God listens. God heals. God forgives.  God answers our prayers. God has His perfect time. As Christians, we all know these realities and we keep holding on to them.  However, do we also believe that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, has risen from His death?  The tomb was empty. Even Jesus’ disciples could not simply understand.  They thought that Jesus’  body was stolen by the enemies.  Jesus’ disciples failed to recognize that what happened was already the fulfillment of the most essential promise of God: the promise of resurrection; the promise of salvation and eternal life.

What can be more unbelievable than resurrection?  Jesus was bloody, lifeless, gone.  Can we blame the disciples for doubting, disbelieving, and not realizing that their teacher, their King, was dead but has risen again?  It is too profound to fathom, isn’t it?  It is not easy to make sense of it.  All because, like the disciples, we do not fully understand God’s promises in the scriptures.  We doubt.  We are stubborn.  We say we believe in God, but we do not completely.  We say we are Christians, yet we refuse to be renewed.  We say we know who God is, but we do not follow Him.

This is the challenge of the empty tomb.  As Christians, we have to allow our faith to take us beyond what is readily perceived.  Jesus conquered death by accepting and following what God’s plans are!  He tells us that there is nothing impossible in God.  What more our hopes and dreams?  What more our pain and suffering?  But Jesus knows that we are like His disciples.  He did not leave them alone in the process of believing; as he does to us, present-day Christians.  Jesus understands how difficult it is to grasp God’s plans and promises; hence, He always reminds us tha He is the way, the truth, and the life.  That someday, in the fullness of our faith in His resurrection, we will realize how powerful God is; how with God, what we think is impossible becomes possible.

Let us celebrate the gift of salvation that God has given us through His Son, Jesus Christ.  Let us accept the challenge to hold on to God’s will like what Jesus did.  Let us be brave to level up our faith on God’s promises.  It is the time to begin again.  Jesus has risen!  We can also rise from our own death, failure, loss, pain, struggle, and sins.  The tomb is empty. Jesus is not in the tomb because He is now with us!  What   else can we not endure through and in Him?  Jesus trust and believes in us, so let us trust and believe Him too.  He wants us to go after God, so He can fulfill the desires of our hearts; so He can make us believe that He is real.

With the grace of the Holy Spirit, may this Easter be the continuation of our faith, as well as the start of a deeper relationship with the One who never fails to make true of His promises – our God; our Savior; our Christ.

~ Olive Ilustrisimo

Source: Neo Jeremiah Voice of the Young Prophet Newsletter April 16, 2017 issue.