Kerry Shook - The Colors of Easter
Happy Easter, Woodlands Church! How you doing? Yeah, you can be seated. You look great! By the way, as I look out over our auditorium at our Easter services, I’m always struck by all the bright and brilliant colors that you’re wearing. You break out the yellow, the purple, the blue, the red, the pink. And Easter is the time to wear those spring colors. Easter and colorful, they just go together. It just makes sense because when we experience the reality of the resurrection in our lives, then our lives go from being boring black and white to the highest definition and brilliant colors.
To experience the power of the resurrection, I want us to examine the true colors of Easter, and they’re not pastel. The first color of Easter is green. Green symbolizes life and growth. Some people are just naturally good at cultivating a beautiful, lush garden, and we say they have a green thumb. Green symbolizes a garden of growth, the garden of life.
To understand Easter, you’ve got to go back to the first garden, the Garden of Eden. God put Adam and Eve in this perfect place, the Garden of Eden. It was a garden of life, a garden of fulfillment, a garden of connection. And you were created for a connection with your creator in a garden of total fulfillment. And God told Adam, «I want you to enjoy all that I’ve given you, all that I’ve created for you. You can eat the fruit of all the trees in this garden except for one. It’s off-limits.»
And God said, «Don’t eat the fruit of this one tree, or you’ll surely die.» God said that because he loved them. He knew what was best for them. He created them, and he wanted them to trust him. But Adam and Eve didn’t trust God. They thought they knew what was best, and they disobeyed God.
And the moment they took a bite out of the apple, everything changed. They didn’t die physically; that would happen years later. But that wasn’t what God was talking about. You see, the moment that they sinned, at that very moment when they disobeyed God, they immediately felt the consequences of their sin: guilt and shame, anxiety, frustration, fear, resentment, emptiness, and total separation from God-spiritual death.
Look what it says in Romans 3:23 because the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin were passed on to us: «For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.» Now, all means all. All includes all of us. None of us are perfect. We’ve all disobeyed God.
Now, doctors tell us that our blood cholesterol levels come from two sources. First is heredity. I mean, we inherit certain genes from our bloodline that affect our blood cholesterol level. But the other source is the food choices that we make. And that’s the way it is with sin. Sin is spiritual cholesterol, and it keeps us from living from our true heart.
And sin comes from two sources. First, it’s in our bloodline. We inherited from Adam and Eve this bent toward sin, this desire to do what we want instead of what God wants. It just comes naturally for us as human beings. And that’s why, when you have little ones, if you’re a parent, you have to teach your kids to share. It doesn’t come naturally.
You know a two-year-old has another two-year-old playing with them at a little playdate, and they’re trying to play with the same toy. It doesn’t work out very well, does it? You never see a two-, three -, or four -year-old saying, «Here’s my toy. Please use it. It’s my favorite. I want you to have it.»
Well, first, they can’t talk like that, but anyway, you get the point. You know, I mean, you have to teach your kids to share. Now, one of my granddaughters, when she was about four years old, took it upon herself to teach her younger sister how to share. It’s like she’d grab a toy, «No, share! You need to learn to share!» So maybe that’s what we’re doing, trying to help each other out.
You know, maybe your job is to teach someone else to share, but we just have this bent toward selfishness, toward wanting our own way. It’s inherited in our bloodline from Adam and Eve. But we can’t blame Adam and Eve for everything because we’ve also all made choices. We’ve all chosen to take a bite out of the apple.
We’ve all sinned. Nobody’s perfect. We’ve all disobeyed God. We’ve all fallen short of his perfection. And the Bible says that the color of sin is scarlet. It’s crimson. It’s red because it’s in our bloodline as human beings.
But this next verse is great news. God says this in Isaiah 1:18: «No matter how deep the stain of your sins, I can take it out and make you as clean as freshly fallen snow. Even if you are stained as red as crimson, I can make you white as wool.»
See, every one of us have these deep crimson stains on our soul. Now, most of the time, you can’t see it on the outside, but on the inside, we all have stains on our soul. Now, with some people, you can see it on the outside. It’s just so evident, and they’re not trying to hide it. And those are the people that we judge so often. We look down on.
But let’s be honest, we all have stains on our soul. It’s just that most of us are pretty good at covering it up. But we’re all broken. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all messed up. We all have made mistakes. We all have regrets. We’ve all sinned.
But the great news is, because of Easter, no matter how deep the stain of your sins, God says, «I can remove it. Even if you’re stained as red as crimson, I can make you as clean as freshly fallen snow.»
Have you ever spilled something red on a shirt? Maybe red wine or barbecue sauce? I mean, it’s so hard to get out! Now, one time, I put a pen in the pocket of a new shirt, and the pen leaked, and there was this huge ink stain on my shirt. Ink, man, that’s the toughest!
But I thought I’d just put a little shout on it and scrub it, and I’ll shout it out. You’re not seeing the commercial, so this ought to work. And all it did was make the stain bigger and worse. And we try to remove the stains on our soul ourselves, and we just make it worse!
Sometimes we try to wash away the stains on our soul by doing good things to try to win God’s approval. We think if we do good things, then God’s going to love us more. If we do good works, then maybe we’ll get into perfect heaven. But the stains are too deep for us to remove, even with our good works.
