Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight people and groups from that first Easter. Twenty-eight chances to see ourselves in the story — not as distant observers, but as participants.

That series is now complete, and I’m grateful for every reader who walked it with me.

Before I start thinking about what’s next, I’d love to hear from you. A short survey — five minutes or less — would mean a lot. Your honest feedback helps me write better, and it helps me figure out how to get this material into more hands next Easter and how to shape the next series.

Take the Survey here - https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSckcf16TicDI0nTSI286N5MNAVMmgW3F5l9-Zx9DOInXOm8qw/viewform?usp=publish-editor

Your answers will help shape what is next.

Thank you for reading and traveling with me. Thank you for being honest with your feedback. That’s not a small thing and I greatly value it!

— Steve

Day 28: We Were the Ones the Tomb Was Emptied For

Matthew 28:1-10; Romans 4:25; 2 Corinthians 5:21

Introduction

The stone was rolled away.

Not to let Jesus out — He had already left. The stone was rolled away so that we could look in. So that the women could step inside and find the folded grave clothes and the two angels and the absence that would change everything. So that Peter could stoop and enter and wonder. So that the whole world, across all the centuries that would follow, could peer into an empty tomb and be confronted with the question that has no comfortable middle ground:

If this is true — what does it change?

Everything. It changes everything!

We have spent twenty-seven days looking into mirrors. We have seen ourselves in the crowd that shouted Hosanna and then crucified Him. In the disciples who slept in the garden and fled at the arrest. In Peter warming himself at the fire, in Judas counting silver, in Pilate washing his hands, in the soldiers casting lots. We have seen our fickleness, our self-protection, our capacity for betrayal dressed up as something more respectable. We have been there at every turn — not as casual observers, but as participants.

And now we are here. Easter morning. The tomb is empty.

And the empty tomb is not despite us. It is for us.

This is the day the whole story was building toward. Not just the resurrection of Jesus — though that alone would be the most significant event in human history. But the resurrection of everything the Jesus accomplished on the cross. The Father’s verdict spoken over the Son. The exchange made complete. The power of sin and death broken at its root. And us — complicit, fickle, beloved us — standing at an open tomb with our names written all over the reason it had to happen.

We were there that first Easter. We are the ones the tomb was emptied for.

Scripture

¹ After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb. ² There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. ⁴ The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.

⁵ The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”

⁸ So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.

— Matthew 28:1-8 (NIV)

He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.

— Romans 4:25 (NIV)

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

— 2 Corinthians 5:21 (NIV)

Reflection

The Father’s Verdict

The cross, taken alone, looks like defeat.

A man executed by the state. Abandoned by his friends. Mocked by the crowd. Buried in a borrowed tomb. If the story ends on Friday, it ends as tragedy — one more prophet silenced, one more flame extinguished by the machinery of empire and religion.

But the Father had the last word. And the last word was the empty tomb.

When Jesus came up out of the water at His baptism, the Father’s voice broke through: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” A declaration of identity. A commissioning for the work ahead. And now, on the other side of everything — the temptation, the ministry, the betrayal, the cross, the death, the three days of silence — the resurrection is the Father speaking again.

Well done. Mission accomplished. This is my beloved Son — and in Him I am well pleased.

Paul puts it precisely in Romans: Jesus “was raised to life for our justification.” The resurrection is not separate from the cross — it is the Father’s public declaration that the cross worked. That the payment was accepted. That the debt has been cleared. That what Jesus said from the cross — “It is finished” — was not the last gasp of a defeated man but the triumphant declaration of a completed mission.

The empty tomb is the Father’s receipt. The transaction is confirmed - Paid in Full. The redemption of creation has begun.

And that redemption is not a small thing. It is not merely the forgiveness of individual sins, though it is that completely. It is the reversal of everything that went wrong at the beginning — the restoration of the relationship between Creator and creation that sin had fractured. Easter Sunday is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the end of everything broken. The first day of the new creation.

The Exchange

Here is what the cross accomplished that the resurrection confirmed:

Jesus, who had never sinned — not once, not in the garden of temptation, not in thirty-three years of fully human life — took every sin of every person who would ever live and carried it to the cross. Our pride and our cowardice. Our betrayals dressed as wisdom and our denials dressed as self-preservation. The fickleness of the Palm Sunday crowd. The self-absorption of the disciples at the Last Supper. The cold calculation of the religious leaders. The indifference of the soldiers. Everything we have seen in these mirrors over twenty-seven days — He took all of it.

And in exchange, He offers us His righteousness. Not a cleaned-up version of who we already are. His. The righteousness of the Son of God, credited to our account as if it were our own.

