Special Edition · April 5, 2026 · Easter

Most of us know how to say the resurrection. We know when to smile and say,
He is risen. We know where to stand. We know when to sing.

And I am not talking about fake faith.

I mean real faith. Church people. Bible people. The kind of people who mean it when they say they believe Jesus got up from the grave. They believe the stone was rolled away. They believe the tomb was empty. They believe the women saw what they saw. They believe death lost that morning.

But then Thursday comes.

And Thursday is not nearly as easy to preach as Sunday.

Thursday is bills and bad news and a body that hurts and a marriage that feels tired and a prayer life that sounds like it is hitting sheetrock and falling to the floor. Thursday is when a person finds out whether the resurrection is a doctrine on paper or a world they actually live in.

That is the tension I cannot get away from.
Not whether you believe Easter happened. A lot of people do.

The harder question is this: Has the resurrection become present tense in your life... or is it sitting back there somewhere in the past, true but quiet, important but not exactly intrusive?

Shrink

I think this is what happens to many of us. We do not deny the resurrection. We just shrink it.

We keep it in the sanctuary. We keep it in the hymns. We keep it in the annual calendar. We keep it where it can inspire us without interrupting us.

That is the part that gets me.

Because if Jesus is really risen, not just in the historical sense, not just in the one-day-I-go-to-heaven sense, but alive now, reigning now, present now... then that changes the emotional architecture of ordinary life.

It means the places I have already marked dead might not be dead in the way I think they are. It means the grief I have tried to make peace with may not get the last word. It means the cold marriage, the wandering child, the exhausted mind, the shame I thought would outlive me... all of it now sits under a different sky.

And if that is true, then resurrection is not a holiday. It is a threat to despair.

Maybe that is why we keep making it smaller. Because a living Christ is much harder to manage than a risen Christ we only visit once a year.

The Verse That Will Not Leave Me Alone

Paul says something in Romans that is almost too big to say out loud.
"The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you." – Romans 8:9

Not visited you. Not brushed up against you. Lives in you.

That is not decorative theology. That is not the kind of verse you stitch on a pillow and move on from. That is the kind of verse that should make you put your Bible down for a minute and just sit there. Because if that is true, then resurrection has already crossed your front door. Not someday. Now.

The Spirit who shattered the logic of the grave does not wait politely for your funeral to become relevant. He brings the life of Christ into fear, fatigue, grief, temptation, regret, and all the rooms we would rather keep shut.

I think a lot of us believe in resurrection power in theory. But in practice... we are still arranging our lives around the assumption that certain things are final.

Where I Get Caught

I know how to preach Easter. I know how to stand up and talk about victory over death. I know how to tell people the tomb is empty.

What I do not always know how to do is live like it is still true on an ordinary day when nothing is moving.

I have believed in a risen Christ and still walked into situations as if the ending had already been written in ink. I have prayed with my mouth while my inner life was already bracing for silence. I have looked at some parts of life and quietly decided,
This will never change. This will never heal. This will always hurt like this.

That is not unbelief in the formal sense. It is something murkier than that. It is functional past-tense Christianity. It is saying Jesus rose... while living as if death still has naming rights over half my life.

Thursday Faith

So what does Easter look like when the lilies are gone and the choir robes are hung back up?

Maybe resurrection faith on a Thursday looks like this:

• Praying like God is in the room, not out on the edge of the universe taking messages.
• Walking into a painful conversation without deciding beforehand that nothing good can happen there.
• Refusing to call a person, a marriage, a season, or your own soul hopeless while Jesus is alive.
• Letting grief be grief, but not letting grief become lord.
• Admitting that what feels dead to you may not be dead to Him.

That is not hype. That is not positive thinking. That is simply what it means to take Easter out of the sermon and drag it into your actual week.

A Harder Question

I think the church has done a decent job asking, "Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?" That matters. It matters deeply.

But maybe we have not asked the second question often enough: Are you living like He is still alive?

Not abstractly. Not poetically. Not as a statement of orthodoxy. I mean in your fear. In your bitterness. In your parenting. In your body. In the prayer you almost stopped praying because you got tired of hearing yourself ask for the same thing.

Where have you already closed the file? Where have you declared the story finished while the risen Christ is still standing there with nail marks in His hands?

This Week

If I were going to leave you with anything, it would just be a few honest questions to carry around for a week.

Where in your life have you treated the resurrection as past tense?

What would change if you prayed today like Jesus is not only risen, but present?

What is the one place in your life that most needs resurrection right now? Name it. Do not clean it up. Just name it.

Because when you name it, you are bringing it out from under the rule of silence. You are saying, This hurts. This looks dead. But I am not ready to hand final authority to the grave.

Easter is not only something to remember. It is something to live inside. Even on Thursday.

— Pastor Mike

From Pulpit to Page is a reflection from Pastor Mike and Red River Baptist Church.

This special Easter edition is for anyone who has ever believed the resurrection and wondered why it does not feel like enough.