Hello and welcome to the John Mark Homer Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host.

Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or others talking about spiritual formation in the body of Christ.

Happy Easter, everyone.

We're still in the middle of our For the Sake of Other series,

but in light of the holiday, we decided to pause that series and share an Easter teaching with you from John Mark

on the hope of the resurrection.

Here's John Mark.

Romans Chapter 8. Well again, welcome everybody if you're walking in late.

My name is John Mark and I'm another one of the leaders and we're so happy you're here.

It's been a wild ride since last Easter.

A white supremacy rally in Charlottesville turns into a war.

A car turns into a weapon, three dead, 33 wounded, and the soul of our nation cut open

yet again.

Then on the other side of the world, in Mindmar, our hopes for a transition to democracy

under a Nobel Peace Prize winner were smashed by the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya,

part of a much larger refugee crisis that we can't even agree on, much less fix. And to top it all

off, you have world leaders now threatening nuclear war on

Twitter. Is it just me, or does it feel like the world is falling apart at the seams? And it's not

just the classic, why do bad things happen to good people? It's deeper than that. It's like, I feel like,

so many of the people and places that we put our hope for the future in have been dashed on the rocks.

If you, like me, grew up at all in and around the 80s and 90s, we grew up in an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity, at least all across the Western world.

You had Clinton, you had an economic boom. You had Baywatch, like remember back in the day,

...