I shall testify nothing
if not Jesus Christ and Him crucified
whom God presented
as a sacrifice of atonement
the righteous for the unrighteous,
to bring us to God;
for while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us;
in this Way God demonstrated
his own love for us:
reconciling the world
to himself in Christ.
Since Christ was raised from the dead,
he cannot die again;
death no longer has mastery over him:
He has destroyed death,
and has brought life and immortality
to light through the gospel;
for Christ did not enter a sanctuary
manufactured with human hands,
but entered heaven itself,
now to appear for us in God’s presence;
He was put to death in the body
but made alive in the Spirit.
There is one God,
and one mediator between God and mankind:
the man Christ Jesus;
there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom all things came,
and through whom we now may live;
God made his light shine in our hearts
to give us the knowledge of His glory;
this is how we know what love is:
Jesus Christ laid down his life for us
and we ought to follow, and lay down our lives
for the sake of our brothers and sisters.
Day Three of Na/GloPoWriMo2017, and today’s challenge is to write an elegy – a poem that mourns or honours someone dead or something gone by, centred on an unusual fact about the person or thing being mourned. In this case, as I look ahead a couple of weeks to Easter, we mourn Good Friday’s sacrifice, but rejoice in Easter’s resurrection, inspired by the words of Paul the Apostle’s various letters to the New Testament church.