This is the exchange: our sin for His righteousness. Our death for His life. Our condemnation for His justification. Paul says it in a single breath — “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

We were there at the cross. Our sin held Him there — every denial, every betrayal, every sleeping in the garden and hand-washing in the courtyard and coin-counting in the temple. We were the reason the nails were necessary. And we were the reason He stayed.

Not because we deserved it. Because He loved us with a love that the cross could not exhaust and the tomb could not contain.

The Victory

The resurrection did not merely confirm what the cross accomplished. It destroyed what sin had built.

Death was the ultimate weapon. The final word that silenced prophets and ended movements and kept humanity imprisoned in the certainty that nothing — not love, not goodness, not God Himself made flesh — could survive its verdict. And then Jesus walked out of the tomb, and death lost its finality, its power forever.

Paul would later write from experience: “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Not as a question but as a taunt — the triumphant declaration of someone standing on the other side of the battle, looking back at a defeated enemy. Colossians says Jesus made a public spectacle of the powers and authorities of darkness, triumphing over them by the cross.

This is not just a historical victory. It is a present one.

The resurrection broke the power of sin and death not just at the end of history but in the middle of it — in your life, today, this Easter morning. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is the power that is available to everyone who is in Him. Not the promise of a perfect life. Not immunity from suffering or loss or the long, grinding difficulty of being human. But the certain, already-secured, nothing-can-reverse-it victory of a God who has looked death in the face and walked out the other side.

You do not fight toward victory. You fight from it. The tomb is already empty.

We Were the Ones the Tomb Was Emptied For

Every “we were there” in this series has named our guilt. Today names our belovedness.

We were there in the 400 years of silence, filling the quiet with our own noise. We were there in the Palm Sunday crowd, fickle and expectant. We were there in the upper room, arguing about greatness while Jesus broke the bread. We were there in the garden, asleep while he anguished. We were there in the courtyard, denying. We were there at Golgotha — in the crowd, at the cross, casting lots, walking away, while the King of Glory died.

And we were there in the purpose behind all of it. We were the object. We were the reason. The beloved, broken, complicit, irreplaceable reason that God did not stay in heaven but came down. Did not stay celestial, unearthly but became flesh and lived among us. Did not enforce His divine prerogatives but went obediently to the cross and paid a debt we could not pay and bridge a chasm we could never traverse.

The mirrors we have been looking into for twenty-seven days were never meant to condemn us. They were meant to show us how completely and specifically we are loved — not a generic, distant, abstract love, but a love that knew exactly what it was getting into when it came for us, and came anyway.

That first Easter, Jesus rose for every person who would ever look into the mirror of the gospel and recognize themselves. For every Peter who went back to fishing. For every Thomas drawing conditions around a breaking heart. For every Mary weeping outside a tomb. For every criminal with empty hands and a simple request. For every secret disciple who finally stepped into the light too late and found that grace had been waiting there all along.

For you. Specifically. By name.

We were there that first Easter. We were the crowd and the disciples and the deniers and the doubters and the grieving and the lost. And we were the ones the tomb was emptied for.

The stone has been rolled away. Come and see the place where He lay.

He is not here. He has risen.

Just as He said.

Grace Note

“And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” — Romans 8:11 (NIV)

The power that emptied the tomb is not a historical force locked in the first century. It is a present, living, indwelling reality for everyone who belongs to Christ. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you — not just as a comfort, but as a power. The resurrection is not just something that happened. It is something that is happening, in you, right now, on this Easter morning and every morning that follows. - This is The Way

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I have spent twenty-seven days looking into the mirrors. I have seen myself clearly — more clearly, perhaps, than I have in a long time. The fickleness and the self-protection. The sleeping in gardens and the denying at fires. The ways I have traded You for less, kept faith private, walked in the wrong direction, gone back to the boat.

And now I am here. Easter morning. The tomb is empty.

Thank You. For staying on the cross when You could have come down. For taking everything the mirrors showed us — all of it, every specific, named, recognized failure — and carrying it there so we wouldn’t have to carry it anymore. For the exchange that is almost too good to believe: my sin for Your righteousness. My death for Your life.

Thank You that the Father’s verdict is in. That the receipt has been stamped, Paid in Full. That what You declared finished on Friday the empty tomb confirmed on Sunday.

I receive it today. Not as a theological proposition but as a living reality — for me, specifically, by name, in the particular shape of my particular life. The tomb was emptied for me. The power that raised You is living in me. The call You spoke to Peter on the beach You are speaking again now.

You are risen. You have risen for me. Amen.

Response

1. Receive the Exchange: Today, do one thing differently than you have for twenty-seven days — instead of looking in the mirror, look at the cross. Take the specific failure or pattern you have been most convicted by in this series and consciously hand it over. Not as a transaction you have to complete correctly, but as the simple act of open hands: This is mine. You already took it. I receive what You offer in return. The exchange is already complete. Receive it.

