People talk about “the real meaning of Easter”.  OK.  So for some people, Easter’s more than chocolates, eggs, bunnies and a long weekend.  But – well, how do you react to the real meaning of Easter?

This week we've been looking at Easter which is not surprising since it’s Good Friday today. Jesus, in his last week, spent a good amount of his time encouraging his disciples, here was a man under an enormous pressure, heading to a gruesome death and yet His main concern was on encouraging those twelve men, one of whom would betray Him.

But of course on what we now celebrate as Good Friday, well, that first Good Friday was far from good at least for Jesus. Beaten, brutalised, nailed to a cross through His hands and feet, He suffered incredibly and died. I don't quite know who came up with the name Good Friday but it doesn't seem to fit, are you with me? So let me ask you here and now, a couple of thousand years on, how do you react? What does Good Friday mean to you?

Well, we celebrate Easter today, a long weekend, fluffy bunnies, Easter eggs, sweet chocolate, more chocolate and yet more chocolate. And all that stuff is great but it couldn't be further from the grim, brutal reality of that first Good Friday, could it?

Today you see so much bluster and self serving behaviour. I love to watch the news every night on the TV and you see politicians and business people talking up this and putting spin on that. I was talking to a young man, a mature Christian and in his Church, he said there are couples who are burning out through work and mortgages and demands of being involved in Church.

Marriages, he said, are falling apart. So much, when you look at it, so much is about external appearances, conforming to whatever it is in our society that people say equals success. Yet on the inside, people somehow aren't satisfied, they're not fulfilled, and they’re not happy and peaceful and looking forward to tomorrow. An Easter bunny, chocolate egg Easter is a bit like that, you may have heard me talk before about the thing that symbolises all that in my life.

Some years ago, before I became a Christian, I bought this really up market, expensive car. It was burgundy, it was a beautiful car, it had light tan leather inside, that smell of leather, it was really classy. And it had four wheel steering so you could turn it around on a pin head and it was so empty and so hollow, it was just a lump of metal and leather and so what?

I tried so hard to live this outside thing and yet I was dying on the inside and two occasions each year, Easter and Christmas, things that we celebrate on the outside, the chocolate at Easter and the presents at Christmas, the holidays, they're supposed to be fun and enjoyment and rest. And for a lot of people in the middle of those things, there's this kind of deep, distant awareness of this stuff these Christians are talking about, of Jesus. Let’s get right to the point, Jesus/Easter.

This was the Passover celebration back then; it was a festival to remember the wonderful things that God did in saving Israel when they were in slavery in Egypt centuries before this first Easter. Would have been just as easy back then to get carried away with the social and cultural aspects of the Passover celebration as it is for us today at Easter don't you think?

I mean, everyone came to Jerusalem and they had feasts and they roasted lambs and they had unleavened bread. It was a big festival going on and it would be so easy to get lost in all the cultural trappings of that festival Just as it is today to get lost in what we call Easter.

But in the middle of all that is Jesus Christ, superstar, this Jesus who was just so well loved and liked, who did so many amazing things and healing and the way He spoke, He made sense and people followed him and then all of a sudden the mob turns on Him. At Easter they bay for His blood, He's beaten and spat on and crucified.

We looked at that from a medical perspective yesterday on the program. Supposedly He's the Son of God and Christians tell us this was all to pay for our sin and the Bible says:

He who knew no sin became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God.

What the heck does that mean today? It comes right down to this, according to God He made us, He loves us and He gave us free will and the point of all that was for us to know Him and have this fantastic relationship with Him, here and now and for all eternity and it doesn't matter which way you cut it, each one of us in our own way has rejected him.

I know I have, more often than I can possibly recount and in doing that we miss the whole point. That's exactly what the Greek word for sin, which is what the Bible uses, means, to miss the mark or to miss the point. Truly I tell you, I used to think of sin as some kind of old fuddy-duddy concept, something that priests and ministers talked about in the 1950's but it's not relevant today. It's old fashioned, it's religious moralising, get rid of it, get over it but when you come back to Easter, God’s Easter, the central point, the central problem of all creation is that we rejected God, we turned our backs on him and on that cross He calls us home.

The consequences of our rejection of Him, our sin, are paid for by His own Son, Jesus who died and suffered for us so that we could have a new life, a life of giving and sacrifice and a fresh new life, a wholesome real life with joy and with peace, all because out of His great love He reached out to us through Jesus.

Fifteen years ago that message hit home for me, I'm going to spend eternity coming to grips with what Jesus did for me but in my heart I know that I know that I know that I know that God is my God, that He loves me just as He loves you and that changes our whole lives, it opens the door to a real, dynamic, exciting, beautiful, wondrous relationship with God. So how does that impact you? What's the reaction in your heart, in your life, in your here and now, in your future? If you would like to accept Jesus Christ today as your Lord and your Saviour, why don't you just stop and pause and pray this prayer with me.

Father, we've heard the story of Easter, we've heard the story of Jesus and we can scarcely believe or understand or comprehend that You would send Your Son to pay the price of our sin, the price of our rejection of You but as we look at that story God, we just believe it in our hearts and we want to say thank You, we want to praise you and worship you and say thank You that you sent Jesus to save us from a life of missing the point that You came to save us from Your judgement.

Father,  I am so sorry for all of the things I've done wrong, I just can't begin to list them all but You know because You felt each one in Your heart. I'm going to turn away from that now Lord, I can't be perfect except in You and I know that Jesus died so that You would forgive all my sin, past, present and future and I give my life to You today as Jesus gave His life for me back then. Father, give me this new life, show me Your love, show me Your future, show me Your grace. Father, I pray these things with all that I am in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.