Resurrection Life

David Wilkerson (1931-2011)

As Jesus lay silent in the grave, Satan and his hordes gloated. They thought they had won an irreversible victory; but all along, God’s foreordained plan was being put into operation. Christ's terrible death was part of the design for resurrection life!

The Lord sent his Holy Ghost down into the very bowels of death, and there the Spirit quickened Jesus’s body, raising him from the dead. Out of the grave stepped our blessed Savior, and he emerged with this testimony: “I am he who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore. Amen. And I have the keys of Hades and of Death” (Revelation 1:18, NKJV). Christ is saying here, “I am the one who has eternal life! I was dead, but I’m alive, now and forever. I hold the very keys to life and death in my hands.”

The moment Jesus walked out of death’s prison, he became the resurrection and the life. He did this not only for himself but for all who would believe on him from that day on. He has brought forth to us a resurrection life totally beyond death’s power. Thus, there is no longer any reason for a Christian to fear death or to see it as an enemy. Our Lord has conquered it completely: “…whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it” (Acts 2:24).

If you have received Jesus as your Savior and Lord, then he resides in you as a mighty power of resurrection life. The same resurrection power that brought him up out of the grave will sustain you as well. “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified” (2 Corinthians 13:5). You have within your being all that is in Christ, a powerful life force that Satan cannot destroy.

“For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man” (Ephesians 3:14-16).