They Came Expecting Death

[00:00:00] Foreign. [00:00:10] Welcome back to another edition of the Weekday podcast. If you missed any of these, or if you want to share them with anybody, just send them to the website weekdaypodcast.com Today's scripture comes from Luke 24, verses 1 through 3. And we read this during the Easter season, it says, but on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb bringing spices which they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb. And when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. Now picture that it's early, earlier than anybody wants to be awake. The sun hasn't come up yet, the streets are quiet and the small group of women's walking through the city carrying burial spices, and they're heading towards a tomb just outside the walls of Jerusalem. They're not walking towards a miracle. They're not walking towards hope. They are walking towards grief. [00:00:56] Because that's what you do when someone you love dies and there's nothing left to do. You do the last kind thing that you can think of. These women had watched Jesus die. They were there for the cross, they saw the stone rolled across the tomb. And now three days later, they go back to do the one thing nobody else thought to do. [00:01:14] Now I wonder how many times we know that walk, not literally, but that low grade heaviness of someone who stopped expecting things to change. [00:01:23] Maybe you've been through enough to know that life doesn't always turn around. Maybe you've showed up today because, well, honestly, someone invited you into this podcast and it felt like the right thing to listen to. But underneath it all, not really expecting anything different to happen. [00:01:38] If that's you, stay with me. Because what happened when those women arrived at the tomb changed everything. They found the stone rolled away, they walked in and the body was gone. [00:01:48] They came expecting death and they found something that they didn't have a category for that moment. That empty tomb is the hinge of everything. The thing that seemed like the end turned out to be the beginning. And so today's step is whatever you came in carrying today, the heaviness, the low expectations, the quiet grief bring those honestly before God, he's not put off by it. He meets people exactly where they are. [00:02:15] They came expecting death. They found something they didn't have a category for. Have a great day. We'll see you back here soon.