But He is risen, a later star of dawn.

Death is strong, but Life is stronger.

The message of Easter is that God‘s new world has been unveiled in Jesus Christ and that you‘re now invited to belong to it.

Hear the bells ringing they’re singing “Christ is risen from the dead!” The angel up on the tombstone said, He is risen just as he said!

Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord‘s Prayer is about.

The joyful news that He is risen does not change the contemporary world. Still before us lie work, discipline, sacrifice. But the fact of Easter gives us the spiritual power to do the work, accept the discipline, and make the sacrifice.

Our identity as Christians is strengthened as we stand in the lengthening shadows of saints down through the centuries, who have always answered back in antiphonal voice: ‘He is risen, indeed!’

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

God proved His love on the Cross. When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‘I love you.’

Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.

We live and die; Christ died and lived!