Acts 1:1-3

Jesus really rose! We were thinking about this mind-blowing truth on Sunday – that a man died and then came back to life, never to die again. And this really happened!

Luke, the writer of Acts, sets out his aim in Luke 1:1-4, to write an “orderly account” for Theophilus – drawing together eyewitness testimony – “that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught”. He’s not writing stories which have a good moral message but no actual truth behind them – things that could be ‘true for you but not for me’; rather he’s writing the real truth about events that really happened on this earth in history. If we’d been there at the time we could’ve seen Jesus die, and then seen him walking, talking, eating – alive again three days later! And the people who were there at the time weren’t deluded; Jesus “presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the Kingdom of God”. Jesus really rose!

And this changes everything! We can see it in the lives of the first Christians: they went from being scared and doubting, to being people who’d share the news about Jesus boldly, living lives of obedience to him – their Saviour and Lord – even in terrible suffering.

His resurrection is the proof that Jesus is Lord of the universe, and so the question for all of us is, ‘do we recognise and live for him as Lord of our lives?’ Either for the first time, or continually, we all need to recognise how we’ve lived for other things – maybe for fame, wealth, power, enjoyment – and turn to Jesus for forgiveness and the help to live for him, the Lord and Saviour who really rose.