Dear Brothers and Sisters, Prayer will be at the Burke home.

Our scripture study for this week is Matthew 27:57-66, where the scene changes from the CROSS to the GRAVE. The focus of this entire section is the grave itself, where the personalities and prophesies are displayed. All of the gospel writers give extensive attention to the burial of Jesus and how it was that He was laid in a grave. We often minimize the importance of the burial of Jesus even though His burial is explained in a total of 26 verses in the four Gospels. Matthew devotes a total of ten verses to this important aspect of the gospel message. First Corinthians 15:3-5 presents the importance of the burial, “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. As you can see, When Paul explains the Gospel, the burial was one of the three elements that form the structure of the gospel message. Jesus died and was buried. He did not give the appearance of dying – He died. He did not swoon. His body was not stolen. He did not escape in the night. His death was not faked. Of the many meanings of His burial, one sticks out to me as I write: By His burial you can know, in a very personal way, the power of the grave over you. In Colossians 2, the apostle Paul makes it clear that we have been buried and raised up with Him. His burial was our burial; His resurrection was our resurrection. We were “buried with Him in baptism, in which you also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead. And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses,14 having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. 15 Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.”

Don’t forget to pray for our Memorial Day Celebration. It is a wonderful opportunity to engage the community. Last year over 2000 people came.