Teach This Unforgettable Easter Lesson In Youth Ministry

The beautiful thing about youth ministry is that there are hundreds of topics you can choose to walk through with your students. You want to spend three years in Romans? Done. Feel like talking about friendship for 5 weeks? Great. Fancy a skip through the classic Old Testament stories? Love it. The world is your oyster when it comes to lesson planning—for 95.2% of the year. But every spring, there comes a week where there’s really only one appropriate thing to talk about. Teaching on the Easter story doesn’t have to be repetitive. There’s so much power in it, and there has been a ton of power in the Easter story for me personally lately. So if you’re looking to mix things up, teach this unforgettable Easter lesson in youth ministry this year.  

Why Easter Is Personal For Me This Year

I don’t mean to state the obvious, but Easter is a story of resurrection. In fact, it’s really THE story of resurrection. The fact that Jesus overcame sin, death, and the grave is a powerful proclamation of His power and glory. And the reason it matters so much for us is because if He did it for us, He can do it in us. We, too, can experience resurrection and new life—both in this life and the life to come.

I’ve been experiencing a lot of that new life lately.

Over the past year, I’ve grown immensely as a follower of Jesus. I’m far more empathetic with the people around me. I have become a very patient and dependable father. The Lord has taught me how to pursue goals without sacrificing people. I have shed many of the excuses and wounds that held me back for years. I say sorry a lot now, and I mean it, and it doesn’t kill me to say it out loud.

Maybe those are weird examples of new life. But they’re real. And they’re mine. Jesus has been molding me experientially into the new creation I already am positionally, and it’s been amazing to see.

So this Easter means a lot more to me than some have in the past. It feels good to roll that stone away!

The Flip Side Of Easter

But the flip side of my story leads to the unforgettable Easter lesson you should consider teaching your students in a few weeks. The flip side of my story is that I’m in the middle of the hardest two-year stretch of my entire life, and it continues to get harder.

My family of five was displaced from our home in fall 2023 from an accident. Navigating that insurance claim has been exhausting, frustrating, and extraordinarily expensive. Shortly after the beginning of our displacement, my family of five became a family of seven—as God called us to adopt two teenagers we knew from our community. That brought its own set of challenges (all of them worth it). By spring of 2024, our home had been stripped to the studs. It has remained in that condition, completely unchanged, for over a year now. As of this post, we still have no date set on when our family of seven will be able to return home.

Now, listen. You’ve probably been through harder things. There are worse things in life than being displaced. There are probably pieces of your story that I would never in a million years want to experience.

But can I just be honest? This. Has. Been. SO. Hard. Raising a newly blended family in the midst of what will be a years-long displacement has been so hard. And doing it has caused some things to die in me that needed to die. There are some things the Holy Spirit needed to put to death within me that have been put to death due to my family’s circumstances.

Selfishness. Weakmindedness. Resistance to change. Scarcity mentality. Ego. Hyper independence. Idolatry. And so many more. They had to die.

Because in order for there to be resurrection, something’s first gotta die.

Teach This Unforgettable Lesson In Youth Ministry

Some of your students want resurrection, but they don’t want anything in them to have to die. They want God to bring them happiness, comfort, and success, but they don’t want to God to lead them through the forges of life. There could be no resurrection of Jesus if Jesus wasn’t willing to die. And we cannot experience the power of Christ’s resurrection in our lives if we aren’t willing to allow the Holy Spirit to put some things in us to death.

For some of your students, their dependence on their phone needs to kick buckets.

Some of your students need to let the Holy Spirit unalive their insecurity.

You’ve got a few students with some trust issues that need to push daisies.

And while no human being dreams of hardship, this Easter you get to teach them that the hardships God allows us to experience might just be setting us up for a season of resurrection.

There is no resurrection without death. So what might God be trying to kill in you?

Closing Thought

I really hope this particular season of hardship is ending. I haven’t shared everything (because you aren’t my therapist, and this blog post has a point), but it’s been hard. I don’t know, though. New potential threats and challenges keep popping up. It feels like I might be here a while. But in the meantime, I want to be a Christian who actively worships God for the resurrecting power of Christ at work in me through the hardships.

I think we all want that for our students. So teach your students this unforgettable lesson in youth ministry this year. There is no resurrection without death.

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