tone of the Resurrection morning service to be more evangelical and simplistic than usual?
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Steve Butts - Former SBC-er
Three Forms of Unity - Bradenton CRC - Bradenton, Florida (A conservative member in a conservative congregation)
"It is a good thing God chose me before I was born, because he surely would not have afterwards." C.H. Spurgeon
The Post Reformation pastors and theologians of the day, following the Reformers, abolished Easter (Ishtar, Astarte), among other things. In June 1647, England Parliament, headed by the Puritans at Westminster, passed legislation abolishing Christmas and other holidays:
“Forasmuch as the feast of the nativity of Christ, Easter, Whitsuntide, and other festivals, commonly called holy-days, have been heretofore superstitiously used and observed; be it ordained, that the said feasts, and all other festivals, commonly called holy-days, be no longer observed as festivals; any law, statute, custom, constitution, or canon, to the contrary in anywise not withstanding.” (Daniel Neal, The History of the Puritans (London, 1837; rpt. Minneapolis: Klock , p. 45).
I would keep the Lord's Day as the Lord's Day and continue as normal (though there is nothing normal about worship).
We do not celebrate the resurrection of Christ any more, or any less, on any particular Lord's Day.
The offer of grace through the gospel of Jesus Christ is appropriate and possible within the context of the preaching the whole counsel of God, and our pastor, by the grace of God, somehow finds a way to decare that offer, in context, practically every Lord's Day.
The birth, life, death, & resurection of our Lord & Saviour was such a world transforming event that everything has changed because of it.
Even the way we measure time has changed!
For Christians to ignore the extent of this transformation is "sub-biblical" in my opinion.
For a "Christian" to pretend that this Sunday is not the very day that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, was resurected from the dead is on the same level as the "christian" who denies the virgin birth IMO.
If Christ was "really" born of a virgin then he was (in addition to all of the theological & metapysical issues) BORN. That means on an actual date, the Saviour of all mankind was born. And in turn he died. Not "in theory" or "in eternity", but in space & in time.
So for any Christian to NOT recognise this Lords Day as THE Resurection Day, is to pretend that Jesus is simply an idea. I happen to believe that Jesus is more then a mental construct, I believe that he is a real person who; lived, died, & rose again to save us from our sins.l
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Kevin Rogers
Sovereign Community Church, PCA
Moncton NB
I think it's a good idea to have a special focus on the Resurrection at Easter time, if only because churches usually get extra visitors and the "twice a year Christians" at Easter. The pastor of my church has had a series of sermons from Revelation 5 during the run-up to Easter.
Talking to oneself is, I believe, considered a sign of lunacy. Thinking to oneself is most certainly a sign of it. - G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), in January, 1906
Whoa, Kevin! Calling people "Christians" in quotemarks because they don't observe Easter? I could go either way on Easter, it's probably not the correct day, but people do try harder to preach the Gospel that day...but no one here is denying the incarnation of Christ or His resurrection in space and time! We don't do Gnosticism here! It strikes me as very uncharitable to doubt another's profession over a day.
