John 20:19–29
Every scar has a story. The one on my finger is from a knife I was told to leave alone. I didn’t listen. The one on my leg is from a bicycle crash I’d rather forget. And the one on my stomach is from a piece of metal that chipped off a steel chisel at exactly the wrong moment.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 10”
John 20:11–18
A man I read about was adopted at birth and grew up with no knowledge of his biological family. In his forties, a DNA service connected him with a half-sister he had never known. They exchanged careful, tentative messages for weeks. Then one afternoon she called him, and the moment he heard her voice, something unexpected happened. She said his name, and he wept.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 9”
1 Corinthians 15:12–24
A historian I read about spent two years trying to disprove the resurrection. He was not a believer, he was a skeptic, and he approached the accounts of Easter the way a detective approaches a crime scene: looking for inconsistencies, alternate explanations, reasons to dismiss. He catalogued the evidence on both sides. He interviewed scholars. He traced the manuscript traditions.
Two years later, he had not disproved it. He had, instead, found his objections answered one by one, until what remained was a historical event he could not explain away. He became a Christian not by feeling but by following the evidence where it led.
Paul made the same kind of argument to the Corinthian church. Some believers there had begun to doubt whether resurrection was real, perhaps, like many in the Greek world, they found a bodily resurrection philosophically distasteful. Paul responded with bracing logic: if there is no resurrection, then Christ was not raised. And if Christ was not raised, then your faith is empty, your sins are unforgiven, and those who have died in Jesus are simply gone (1 Corinthians 15:17–18, ESV).
He did not soften this. The resurrection is not decorative to Christianity. It is load bearing. Everything hangs on it. If the tomb is still occupied, the whole structure collapses. What Christ has been raised from the dead means is not a footnote to the faith. It is the foundation.
But, and this is the word that changes everything, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:20, ESV). The verb is perfect tense: a past event with ongoing, permanent effect. He rose, and He remains risen. Death has been defeated, not in theory but in fact, in history, in a garden outside Jerusalem on a Sunday morning.
This Good Friday, we pause at the cross, not because the story ends there, but because it can’t be skipped. The resurrection is glorious precisely because the death was real. He carried what we could not carry, so that we might live what we could not live on our own.
What doubts have you carried about the resurrection? How would your daily life look different if you lived as though Christ’s resurrection were the most certain fact in your world?
Risen Christ, thank You for dying a death that was real so that You could offer a life that is eternal. I choose today to build everything on the truth of an empty tomb.
Psalm 2
A photojournalist who covered conflict zones for twenty years described what she called the hardest moment of her career. Not the violence she’d witnessed, but a single night in a city under siege when she genuinely believed darkness was going to win. The brutality seemed total, the cruelty organized, the hope of liberation absurd.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 7”
Exodus 2:23–25
For eighteen months, a woman I know wrote weekly letters to her estranged adult daughter who refused all contact. She never knew if the letters were read, returned, or thrown away. The silence was total. She kept writing anyway, because the love didn’t stop just because the replies did.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 6”
John 14:1–10
Maybe you’ve been there. You’re hiking a trail, the fog rolls in thick, and suddenly you can barely see five feet ahead. Your map is useless, all the landmarks you’d been following have disappeared. You’re standing at a fork in the trail, genuinely unsure which way leads back to the trailhead and which leads deeper into the backcountry.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 5”
John 13:6–20
A master woodworker once described the most discouraging phase of any project: the middle. “The beginning is exciting,” he said. “You have vision, you have energy. The end is satisfying, you can see the finished piece. But the middle? The middle just looks like a mess of sawdust and mistakes. That’s when most people quit.”
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 4”
Romans 8:18–27
A cellist I once heard interviewed said something that has stayed with me for years. She was asked which pieces she found most moving to perform. Without hesitation, she said the slow, mournful ones, the adagios, the elegies, the laments. “There’s something in sadness,” she explained, “that reaches for what beauty is supposed to be. Joy tells you it exists. Longing tells you where to look.”
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 3”
Romans 5:1–11
I read about a woman who spent three years training for a marathon she never ran. A stress fracture sidelined her two weeks before race day. She said later that the hardest part wasn’t the physical pain, it was the quiet, creeping question that followed her for months: What’s the point of all this effort if it can be taken away so easily?
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 2”
Luke 19:1–10
When my son was five, he slipped away from me at a local county fair. One moment his hand was in mine; the next, he was gone. I pushed through the crowd, heart hammering, calling his name above the noise. Four long minutes later, I found him near the funnel cake booth, perfectly calm, watching a pig race. He had no idea I’d been searching frantically. But I had come for him, because he was mine, and I was not leaving without him.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 1”Easter is an important day for all Christians. It’s important because Jesus rose from the grave, victorious over death and sin, and promises the same to us. Numerous passages in Scripture equate that truth.
Continue reading “A lesson on Easter”As I began preparing for this week’s bulletin article, I quickly realized that I have never written an article about Easter. I’m not sure why I have never broached the subject. Perhaps, it’s about the traditional view of the church and the fact that most still participate. Continue reading “What is the point of Easter?”
Central Haywood Church of Christ 