How Many Nails in Easter?

How Many Nails in Easter?The answer is five, Easter has five nails.On what do hang your hopes? Good luck? Your wealth? Your health? Your family and friends? Your own intelligence? An experimental drug? …?What nail does your future hang on? Your charisma? Some special ability? …?I have seen my fair share of rusty, bent, and failed nails - in hospital rooms, hospice beds, at crash sites, in treatment centers, living rooms, jails, prisons, counseling sessions, and at gravesides. I have not only seen them I have experienced failed nails in my own life, the pain, the confusion, the grief, and disappointment that comes with hanging life on the wrong nails.Those Easter nails are significant because they offer us our only shot at real hope, lasting life, getting it right before God. You hang your hopes and your life on anything else and you will in the end find it all broken on the floor like a picture that has fallen off the wall.Five nails. Three made sure Jesus really died. They fastened his hands and feet to a cross until every ounce of his life was drained out. On those three nails hang the redemptive purposes of God. God sacrificed his own Son so that by his death we might have life. One nail held Pilate’s sign posted above Jesus’ head, declaring “the King of the Jews.” Pilate made a common mistake. He didn’t think Jesus had any significance for him. He didn’t post his complete title, “King of Kings, and Lord of Lords." He, like you and I, should have hung his life on Jesus’ identity, but he relegated Jesus to only having significance for the Jews, good for someone else. He stuck with the rusty nails of his own beliefs. And there is the fifth nail, the one that nailed God’s indictment of each one of us to the cross of Christ, the one that lists our personal sins and transgressions, the one that renders each one of us guilty before God. Paul reminded the Colossians who had trusted in Christ, “He made you alive with Him (Christ) and forgave us all our trespasses. He erased the certificate of debt, with its obligations, that was against us and opposed to us, and has taken it out of the way by nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:13-14 (HCSB, parenthesis mine). It is the nail that spells hope and life for sinners.This Easter examine the nails and make sure  your hopes, your future, your life hangs on the Easter nails.To God be all glory, love you, Pastor Hans