The Resurrection of Christ, is the central doctrine of Christianity. It is what Christianity is all about — the belief that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead on the third day after his Crucifixion and that through his conquering of death all believers will subsequently share in his victory. To be a Christian you must die and be reborn. Think about that — you must die! Dispossession is not enough! “Therefore, I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” [Matthew 6:25, KJV]You have to die to be reborn! That is what the Gospel of John is calling on us to do. That is more – much, much more than dispossession and displacing ourselves socially, giving up your possessions, becoming a hermit. It is actually giving up your life. To actually die to this world’s consumerism and the pursuit wealth. It is becoming One with God and listening to that voice within you – the spirit sent by Christ, the third person of the Trinity. It is to be reborn. Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” [John 3:3] It is to be reborn into the spiritual union of the members of the Christian Church, living and the dead. Being One with God is Perfect freedom – Freedom is not the right to do what we want, but the ability to do what we ought. · Without Christ, we are slaves to sin, unable to do what is right. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death.” [Romans 8:2]

“ASHAMED OF DEATH :The world, knowing how all our real investments are beyond the grave, might expect us to be less concerned than other people who go in for what is called Higher Thought and tell us that “death doesn’t matter;” but we “are not high- minded,” and we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus – not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours. The nature which He had created as God the nature which He had assumed as man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame; if I may here quote a writer of my own communion, “I am not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it.” And that brings us again to the paradox. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to – well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny ais an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it. Because Our Lord is risen, we know that on one level it is an enemy already risen armed; but because we know that the natural level also is God’s creation, we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all those other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world better than those who know no other. ” — From “Some Thoughts,” God in the Dock –C.S. Lewis