If Christ has not been raised..." (I Cor. 15: 17a)

We like to be fooled. This is proved over and over everyday. We have lost all sense of values. We dare not face reality; we live in a make-believe world. We are escapists! We substitute wishes for wants, vanities for values and mistake dreams for reality. We have lost all sense of values. This was the analysis of our time as I heard it recently over the radio. The speaker used the buying of groceries as proof. I checked. He is right!

We have lost all sense of values. When we go for groceries whatdo we come home with? Values? No we come home with spacemen and shotguns, bulbs and buttons, pans and pictures. We buy soap boxes half filled with a face cloth, pudding with salt shakers, toothpaste with hairbrushes, and a score of other specials, super specials, coupons, "two for-the-price-of-one" items and "bargains-of-a-lifetime". It is true! We like to be fooled. We like to be fooled and we are being fooled. Yes, in religion too!

One quick glance at a Friday evening paper will confirm our "religious bargains". They are not all bad, but should there be need of such "specials" in our worship services as scouts, lodges; "salvation made simple" with brass and full orchestra, "You must hear.. . ", "Railroad men service", "Hindu fire walking and Zulu dances" and scores of other "specials" and attractions which may attract, but do they offer the only bargain the church has - Christ?

Frankly, it is frightening. Where is the power of the Church? Where is the attraction of Christ? Have we lost our Christian sense of values? Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain." (I Corinthians 15 :14.) The new Dutch Translation gives the meaning a bit more accurately: If Christ has not been raised ... then is our preaching without content and also is our faith without content. We may "have a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof; we may be serious but seriously wrong; we can roam heaven and earth for conversions, but not be converted ourselves; we can be sincere but sterile. For "If Christ has not been raised then we are "waterless clouds, carried along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars for whom the nether gloom of darkness has been reserved for ever." (Jude 12-13).

"If" is a stick of dynamite. Christ is risen. There is no "if" about that. Twenty centuries of Christianity could not be built on a tombstone or on a lie. Yet, "if" Christ is not living in you you are to be pitied. The Christian religion without a living Christ is not a bargain, no matter how attractive. The Christian religion lacking the living Christ is dead no matter how orthodox, how attractive, how special or even how miraculous - it is foolishness.

Christ is risen! That's a fact, but "if" He is not risen in your heart you are still to be pitied. Can you sing: