Happy Easter Season Friends,

The season is a good time to reflect and remember the basis and the foundation of our salvation; the Death, Resurrection, Ascension and Position of Jesus Christ. We can’t hear enough of it! Oh what a joy!

When we examine the story of Easter across all the gospel accounts, we see the visible events of Christ’s death, His resurrection, His ascension which also infers His position and His authority. Particularly, I’ll reference the account in Matthew 27 and Matthew 28; Matthew 27 closed with the Soldiers sealing the Sepulchre shut and Matthew 28 begins with the Angel telling Mary that the Christ whom she sought wasn’t there and had risen.

While we do not clearly see the activities between Christ’s death on Friday and resurrection on Sunday clearly spelled out, Apostle Paul’s accounts in Colossians and Ephesians and David’s account in the Psalms present glimpses of the events between the death of Christ and His resurrection.

These scriptures reassure us that though to the ordinary eye, Christ our Saviour was dead, God’s power was working out a far exceeding weight of glory beyond death. I’ll take a pause here and draw some parallels.

2 Pet 1:4 guarantees that believers have a compilation of good and precious promises on which we can lay hold to become authorized partakers of the divine nature.

At different times and in different seasons, a believer is supposed to actively and progressively partake of and personify the divine nature through his/her engagements with the promises locked up inside God’s Word.

Promises, like prophecies unfold with the passage of time. Time reveals the veracity and validity of a promise made. So, we can say time is one factor in the fulfilment of a promise.

The other factor which is really the crux of my encouragement to you today, is the occasional complex dependency of contradictions; Situations in which there is a discordance between the reality of hope presented by life’s situation and the expectation of hope presented by the promise.

Contradictions are instances when the promise is in stark negation to your experiences. When the variable of negation is introduced into your equation of glory, it may become a dissuasive story.

Sometimes, you may even get more discouraged when fellow believers present this assuring truth of the promise before you, yet all you see in your immediate environment is an opposite reality seemingly more tangible that the promise you have received.

Friends do not be despondent. One of the rare advantages the Gospel presents by looking onto the archetype of Jesus’ death and resurrection is our understanding of the revelation of the power of God at work in a dead situation in attendant obedience to the Word of God. The Word of God evokes the workings of God’s power in contradicting situations.

Colossians 2 and Ephesians 4 allude to the glorious work the Word performed and is always performing in every stretch of time when it looks like the activities of Heaven are muted over your situation.

We see a prototype in Abraham (Romans 4), who did not consider the age (time) of his body or the deadness (contradiction) of Sarah’s womb, but who against any realistic eventuality of a better ending believed in a better ending, trusting that God who quickens the dead, will through the power resident in His Word quicken His body to life.

The end of every promise of God is to work out in you a participation of a divine nature, regardless of any present paradox in your life, that tree of promise is still budding at the scent of the water of God’s Word. Your members, your situations and circumstances are no longer obedient to the finality of death, they are compliant to the resurrection power. This is true

So when you go through a period of interlude, when it looks like your equation of glory seems to be complicated by time and contradictions and there seems to be a period of muted activity or maybe you have even received a negative response which looks like it’s the final answer.. Hmmm… Friends do not despair. The Power of God is at Work attendant to the Promises in His Word, it is working for you a far more exceeding weight of glory beyond what you are expecting.

Draw strength and hope from knowing that the Word is working for you, on your behalf. Death is not the end, your tree would surely bud again at the scent of water.

What a joy to begin Q2 with the renewed hope that Easter brings. I wish you an amazing quarter full of renewed possibilities. Amen.

Be encouraged!

Olayinka Adebayo
Olayinka Adebayo