“God’s Will for the New Creation”

7:30am 

• Celebrate the risen Savior early.
• Outside service on the lawn — weather permitting.

8:15am 

• Easter breakfast sponsored by the Youth

9:15am 

• Sunday School for all ages 10:30am

10:30

• Easter Festival Worship with the celebration of Holy Communion.
• Joyous hymns and special music, featuring the Adult Choir and a brass quintet.

“The Risen Lord Jesus Is Our Strength and Our Song,

for He Has Become Our Salvation”

Oh, come, let us “sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously” (Ex. 15:1). By His Cross He has shattered the enemy, crushing sin and death beneath His feet, and in His Resurrection, He has brought us out of Egypt into the freedom of the Gospel. He has called us out of darkness into light, and led us from confusion, fear and weeping, into the joy and gladness of His Resurrection.  He is our strength and our song, and He has become our salvation (Ex. 15:2). Thus, do we hear and respond to His voice of the Gospel, as He calls each of us by name. We enter His tomb by our Baptism into His death, and just as surely as He has risen, so we also “must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). “Let us therefore celebrate the festival” (1 Cor. 5:8), not in the revelry of self-indulgence, nor in the debauchery of lust, but in sincere faith and genuine love.  For “Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7). He has thereby set us free from sin and death, and now He feeds us with Himself unto the life everlasting.

“The Risen Christ Has Swallowed Up Death Forever!”

The entire fallen world is veiled in a funeral shroud “that is spread over all nations” and “cast over all peoples” (Is. 25:7). But the Lord of hosts, in the Person of the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, has removed that terrible pall and swallowed up death forever. By submitting Himself to death He burst it apart from the inside out. Now He wipes away all tears from our faces, and He invites us to “be glad and rejoice in His salvation” (Is. 25:9). His Body and His Blood, crucified and risen, are given and poured out for us as a feast “of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined” (Is. 25:6). We enter that feast through Holy Baptism, whereby our old man is buried with Jesus Christ, and we are raised up in Him, “dressed in a white robe” of His perfect righteousness (Mark 16:5). What St. Paul and the other Apostles received “by the grace of God” is also “delivered to you” by the preaching of Christ, “in which you stand, and by which you are being saved” (1 Cor. 15:1–11).