Jesus Rose

There is a word in the Greek New Testament that does not translate gently. It is the word the Apostle Paul reaches for in Philippians 3:10 when he tries to describe what the resurrection of Jesus released into the world — and it is the word from which we get our English term “dynamite.” The word is dunamis. Paul is not describing a spiritual concept or a theological category. He is describing a force. An explosion. An event with ongoing reverberations that no sealed tomb, no Roman guard, and no verdict of crucifixion could contain. Easter is not primarily a day on the calendar. It is a detonation — one that shattered the infrastructure of sin and death on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem’s city walls, and whose shockwave is still being felt in every life it touches today.

What makes Philippians 3 so remarkable is the voice in which it is written. Paul was not a man short on credentials. He was circumcised on the eighth day, descended from the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, trained as a Pharisee, zealous beyond his peers, and blameless under the law by every measurable standard his world recognized. If anyone had reason to trust a list of religious accomplishments, it was Paul. And then he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus — and everything he had carefully placed in the credit column of his life got moved to the debit column. Not because those things were worthless in themselves, but because measured against the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord, they were — and here Paul uses a word that is startling in its vulgarity — dung. Garbage. The kind of thing you don’t want tracked into the house. The contrast is deliberate and extreme: you can have the Bread of Life that satisfies forever, or you can spend your life accumulating things that smell like refuse by comparison.

The revaluation Paul describes is not an act of false modesty. It is the honest assessment of a man who has tasted something qualitatively different from anything religion could produce. This distinction is worth sitting with carefully, because the temptation to treat Easter as a religious performance rather than a living encounter is perennial. Paul had been deeply, earnestly religious his entire life — and he was completely wrong about the most important thing. His problem was not that he had failed at religion. His problem was that religion was the wrong category entirely. No amount of good can outweigh our bad in God’s economy. No amount of service can earn back a salvation that is unattainable without perfection. The life God always intended for His people to experience is not a life earned by effort. It is a life received as a gift from the One whose effort — at infinite personal cost — made it available.

At the center of Paul’s consuming ambition in Philippians 3 is a word worth examining in its original language. When he writes “my goal is to know him,” the Greek verb is ginoskein — not the word for intellectual knowledge acquired through study, but the word for personal, experiential, relational knowing. The kind of knowing that only comes from genuine encounter. You can know everything the Bible says about Jesus and still not know Jesus. You can hold correct doctrine, attend church faithfully, and serve in every available ministry — and still be relating to a theological proposition rather than a living Person. Easter changes the category entirely. Jesus did not rise from the dead so that we could have a better theology of resurrection. He rose so that He could be known — personally, experientially, intimately — by every person who turns to Him. The empty tomb is not primarily a historical fact to be defended. It is an invitation to relationship with a living Savior.

This invitation has a shape, and Philippians 3:9 describes it precisely. The problem every human being faces is that only righteous people stand before God without condemnation — and none of us are righteous. Not the scholar with a lifetime of Scripture study behind him. Not the fisherman who walked on water and then sank. Not the woman who came to the well alone at noon because her past had made her an outcast.

The resurrection resolves this problem in a way that nothing else in history has been able to touch. When Jesus rose from the dead, He declared that what He had accomplished on the cross was accepted — the debt paid, death defeated, the righteousness He had lived perfectly now available to be credited to every person who trusts Him. Theologians call this imputed righteousness: God sees us not through our own record but through the record of Christ. Not just forgiven — not just moved from negative to neutral — but clothed in the perfect obedience of the Son of God. That is the standing Easter gives to broken people.

The characters who have walked through this Easter series with us are vivid illustrations of exactly this truth. The woman at the well did not clean up her story before Jesus showed up at Jacob’s well — He arrived knowing every chapter she had tried to hide, and He did not walk away. He sat down and offered her living water. Peter did not earn his restoration after three denials by a courtyard fire — he received it at another fire, on a quiet shore, from the same Jesus whose hand had caught him before he went under in the storm. Paul did not graduate into grace through religious achievement — he was stopped cold on a road paved with certainty and handed a righteousness he could never have built for himself. In every case, the pattern is identical: the encounter with the risen Christ required nothing from them but a willingness to receive what only He could give. The worst chapter of your story is not the last word about you. That is what Easter declares.

Paul does not end his reflection in Philippians 3 by looking backward at the empty tomb. He looks forward — toward a horizon where the resurrection of Jesus leads to the resurrection of everyone who belongs to Him. Our citizenship, he writes, is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of His glorious body, by the power that enables Him to subject everything to Himself (Philippians 3:20–21, CSB). Easter Sunday is not the conclusion of the resurrection story. It is the opening movement. The risen Christ is the firstfruit — and the harvest is still coming. This world is not our permanent address. The corruption and frailty and grief of this present life are not the final word. The same dunamis that rolled a stone away from a sealed tomb is the power that has been promised to every person who is found in Christ. What began on that first Sunday morning is still unfolding — and the last chapter has not yet been written.

That forward-looking hope is not meant to make us passive. It is meant to make us unstoppable. Peter — the man pulled from a sinking sea, restored after his denial, and filled with the Spirit at Pentecost — eventually laid down his life for the gospel he once ran from. The woman who left her water jar at the well ran toward the very neighborhood she had spent years hiding from and turned a whole town toward the Savior of the world. Paul traded his impressive list of accomplishments for a list of shipwrecks, beatings, and imprisonments — and counted every bit of it as gain. None of them were rescued and set on a shelf. They were rescued and sent. Jesus does not save us to leave us where He found us. He saves us to send us — back into the world with a story no one can argue with, a testimony built not on a clean record but on a real encounter with a living Person.

This Easter, we want to extend to you the same invitation that has been at the heart of this entire series. You do not need a polished platform, a spotless record, or a cleaned-up version of your story to walk through our doors. The woman at the well didn’t have one. Peter didn’t have one. Paul didn’t have one. What they each had was a genuine encounter with the risen Christ — and it was enough to change everything. Whether your faith is steady, whether you are full of honest doubt, whether you have been away from church for longer than you care to admit, or whether you are carrying something right now that feels too heavy to carry alone — there is a place for you at this table. Come and hear the story for yourself. Come and see that the tomb is empty, the stone is moved, and the Savior is alive. Bring someone with you. The same power that stopped Paul on the road to Damascus, that caught Peter before he went under, that sent a forgotten woman running toward her whole town with the best news she had ever heard — that power is available to you. Not as an annual celebration. As a daily, living reality. Come and encounter it.

“My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.”

— Philippians 3:10–11, CSB

Join Us for Easter at Union Avenue Baptist Church

We would love to worship with you this Easter Sunday as we celebrate the risen Christ —

the One whose resurrection is not just a historical event, but a living invitation.

Come as you are. Come and see. Come and know Him.

2181 Union Avenue  •  Easter Sunday at 10:45 AM

unionavenue.org