We just make it worse. Or we compare ourselves to others. We judge them to make ourselves feel better, and we think, «Well, at least I’m not that bad.» But that does nothing to cleanse the stains on our soul. There’s only one who can get rid of the crimson stain on our souls, and that’s the only perfect one who shed his blood on the cross.
And that’s why red is also the most beautiful color of Easter because it’s the color of the precious and priceless blood of the Son of God that cleanses us from the stain of our sins.
Look at Colossians 1:20. It says, «He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.» One drop of Christ’s perfect and powerful blood did what all of my blood, sweat, and tears could never do: take away the stain of my guilt and sin.
The most beautiful color of Easter is red because of the sinless blood of the Savior that washes away our sins. And that brings me to white, the color of forgiveness. And the Bible says, «Even if our stain is deep crimson, because of Christ’s blood we can be washed white as snow.»
Look at 1 John 1:9. This is really, you know, the verse I call it God’s detergent verse. Easter is God’s detergent. You know it says, «If we say that we have no sin, we’re only fooling ourselves.» So if you say, «Oh, I’ve never sinned,» then you just sinned because you lied, because we’ve all sinned.
And it says we refuse to accept the truth, but if we confess our sins to him, he can be depended on to forgive us and to cleanse us from every wrong. And it is perfectly proper for God to do this for us because Christ died to wash away our sins.
Because of Easter, no matter how deep the stain of your sins, Christ’s blood can wash it away, and your soul will be totally cleansed as white as freshly fallen snow. But you can’t pretend it’s not there. You can’t minimize it. You can’t deny it.
You can’t think that you can take care of it yourself by being good enough. No, you just have to confess it. You just confess it to him and admit you’re like everyone else. You’ve missed the mark. You’ve sinned. And then he cleanses you and gives you a fresh start, as white as freshly fallen snow, brand new.
Easter is all about forgiveness. A fresh start. Because of Easter, guilt is unnecessary. Shame is unnecessary because all we have to do is to admit to God that we’ve sinned, admit to God that we need him to cleanse the stain on our soul with his Son’s precious blood. And it’s a free gift. We could never do it ourselves.
When we receive Christ’s free forgiveness that we could never deserve, he takes away our guilt. He takes away our sins. But he also changes our bloodline. Look at Ephesians 1:5. It says, «God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.»
Because of our bloodline to Adam and Eve, we were disconnected from the garden of true fulfillment. We were disconnected from God, separated from God, perfect, holy God who loves us so much. We were on the outside looking in. But Christ made us right with God. And out of God’s love for us, he adopted us into his family, totally connected to him so we can receive all the blessings that belong to someone who is part of his family.
Our son Josh and his wife Kelly adopted three years ago a beautiful boy named Elijah. Elijah is now three years old. Here’s a picture of Elijah. He is the happiest boy you’ll ever meet! But when Josh and Kelly adopted Elijah, he got a new bloodline. He wasn’t just adopted into their family; he also became part of our whole family.
At the moment he was adopted, I became his granddad, Chris became his nanny, and our parents became his great-grandparents. So not only does Elijah have a birth mother and father and birth grandparents and a lineage going back with them, he also has a new bloodline going all the way back in Josh and Kelly’s families.
And when you receive Christ’s free gift of forgiveness, you get adopted into the bloodline because of Jesus' blood on the cross. You become one of God’s kids, with all the privileges and blessings of being a part of his family. If you’re a Christ follower, you’ve been adopted into his family. You’re a child of God! That means you have a royal bloodline. You have royalty running through your veins. You’re a child of the King of Kings. You have the rights to all the blessings and privileges of the family of God.
You’re in God’s family because of Jesus, the King of Kings! Let’s celebrate! Is that good news, Woodland Church? Yeah! We are a family, all part of the body. Father, you’ve given us a blessed inheritance; we’re no longer orphans. You call us your children. You won’t withhold from us a holy deliverance.
So prune back, cut down every curse against us. As we breathe deep, drink in every single blessing. You are the God of my fathers. You are the God of my mothers. You’ve been faithful for all time. You turn the old into new wine. Because you are good on your promise, because of the mercy of Jesus, you bring us in from the outside. We’re welcomed into the bloodline.
So prune back, cut down every curse against us as we breathe deep, drink in every single blessing. You are the God of my fathers. You are the God of my mothers. You’ve been faithful for all time. You turn the old into new wine because you are good on your promise. Because of the mercy of Jesus, you bring us in from the outside. We’re welcomed into the bloodline.
Oh, hallelujah! And that means joy, and that means healing. Generations finding freedom. We claim it now! We claim it now! We claim it now in Jesus' name! Those old days and nights are over! Every chain and curse be broken! We break it now! We break it now! We break it now in Jesus' name!
And we see joy and we see healing. Generations finding freedom. We claim it now! We claim it now! We claim it now in Jesus' name!
Oh, in your name! Can we stand and sing together? What a mighty name!
We worship you, Father. Death could not hold you! The veil tore before you! You silence the post of sin and grave. The heavens are roaring the praise of your glory, for you are raised to life again.
And you have no rival! You have no equal! Now and forever, God, you reign!