Telling the Truth

Guest (Male): How do you respond when a crisis hits? Do you use it to make life better or run away and hide? Maybe it depends on the situation. This time on Telling the Truth, Jill Briscoe talks about big obstacles that pop up in life and how the miracle of Easter and the resurrection of Jesus can change how you respond.

Jill opens her message in just a moment. Did you know you can find more life-giving content from the Briscoes at tellingthetruth.org and on the Telling the Truth app? There, you can sign up for daily devotions, watch videos, read blogs, and access a variety of other resources to help you experience life. And while you're there, you can also request this month's featured resource as thanks for your gift of support to help share the abundant life Jesus offers with more people around the world. Visit us online or download the app today and experience life with Telling the Truth. Now, here's Jill Briscoe with Easter in My Heart.

Jill Briscoe: I want to talk about what it means to have Easter in your heart. If you turn to the word of God with me to Mark's Gospel. I could have gone to any of the Gospels to read any of the Easter stories. I wanted one that dealt with women coming to Easter. I wanted one with women coming towards Easter Sunday with heavy hearts, and of course, I found it in all the Gospels.

But here there is a little bit of detail that I wanted to use in Mark chapter 16. When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, brought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus' body. And very early, the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, "Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb?" But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. And as they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed.

"Don't be alarmed," he said. "You're looking for Jesus the Nazarene who was crucified. He's risen. He's not here. See the place where they laid him? But go tell his disciples and Peter, he is going ahead of you into Galilee and there you will see him just as he told you." Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.

Now, if you read all of the Gospels, you will see almost contradictory statements. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. And yet, we read about Mary Magdalene rushing into the disciples and telling the disciples what she had seen and who she had met. And then in another of the Gospels, it looks as though some of the women went and told the disciples.

And so, it isn't that we have contradictions in the Word of God. It's just that if you have four people telling the same story, they see different things and hear different things and record different things. And that's why there are sometimes apparent contradictions in the things that you read if you read it all.

But what I wanted you to notice was that these women had been in a living nightmare. They had been living in a living nightmare. They had just witnessed a crucifixion. Now think about it. Not only must that have been the most incredible experience, I cannot imagine, but it was the crucifixion of someone they loved to distraction. It was the crucifixion of someone in whom all their hopes and dreams resided. And they had been no doubt traumatized by this.

I have two friends who have witnessed an execution. Anne Graham Lotz ministered to a woman who was being put to death in Texas because the lady asked her if Anne, who had led her to Christ on death row, would be with her. It took Anne probably two or three years to recover. I was with her shortly afterwards. She had lost weight. She couldn't sleep. I can't imagine.

And then I have another friend who lives in Milwaukee, who was instrumental in a very prominent situation again. A woman that was put to death in Texas. And Linda is a chaplain working at that facility, working with the women on death row. And she and Carla Faye, their life was just woven together. And Carla Faye asked the same thing: "Linda, would you be with me when the day comes?" And Linda, dreading that question, knowing it was coming, said yes. I don't know how many years it's taken Linda and whether she'll ever get over that particular experience.

And that in a sense was a lot more humane than this. And so we have women, ordinary women, women from Galilee, women that probably had never learned to read and write unless they were educated women, as many of these were actually. Mary Magdalene certainly and the other women that had followed Jesus, helping to support him out of their means, would be wealthy women and perhaps were educated.

But women were not educated in those days. And they had not probably in all of their lives ever faced such trauma. And they were out of context. They were up in the big city from the country. And they'd been through this incredible mob violence. And they had been there at the cross. John was there. Peter turned up eventually. The rest of the men were not there. But the women were watching from afar. And so they came to Easter Sunday having lived in that living nightmare with heavy hearts.

Now, the Chinese combined two characters for the word crisis. One means danger and the other opportunity. And these two possibilities are inherent in every crisis. A crisis is a crossroads, and the outcome is determined by which path is taken. When a person is described as critical in medical terms, it means he can either move towards life or move towards death. Just so the crisis of life presents not only danger but also opportunity.

Isn't that interesting? We come into a crisis. Now, all of us have experienced crisis in our lives. And when a crisis comes, remember you've got a crossroads. You can either use it and walk towards opportunities, or you can recognize the danger and freak out basically, run away and hide. Now, there was danger involved in this scene for these women. There was danger in making the burial ointment and daring to put their nose outside into those streets and actually go to the place that was guarded by the temple guard and possibly by the Romans.

They didn't know. They had no idea that Pilate had said to the temple guard, "You've got a guard. Go and make that tomb as safe as you can. Make sure nobody gets in it and nobody gets out of it. Just go and do your thing." They didn't know that. They had no idea what they would find. The only thing that they expected was a stone, a great big humongous stone, far too big for them to move. If they had known about the guard, I wonder if they would have gone. But they didn't.

