I Will Enter His Gates

Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! Psalm 100:4

I will enter His gates with thanksgiving in my heart.
I will enter His courts with praise.
I will say this is the day that the Lord has made.
I will rejoice for He has made me glad.
He has made me glad; He has made me glad.
I will rejoice for He has made me glad.
He has made me glad; He has made me glad.
I will rejoice for He has made me glad.

This Is the Day

This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24

This is the day, this is the day, that the Lord has made, that the Lord has made.
We will rejoice, we will rejoice, and be glad in it, and be glad in it.
This is the day that the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the day, this is the day, that the Lord has made.

Blessed Be the Name

Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore! Psalm 113:2

Blessed be the name, blessed be the name, blessed be the name of the Lord!
Blessed be the name, blessed be the name, blessed be the name of the Lord!
Glory to the name, glory to the name, glory to the name of the Lord!
Glory to the name, glory to the name, glory to the name of the Lord!

Behold What Manner of Love

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God...1 John 3:1

Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us.
Behold what manner of love the Father has given unto us.
That we should be called the sons of God.
That we should be called the sons of God.

Resurrection Hope, Peace, Joy, and Glory

During the four Sundays of Advent, we thought about what Jesus’s arrival two thousand years ago meant for God’s people. We saw that since “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,” we can know true hope, peace, joy, and glory. Today, as we celebrate Easter, we’ll see that Jesus’s resurrection makes those four Christmas gifts even better in the lives of those who know Jesus by faith.

Hope  When people say things like, “I hope it doesn’t rain this weekend,” they’re really saying, “I don’t want it to rain this weekend, but it might anyway.” Or if they say, “I hope this new recipe turns out right,” they’re really saying, “This might taste good, or I might just end up throwing it away.” They talk about “hope,” but at the same time, they are preparing themselves to be disappointed. At Christmastime, we learned that the hope that Jesus brings is not this wishy-washy kind of hope at all. Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem was proof that when God makes a promise, He never fails to keep it. He had promised to send His people a Savior, and He did. Hope means that since God kept all His promises in the past, we can look forward to the promises He’s made for the future, including the promise that Jesus will come again. Titus 2:11-13 says that our “blessed hope” is the second coming of Jesus. We can be 100% sure that Jesus will come again.

Jesus’s birth and His promised second coming give us hope, and so does His resurrection. Near the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus had told His followers that He would go to Jerusalem and be killed (Matthew 16:21). However, when it actually happened, Jesus’s followers were frightened and confused. How could Jesus, who had power to control the weather and raise the dead, possibly be overpowered and killed by His enemies? Imagine how disappointed and hopeless they felt when Jesus lay in the tomb. But when Jesus rose from the dead, they remembered what Jesus had said. They understood that everything was happening just as Jesus had said it would. The resurrection was proof that God was still in control and that He would keep all His promises.  When those same disciples began to preach Jesus to the whole world, they taught that Jesus’s resurrection is proof that we can trust in God, “who raised [Jesus] from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God” (1 Peter 1:21).

Peace   To many people, peace just means that there is no fighting:  no countries are at war; everyone is just “getting along.” During Advent, we thought about the peace that the angels sang of at Jesus’s birth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace. . .” We saw that the peace Jesus brings is about much more than settling trouble between nations or neighbors. It’s about settling the trouble between rebellious people and God. “All have sinned,” says Romans 3:23, and our sin puts us in conflict with God. Romans 5:10 even calls us “enemies” of God who deserve His punishment! But Jesus came to “reconcile” us to God—to bring us back to God’s side—so that we are His enemies no longer. Paul tells us in Colossians that God, through Jesus, was pleased to “reconcile to himself all things. . . making peace by the blood of his cross” (1:20). 

Because we’re on God’s side, God’s enemies are our enemies, too. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that when Jesus returns, He will “put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (15:25-26). Earlier in that chapter, Paul talks about the importance of Jesus’s resurrection in God’s great plan to make everything right again. Jesus’s resurrection is a guarantee that all God’s enemies (including death) will be defeated, and all God’s people will be raised to immortality (never dying again). We can live in peace, not afraid of death, because we know “the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus” (Hebrews 13:20).

Joy   During Advent, we thought about the difference between happiness and joy. We saw that happiness can come and go as our situation changes, but when we trust in God, we can have joy—a feeling of deep pleasure and contentment that stays through good times and bad. When Jesus was born, the angels told the shepherds that the news of Jesus’s birth was “good news of great joy for all people.” Trusting Jesus doesn’t mean that we will be happy all the time, but because of the good news of Jesus’s arrival, we can have true joy in everything.

Matthew tells us about the women who followed Jesus during His earthly ministry and cared for His physical needs. Perhaps they cooked meals for Him and sewed His clothes. Like His other followers, they were frightened and confused when Jesus died, but they were committed to caring for Him, so they went sadly to the tomb to anoint His body. When they arrived, they met an angel who told them that Jesus had risen. Matthew says that with “fear and great joy” they ran to tell the other disciples. Their fear probably means that they still didn’t understand everything that was going on, but the fact that Jesus was alive filled them with joy in spite of their confusion. We can rejoice in knowing that our Savior is alive even if we live in confusing or scary times.

Glory   In our Advent lessons, we learned that the word glory refers to the “perfect splendor” of God and the idea that no one is greater or more deserving of honor than He. We know that even though Jesus came humbly and lived humbly, there were moments of glory throughout His life: the angel choir that announced His birth, the rich gifts of the magi, the miraculous signs He performed, the transfiguration, and more. John says that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.” Certainly the resurrection displayed God’s glory. In fact, Paul says that “Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Romans 6:4). The glory of God is plain in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

We’ve been looking at how Jesus’s resurrection blesses God’s people by increasing our hope, peace, and joy. So you might wonder how we are blessed when God’s glory is displayed. The answer is this: we were created for God’s glory. We were created to reflect God’s glory by obeying Him, worshiping Him, and proclaiming His perfections to those around us. The better we know God, the more we are able to do what we were made to do—glorify Him.

This Easter, let’s thank God for the hope, peace, and joy that is ours through the birth, life, death, and the resurrection of Jesus. Let’s glorify Him through the Word as it is read and preached and through the hymns and prayers that teach us more about the meaning and importance of the resurrection. Christ is risen indeed! Hallelujah!