Resurrection Power

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul is in the middle of recounting the blessings and benefits that we have in Christ. He has described these benefits and prayed for us to understand them, and now he returns to his project of sketching these benefits in brief but powerfully suggestive terms. He focuses on the resurrection, first the resurrection of Christ and then our spiritual resurrection at the beginning of the next chapter — and the overarching category under which he looks at the resurrection and session of Christ is the category of God’s power. You need to know hope; you need to know riches; and you need to know power! All three of these things require experiential knowledge, of course. To know hope, riches, and power is to experience all three — it is to have hope, to have riches, to have power. And brothers and sisters, that is exactly what you have in union with Christ.
More than once in this letter, Paul tries to describe the immeasurable. He wants us to know how large the boundless love of God is. And he also wants us to know how powerful the immeasurable power of God is. The best idea of it that he can give us is in asking us to look at the most signal exercise of that power. At the Resurrection of our Lord, God’s power worked, well, most powerfully. The point of today’s sermon is simply this: You need to know God’s awesome Resurrection power.