Danger. Very dangerous for women in that particular situation, in that particular society, to do what they were going to do. And fear rises in danger, which can be torture. And yet a dangerous crisis can mean an opportunity to overcome the fear and do the right thing. It's an opportunity to find the risen life of Christ in this nightmare, in this living nightmare that they were living in.

So women should not have been where they were doing what they were going to do. That was a restricted area. It was a religious restricted area. They were women in a men's world in a way that you and I do not know what that means. We do not know what that means. They were women in a world gone mad. And please God, we should never know what that means. I have certainly been among women in those situations in this last year in danger that just beggars the mind. And here they were, walking towards the danger with no faith, just sheer obedience probably driving them.

Guest (Male): More powerful teaching from the Briscoes is headed your way, so don't go anywhere. We've made a wide array of resources and content available to you online for free at tellingthetruth.org and on the Telling the Truth app. There, you can listen, read, and watch powerful teaching from Stuart and Jill on relevant topics, like the sovereignty of God, the importance of the church, and how to grow closer with Jesus Christ. You can also request this month's featured resource as thanks for your gift of support to help share the abundant life Jesus offers with more people around the world. Visit us online or download the app today and experience life with Telling the Truth. Now, here's Jill Briscoe once again.

Jill Briscoe: But the biggest restriction for these women in a men's world, if you wish, was the stone. "Who will roll away the stone?" That's what the scriptures tell us. All they could think about was this great big stone. This impossibility. And some of you have come here today and there's a great big stone as you walk towards Easter this point in your life. It's impossible. There's nothing you can do about it.

So what are you doing anyway? There is this humongous difficulty, this incredible thing. Maybe it's a relationship and you're going to have to face it at a family gathering. And it's just huge and you've tried to do things about it before and what's the point? It's just too big. And even as the group, "Who is going to move away the stone?" There's five, six, seven women—we're not quite sure how many of those women were going to try and move away this stone. But it was too big for one of them certainly. It was too big for the group.

Have you ever been in a situation like that? You're moving timewise towards an impossibility. "Who will move away the stone? Who will move away the stone?" What a difficulty. Huge, immovable object, an obstacle. You're overwhelmed. Have you ever been overwhelmed? I have heard that word from some young women in my life in this last month. They are totally overwhelmed. Can't do it. It's too much. It's too big. It's too heavy. Too heavy for me.

And instead of moving towards it in faith, they're moving towards it in fear and in sorrow instead of joy, and in darkness instead of light. So I want to ask you, what is your stone at this point in your life? Now, you might say, well, Jill, you know, you might say these women had big things and maybe a crucifixion is bigger than my problem. Yes, okay, I'll give you that. But really, you don't understand. You don't understand the complexity of the stones in my life and the problems in my life.

Well, let's think of two of these women briefly for a minute. Mary Magdalene. She was delivered from seven demons. I mean real demons, there are such things. I mean demon demons of the nastiest kind. She was mad. She was absolutely crazy, driven crazy by these demons, spirits. You think you have problems? Try that. Try being possessed by seven demons.

She had a lot of things to prove once she came to faith and Christ cast them out. She had to prove she wasn't mad anymore. And what she did was take off after this nobody preacher, leave her home and her responsibilities and traipse around the countryside, which women never did. Rabbis had disciples but always men, never women. And start spending her money, which she had much, on him, supporting him out of her own means. Well, then everybody really thought she was mad. Now she was sane and she was mad.

And so here she is, facing no doubt ostracism, problems with her family. Here was Mary Magdalene. I don't believe this woman was a sinner woman in the sense of the sinner woman that came to Jesus. We get them mixed up. Nowhere in the scriptures do we see that she was sexually perverse, this woman. She was certainly inhabited by demons, which might have driven her that way, but if you look into the history of Mary Magdalene, that is not one of her characteristics.

She had many problems, but that wasn't one of them. But she had to prove herself and she was not going about it the right way and she would have known what it was to have her whole family on her back. "Why are you going to that church, that Galilean church? Didn't bring you up to do that. You should be sitting in the synagogue back home," etc., etc. So there are plenty of women in this Easter story no strangers to difficulties, and Mary of course was one of them.

But I tell you, there's another one, Joanna, wife of Chuza. He was Herod's steward. So she lived in the palace with Herod the puppet king and he was the one that beheaded John the Baptist. And she became a follower, probably first a secret believer in the Jewish preacher, in Jesus of Nazareth. And I wonder if Joanna was in the kitchen when they asked for a very big plate at the party, one big enough for a man's head. Probably.

