Christ's Passion

As I write this it is the Tuesday before Easter. Easter is that time in Christian circles where we celebrate the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The thought occurred to me this morning that this is His "Passion Week", and that spurred another thought, "What was Christ's passion?" To which I had to answer, "Us."

In the book of Luke, chapter 19 and verse 10 it states: "For the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost." When we look at this Scripture, we have to ask ourselves what is it that

was lost? And to find this, we have to go back to the time of the beginnings, the book of Genesis.

In Genesis 2 we find the creation of man, and his job description. Look at verse 15 - 17;

15) And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and guard and keep it. 16) And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden 17) but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and blessing and calamity you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

Now we know that Adam and Eve didn't physically die once they ate the fruit. So either God lied, or He meant something else. Other more literal translations of this passage say that, "in dying, you will die." Meaning that it was not physically that they died, but spiritually they did. Their hearts within them, the real them, their spirits died that day. They

became cut off from God. This is what Jesus came to seek and to save, mankind's spirits.

Remember what Isaiah stated in chapter 53, verses 4 - 6:

⁴ Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;

it was our sorrows that weighed him down.
And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God,
a punishment for his own sins!
⁵ But he was pierced for our rebellion,
crushed for our sins.
He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.

⁶ All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.
We have left God’s paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him
the sins of us all.
.

The best part of the story is not shown in Isaiah, but in Matthew 28:5-7:

⁵ Then the angel spoke to the women. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.

⁶ He isn't here! He is risen from the dead, just as he said would happen. Come, see where his body was lying.

⁷ And now, go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and he is going ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there. Remember what I have told you.”

There can be no doubt that God loves us. He set in motion the rescue of mankind's hearts, at the very time that they became lost. Jesus definitely loves us, or else He would not have gone to the cross and taken the beating that He did. There is nothing else that either of them can do to show us that they love us, and the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are the children of God. So as we enter this week of remembrance of what Jesus has done for us, remember that His passion is you.

Get 'em up folks, let's go out and whip something for the Kingdom today!