David Pool

Another Easter is in the books, and I hope that you were able to take some meaningful and undistracted time to think about what the day means. As I was preparing for Resurrection Day services this year, I was surprised to come across a survey result from 2022 that reported that two-thirds of U.S. adults believe that the biblical accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate. Fully 66% of American adults believe it actually occurred! What!? That is hard to believe, and here’s why: The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead has always had an enormous impact on individuals who believe it and on whole societies where this belief is nurtured.  

The scholar N.T. Wright observes, “There is no evidence for a form of early Christianity in which the resurrection was not a central belief. Nor was this belief, as it were, bolted on to Christianity at the edge. It was the central driving force, informing the whole movement.” The central driving force? If that is true (and the Bible affirms it is), then it is nearly impossible to explain how Christianity could rise out of Judaism to become a powerful movement within the Roman Empire. If the resurrection was central to the claims that Israel’s Messiah had, in fact, come and rose from the dead, then how could those claims have persuaded so many people even though it was completely falsifiable?

What I am trying to point out is that the first Easter, the resurrection of Christ, sent enormous shockwaves through the first century world. And going further, it also changed the course of history as people and nations came under its influence and powerful message. And those effects continue today. In his book, “How Christianity Changed the World,” Alvin J. Schmidt points out that true Christianity, when it is practiced faithfully, has been improving lives and societies for 2,000 years. It has emphasized the sanctity of human life, elevated sexual morality, honored the role of women in society, established hospitals, started universities, bestowed dignity on labor, launched scientific inquiry into the wonders of creation, abolished slavery, influenced art, architecture, music and literature and always left this world better than it found it.

The resurrection also has had profound impact of billions of individual lives. Around A.D. 56, the Apostle Paul points out how the lives of people who had been immersed in idol worship, sexual immorality, homosexuality, thievery, greed, substance abuse, embezzling or cheating had been drastically changed through faith in Jesus Christ. He writes in 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, “Some of you were once like that. But you were cleansed; you were made holy; you were made right with God by calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”

In other words, Easter makes an undeniable difference in people’s lives when they believe in Christ and live out that belief.

Have there been bad examples of Christianity? Without a doubt. But when practiced faithfully, it is easy to see that the resurrection of Jesus Christ has had an enormous effect on humanity and the world. In other words, there’s an “Easter effect.” George Weigel, in a Wall Street Journal story from 2018, wrote, “There is no accounting for the rise of Christianity without weighing the revolutionary effect on those nobodies of what they called “the Resurrection.” They encountered one whom they embraced as the Risen Lord, whom they first knew as the itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, and who died an agonizing and shameful death on a Roman cross outside Jerusalem.” Weigel calls it, “the Easter effect.” 

So, what about you? Do you believe that Jesus Christ died on that cross to pay for your sin and rose on the third day? If so, you’ve made a step that should have a profound effect on your life and the way you live.  May we all faithfully and joyfully demonstrate “the Easter effect”!

(David Pool is pastor at Grace Point in Powell.)