How wonderful, on Easter Sunday, to celebrate the Christian hope – that death is not the end, and that we will be raised with Christ. Here are a few words from Mark, recorded about 8 months ago, which show how that hope has transformed his life.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, this is a book about “How the Resurrection changes everything.”

One of the central arguments of the book is that we Christians often spend a lot of time talking, singing and preaching about the death of Christ, without carrying on to talk, sing and preach about the vindication which followed. He demonstrates from the Bible how the two concepts of ‘death’ and ‘resurrection’ go together, and notes how much more air time ‘resurrection’ gets in New Testament preaching than ‘death’.

As such, this is a really timely reminder (in fact there seem to be a spate of such books – Sam Allberry’s Lifted: Experiencing the Resurrection Life being another example).

The book is saturated with Scripture which is a joy – barely a page goes by without us being pointed to some truth from the Bible. Dave Bish notes Adrian’s fondness for quoting Martin Lloyd Jones, and to this I would add Spurgeon and John Piper. But they are all Godly preachers worth hearing from and help us to see that this isn’t some novel doctrine he is presenting.

The first half of the book covers ’standard’ ground – but is a helpful summary and reminder of the Biblical teaching on resurrection, the apologetic defence of the resurrection, union with Christ etc. I am sure that I will come back to much of this again in my own studies and teaching.

The second half of the book seeks to work out some of the implications of the resurrection in our life as believers. I was delighted to be encouraged to reflect on what this ‘looks like’ in the Christian life, and challenged about how little of this ‘resurrection power’ I seem to experience day by day. Adrian’s theology would be more ‘charismatic’ than my default position, but he kept leading me back to the Scriptures to support his arguments and there was plenty to make me think.

I would certainly recommend this book. It will encourage you to look forward to the day when we will be finally raised with Christ and be like Him in our resurrection bodies; it will challenge you to think about the implications of that same power which raised Christ from the dead being at work in our bodies even now; and it will remind you that we worship a living, vindicated and raised Saviour. And hopefully it will help me with my Easter Sunday sermon too!

(you will find some more resources related to the book at http://raisedwithchrist.net/)