What did Herod think when he heard his steward, his right-hand man, his steward's wife had taken off after the Baptist's cousin, traipsing around the country as a groupie? And what did Chuza think? Was he a believer too or wasn't he? Jesus had been taken in front of Herod to be tried. Chuza would have been there. Was he wondering where his wife was? He knew she was in Jerusalem, coming up for the feast turned disaster. Where was she now? Were his eyes going this way and that, trying to find her?

They were working at crucifying Jesus. Can you imagine what Chuza watching this was thinking? If they were going to do this to Jesus, what were they going to do to his followers? Where was his wife? So these women were no strangers to dangers and difficulties and obstacles to their faith.

But crisis is made up of danger and opportunity. Opportunity for what? To see what God alone can do with the most impossible, ridiculous situations. And Easter is all about taking the ridiculous and turning it into the miraculous. That's what Easter is about. And you know it's possible to experience an Easter in your heart and watch God's resurrection power at work.

Didn't mean all their dangers and difficulties would vanish when the women found out about the resurrection. They still had to pay taxes to Caesar. Herod was still doing his thing in Galilee where they lived. Paul or Saul the persecutor was on the horizon and Jesus had still been crucified. So it doesn't mean that the whole of their life was changed back to what they wished it had been. And often for us, that is the case.

But what had happened was the stone was rolled away. And what I think we do is we walk towards the difficulties in our life saying, "Who will remove this? How will I cope with this? What's going to happen?" And when we get there, the stone is rolled away. Just think, 90% of the things we worry about never happen. "Who will move away the stone? Who will move away the stone?" We freak out. We get there and there's an angel sitting on top of it and it's been moved. We needn't have bothered.

And so the danger and the difficulties were facing them and also the despair. They were overwhelmed and they had been overcome. The crisis. But the crisis is the crucible of faith, if we will allow it so to be. They had been in the crucible of watching. Watching. They hadn't slept. You can't. Somebody you love has just been crucified, has just died. I think about God who was watching his son from a distance on the cross and what that must have been like because he could have done something about it and chose, because he loved us as much as he loved Christ, not to.

Guest (Male): Now, here's Jill Briscoe to go a little deeper with some thoughts from today's message.

Guest (Female): Jill, you mentioned today that a large percent of what we worry about never even happens. How does a chronic worrier refocus their thoughts instead of worrying?

Jill Briscoe: Well, let me tell you something that, believe it or not, I've only just consciously started helping myself with on this. I wake up worrying. I mean, the first thought is a worry thought, still, after all these years. And so in the past, I have worried immediately and worried through breakfast, and I'm really looking forward to my time when I can worry in prayer with God and he's going to sort it out.

And it just occurred to me to invite him into my worrying as soon as I wake up. And it's made a huge difference. So immediately I wake up, here's the worry, I form a thought about the worry, and then I immediately, and it's a choice, invite him into the conversation. "So Lord, here I am again. I'm worrying all over again, all over again. Please give me a thought." And something from his Word immediately comes into my head. "Hey, this works." And I think, why didn't I figure this years and years ago? So what we do is we save it up for our prayer time, and by the time we get to our prayer time, we've added another hundred worries that come out of the first worry and where on earth do you start? And so just invite him into the first worry and ask him to remind you of a word from his Word.

Guest (Female): What would you say to that person who says, "Jill, you don't know how big my stone in front of my tomb is," and just feels helpless?

Jill Briscoe: It's a wonderful picture to me: who will move the stone? Here's the women at Easter walking towards this huge piece of masonry in front of the object of going and doing what they're going to do to see to the body of Jesus. "Who's going to move the stone? We're just little women. It's a huge piece of masonry. We're going to need men to do that," etc., etc. And when they get there, the stone is gone.

That's what I find. If you worry about who's going to move the stone, you might find when you get to the actual thing, the worry hasn't happened, or it's not as bad as you think, or the stone is smaller or it's manageable, or the stone is gone altogether. So don't waste your worry time worrying about the stone. Wait until you get there and then start worrying about it if you have to.

Guest (Male): Thanks, Jill. Tellingthetruth.org and the Telling the Truth app are great resources to help you grow in your spiritual life. Packed with videos like Ask the Briscoes, articles from Stuart and Jill, and encouraging audio teaching content, you'll find a treasure trove of resources to encourage you and others in your faith. And while you're there, you can also request this month's featured resource when you give a gift to help more people around the world experience life in Christ. So visit us online or download the app today. We look forward to connecting with you. Next time on Telling the Truth, it's more from the Briscoes about how you can experience abundant life in Christ when you open your life to be changed by God. We hope you'll be listening then.