More On Our Eastertide Preaching Series
Jesus’s resurrection in history is the cornerstone of the Christian faith.
It’s such a big deal that followers of Jesus throughout history and across the world today celebrate Christ’s resurrection not just on the single day of Easter Sunday, but for a season of 50 days known as Eastertide that begins on Easter Sunday and continues until Pentecost.
This year, at The Mission Cincinnati, we’ll press into these themes of celebration and new life through an Eastertide preaching series we’re calling “Resurrection Habits.”
In this series we’ll explore how the resurrection makes a difference in our daily lives, by considering a series of practices, characteristics, or habits which Christ’s resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit enable us to live out.
Habit has two meanings. We likely hear habit and think of things like daily exercise, eating well, or drinking enough water. This is the first meaning of habit: something good (or bad) you intentionally practice day by day until it becomes a regular part of your life.
But habit can also mean CLOTHES. The special robes a monk or nun wears are called habits. Habits function like a work, team, or school uniform to mark someone out from among the rest of humanity for a particular purpose.
An order of monks from Australia explains the meaning of the monk’s habit like this:
“The Police wear uniforms. The staff in a shop have badges. Construction workers have orange vests. Doctors have coats and stethoscopes. A Monk also wears a habit as his work uniform, but a habit is much more…the religious habit shows forth an inner consecration. Religious profession sets a monk apart. He becomes a consecrated person. He belongs in a very particular way to God. Although the habit does not make the monk, the habit expresses fundamentally that the monk is different…He is not supposed to live like everyone else. He is called to live a life totally dedicated to God…He becomes a living reminder that God exists, that there is something more.”
Not all followers of Jesus are called to be monks or nuns. Not all of us will literally wear different clothes because of our faith. But ALL of us as Christ followers are called to a similar set-apartness in the world. We are called to put on new spiritual clothes by virtue of our faith in the resurrected Jesus. Spiritual habits: ways we live and act that mark us out as different in the world and show that our lives are dedicated to God and not to ourselves.
Naming these habits, and considering how Jesus’s resurrection empowers us to live them out is what our Eastertide journey is all about!
We hope you’ll join us in these weeks, and we pray the fruit of this journey is that we all would look more like Jesus, and that our lives too might become living reminders to others that God exists, that there is something more, and that all are invited to come and know Christ!