Minister: Lift up your hearts!
Congregation: We lift them up to the Lord!
Our Father and gracious God, You are the God who raises the dead. You speak to dead nothing, and a vibrant, living universe appears. You speak to the inanimate world, and every manner of teeming life appears, from the grass, to the fish, to the birds, and to the animals that walk on the ground. You shaped dead earth into the form of a man, and breathed into it the breath of life. You are the triune and living God, and all that You do brings life.
When our first parents sinned against Your words of life, and fell away from the tree of life, being exiled from it, Your words of promise followed after us. We were plunged into the death of insanity and rebellion, and yet You promised life to us.
You, the Author of life, gave Your only begotten Son to be born of a woman, born under the law. You sent Him to dwell among us, and He did so, living with us in the midst of our walking death. In the land of darkness, a great light appeared. In the valley of the shadow of death, a woman from our dead race somehow gave birth to a child who was truly alive.
Our dead fathers did not know what to do with this strange apparition, a man who was truly alive, and so they killed Him. But even this was part of Your purpose—they only did what Your purpose and will had foreordained to happen. And on that glorious resurrection morning, two thousand years ago, we were given the first glimpse of what that purpose was. Death was swallowed up by victory.
It was not Your intention to abandon us to the realm of insanity, rebellion and death that we had chosen, and defiantly embraced as the only realistic option. Your Son died, took hold of us in the grave, and brought us back to the land of the living.
And so, gracious Father, we worship You now through Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end, amen
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