2. Declare the Victory: The resurrection is not just a belief to hold — it is a reality to proclaim. Today, say it out loud. To yourself, to your family, to someone who needs to hear it. Not as a religious formality but as the most important fact in human history: He is risen. Speak it into whatever your Friday looks like right now — the grief, the uncertainty, the unanswered prayer, the tomb that still feels sealed. The declaration is not dependent on your circumstances. It is the ground beneath them.

3. Carry the Fire Forward: The women left the tomb afraid yet filled with joy, and ran. That is the posture this series ends on — not arrived, not resolved, not having figured everything out, but moving. Carrying something too good and too urgent to keep to yourself. Who in your life needs to hear what you have encountered in these twenty-eight days? Not a summary of the devotionals — but the living reality underneath them in you. A God who knew exactly who you were and came anyway. A tomb that was emptied for you. A risen Christ who is still speaking names into grief, still cooking breakfast for the ones who went back to fishing, still walking through locked doors for the ones who couldn’t get there yet. Go and tell someone.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

One last thing — Please

If this series has meant something to you over these twenty-eight days — if you’ve seen yourself in these stories, received grace you needed, or found the Easter story feeling less familiar and more alive — I’d love to hear about it.

Leave a comment below. It doesn’t have to be long. Just tell me: where did you find yourself in the story? Which mirror was hardest to look into? Where did grace land?

And if someone in your life needs to walk this road — a friend carrying a burden, someone who has drifted, someone who has never heard it told this way — share it with them. Restack it. Pass it on. The journey is worth taking from the beginning, and it will be here whenever they’re ready.

He is risen. Go and tell someone.

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© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 27: Peter’s Restoration

John 21:1-19

Introduction

Peter had gone back to fishing.

We should feel the weight of that. Three years earlier he had walked away from these same nets, these same boats, this same lake — left everything at the word of a carpenter who told him he’d fish for people instead. He had followed. He had confessed Jesus as the Messiah. He had walked on water, briefly. He had been given the keys of the kingdom.

And then, in a courtyard lit by a charcoal fire, he had denied three times that he even knew the man.

Now Jesus was risen. Peter had heard it. Had seen it — had been in the room when Jesus appeared, had received the breath of the Holy Spirit with the others. He knew the tomb was empty. He knew the story hadn’t ended the way Friday had suggested.

But something in Peter hadn’t caught up yet. Some part of him was still standing at that fire, still hearing the rooster, still seeing Jesus turn and look at him across the courtyard. The resurrection had happened. Peter’s restoration hadn’t — not yet. And so he did what people do when they don’t know where else to go:

“I’m going out to fish.”

The others went with him. They fished all night and caught nothing. And at dawn, a figure stood on the shore and called out across the water.

“Friends, haven’t you any fish?”

They didn’t recognize Him. Not until the nets filled. Not until Johne said “It is the Lord” — and Peter, hearing those words, threw on his outer garment and jumped into the water.

Three years earlier, Peter had left his nets to follow Jesus. Now he left his nets to swim to Him. Something was still there. Something that couldn’t wait for the boat.

Scripture

¹ Afterward Jesus appeared again to his disciples, by the Sea of Galilee. It happened this way: ² Simon Peter, Thomas (also known as Didymus), Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together. ³ “I’m going out to fish,” Simon Peter told them, and they said, “We’ll go with you.” So they went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

⁴ Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus. ⁵ He called out to them, “Friends, haven’t you any fish?” “No,” they answered. ⁶ He said, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.

⁷ Then the disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” As soon as Simon Peter heard him say, “It is the Lord,” he wrapped his outer garment around him (for he had taken it off) and jumped into the water.

⁹ When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread. ¹⁰ Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.” ¹¹ So Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not broken.

¹² Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?” They knew it was the Lord. ¹³ Jesus came, took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish.

¹⁵ When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”

¹⁶ Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”

¹⁷ The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”

¹⁸ “Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” ¹⁹ Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!”

— John 21:1-19 (NIV)

Reflection

The Jump

John includes a detail that is easy to read past: when Peter heard “It is the Lord,” he put on his outer garment before jumping into the water.

That makes no practical sense. Nobody dresses before swimming to shore. If anything, you’d strip down. And yet there is Peter, pulling on his garment — the way you’d dress before a meeting rather than before a swim — and then leaping into the water anyway.

The most natural reading is that Peter, in that electric moment, wasn’t entirely sure he would need to swim. That somewhere in the desperate hope surging through him was the memory of another morning on this lake, another impossible moment, another invitation from Jesus to step out of the boat onto the water. Whether he stepped out and immediately sank, or whether the garment was simply an act of reverence — a man dressing himself to meet his Lord — we don’t know. What we know is that it reveals the state of his heart: not calculating, not rehearsing his apology, not hanging back in the boat composing himself. Expectant. Reaching. Moving toward Jesus before logic could intervene.

