Richard Dawson, 6 April 2016

Life! We live in a time in our country when suicide has become an epidemic and it raises the question what makes your life truly worth living? Many of us would perhaps answer with things like family, friends, love, health, achievement etc and there’s know doubt these things are important. But they can’t be everything because there are plenty of people who’ve had all or most of these things and yet for whom life has become either so painful or so meaningless that they’ve taken there own life.
Christians believe that something else lies at the heart of life—something so different and so important that it’s worth giving up much else that would normally be called ‘life-giving’ to obtain it. That thing is, of course, a relationship with God made possible by the life, death and resurrection of God’s Son Jesus Christ. Time and again we search for something in life to give us life and though many things are worthy and indeed helpful none can replace the thing which gives true life, the life of abundance, the eternal life which is above all life.
The difficult thing about choosing this life is that it is counter-intuitive in almost every way. You see choosing this life means choosing humility over pride, weakness over power, being second over being first and, sometimes, choosing death over life! Yes, even death now comes to the service of life for in dying to an old way of living we discover a new life we could never have imagined or lived before. What is more we discover a Saviour who has travelled this way before, indeed, was our pioneer in taming death that it might be used to discover life. Today, Easter Sunday, life is made available for all to receive, a life we could never have known had Jesus not given Himself to the Cross and to death only to rise again