by Sandy Mayle

Is there another day in all the year as glorious as Easter Sunday? “He is risen!” we exult. “He is risen indeed!”

After church this past Easter, our family gathered for dinner. We greeted Celia, our four-year-old granddaughter, and asked her what she had learned in children’s church that day.

“Jesus died,” she said solemnly.

That was it? That was her Easter story? Her dad, likewise wondering, prodded, “And then what happened?”

“Jesus un-died.”

Yes! That right there is the message of Easter, isn’t it?

It’s true that Jesus died—but by that dying, He conquered death forever. After the darkness of Friday afternoon came the triumph of Sunday morning. Out of the decay of the tomb stepped our Lord.

He un-died!

Because He did, we can also celebrate our own new life on Easter Sunday. Low in the grave we all once lay, dead in our trespasses and sins. But if we have confessed those sins to the Father and believe we have been forgiven because Jesus paid for them on the Cross, then we, too, have un-died. “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!” (2 Cor. 5:17, NLT).

While our bodies inevitably age, on the inside God continues to make us newer every day. For we have “taken off [the] old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (Col. 3:10, emphasis added).

What an astounding love, that lets us begin again! What a powerful God, who can make the old new again . . .

So, on this Easter Sunday, we celebrate not only Jesus’ new life, but our own. We celebrate this growing newer and newer, this becoming, as Celia might say, “aliver and aliver.” We celebrate this journey we’re on, one in which we move from strength to greater strength (see Ps. 84:10) and from glory to increasing glory (see 1 Cor. 3:18), shining brighter and brighter until we enter the full light of His presence (see Prov. 4:18).

As Paul wrote to the Colossians, we died with Christ (2:20), and we have been raised with Him (3:1). In Jesus we died and in Him we un-died. Because He is risen, we are risen—and we are risen indeed!