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.
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”
Jeremiah 1:5
Most of us have been chosen for something at least once. A team in high school, a committee at work, a seat on some board nobody else wanted. You remember that feeling, right? Somebody looked at you and said, “We want you.” It felt good. But then Monday rolls around, and whatever we were chosen for starts to feel pretty ordinary. The excitement wears off. The responsibility doesn’t.
Continue reading “The Call That Changes Everything”Isaiah 64:8
There’s something about finding an old coffee mug your dad used to drink from every morning. You pick it up and it all comes back, the way he’d sit at the table before anyone else was awake, the quiet steadiness of his presence. A good father doesn’t announce himself. He’s just there, reliable and close, even when you weren’t paying attention.
Continue reading “The Name He Chose for Himself”
Isaiah 58:11
Have you ever been completely lost? Not the kind of lost where your phone reroutes you in thirty seconds, but the real kind. The road ahead unfamiliar and nothing behind you looking right either. Maybe it wasn’t a highway. Maybe it was a hard conversation, a medical decision, or a week where every option felt wrong. We’ve all stood in that fog, hoping somebody could point the way.
Continue reading “The Guide Who Walks With Us”
Isaiah 53:4-7
It’s a question I’ve been asked more than a few times, usually over coffee, sometimes in a hospital room, occasionally from someone sitting in the back pew with tears they’re trying to hide. Why did Jesus have to die? The truth is, it’s not an easy question to explain. Not because the answer isn’t there, but because the weight of it is almost too much to hold in a single conversation.
Continue reading “Why Did Jesus Have to Die?”
Isaiah 50:10
There are stretches in life when you do everything right and still feel lost. You read your Bible. You pray. You show up on Sunday. And yet the fog stays. The confusion lingers. Some of us are walking through one of those stretches right now, and the hardest part isn’t the darkness itself. It’s wondering whether we did something wrong to end up in it.
Continue reading “When the Dark Won’t Lift”
Isaiah 43:18-19
There’s a strange tension in walking with God, one that shows up in the most ordinary moments. You’re supposed to remember His faithfulness, to rehearse His past rescues and miracles, to keep them close like stones in your pocket. But then Scripture turns around and tells you to forget. Not everything, but something. And honestly, figuring out which is which can feel like trying to fold a fitted sheet.
Continue reading “Remember and Forget”
Central Haywood Church of Christ 