And that impulse tells us something crucial about what was happening inside Peter in the days between the resurrection and this morning. He had failed spectacularly. He had denied Jesus three times at a charcoal fire while Jesus was being handed over to die. He had wept bitterly. And yet — when the word came that it was the Lord standing on the shore — his first instinct wasn’t to hide. It was to get to Jesus as fast as possible.

That is not the behavior of a man crushed beneath self-condemnation. That is a man whose love for Jesus, and whose desperate hope in Jesus’ love for him, was stronger than his shame. He didn’t know exactly what waited for him on that shore. But whatever it was, he wanted it more than he wanted the safety of the boat.

His love was greater than his failure. And his desperate hope in Jesus’ love for him was greater than his fear of what Jesus might say.

That is the posture that made restoration possible. Not performance. Not penance. Just a heart that couldn’t stay away.

The Charcoal Fire

John is a careful writer. He records details that matter, and he expects his readers to notice them.

In chapter 18, Peter stands in the courtyard of the high priest warming himself at a charcoal fire while Jesus is being interrogated inside. It’s there, at that fire, that he denies three times that he knows the man. The Greek word for charcoal fire — anthrakia — appears only twice in the entire New Testament. The second time is here, on the beach at dawn, where Jesus has already built a fire and is cooking breakfast.

John wants us to feel that. The same smell. The same warmth. The same setting — a fire in the early morning, a question being asked, Peter being given three chances to answer. But this time everything is different. This time the question isn’t “aren’t you one of his disciples?” — a question that carried accusation. This time it’s “do you love me?” — a question that carries only invitation.

Three denials. Three questions. The architecture is exact. Jesus didn’t accidentally choose a charcoal fire on a beach. He constructed a moment that would reach back into Peter’s worst memory and begin to redeem it from the inside.

Jesus didn’t just forgive the failure. He revisited it — deliberately, specifically, tenderly — and replaced it with something new.

The third time He asks, Peter is hurt. “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” There is something raw and real in that answer — a man who has stopped trying to perform certainty and is simply throwing himself on what Jesus already knows. He can’t prove his love. He can only trust that Jesus sees it beneath everything Peter has done to obscure it.

And Jesus responds not with a verdict on Peter’s past but with a commission for Peter’s future: “Feed my sheep.” Then: “Follow me.”

The same two words He had spoken by these same waters three years before. The call hadn’t been revoked. The failure hadn’t disqualified him. The Peter who had walked away from his nets at the beginning was being called forward again at the end — not despite what had happened in the courtyard, but somehow, mysteriously, through it.

We Are Like Him

We have visited Peter’s denial already in this series. But this devotional isn’t about the denial. It’s about what we do with ourselves after it.

Peter went back to fishing. And we understand that instinct completely — because we do the same thing. We go back to what we knew before Jesus complicated everything. Back to the job, the habit, the way of being in the world that predates our faith. Not in dramatic rebellion. In quiet retreat. Because we don’t know what else to do with a failure that size, and the old familiar life is at least something we can manage.

The resurrection has happened. We know it. We believe it — in the way Peter believed it, having seen the risen Christ with his own eyes. But belief and restoration are not the same thing. You can know the tomb is empty and still be standing at a charcoal fire in your memory, still hearing the rooster, still unable to fully receive what the resurrection means for the specific thing you did.

We are experts at accepting forgiveness in principle while withholding it from ourselves in practice. We say we believe in grace and then disqualify ourselves from the commission it carries. We hear “follow me” and quietly assume that invitation has an asterisk — that it was extended before Jesus knew what we were capable of, and now that He does, the terms have surely changed.

But watch what Jesus did on that beach. He didn’t wait for Peter to get his act together. He didn’t require a full accounting of the failure before offering breakfast. He had already built the fire. Already had the fish on. Already prepared the meal before Peter set foot on the shore. The restoration was underway before Peter even knew the conversation was coming.

Grace doesn’t wait for us to be ready. It builds a fire on the beach and calls us to come and have breakfast.

And the commission on the other side of breakfast is the same one that was there before the failure. Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep. Follow me. Not a reduced version, not a provisional reinstatement pending good behavior. The same call, spoken with the same authority, to the same Peter — who is now, because of the courtyard and the rooster and the three questions on the beach, more equipped to carry it than he ever was before.

The failure didn’t disqualify him. It deepened him.

That is what God does with the worst moments of our lives when we bring them to Him rather than retreat to the boat. He doesn’t erase them. He redeems them — specifically, deliberately, tenderly — until the very place where we fell becomes the ground where we were restored.

What posture do we bring to that shore? Peter’s jump tells us everything. Not a carefully prepared confession. Not a negotiated return. Just a desperate hope that the love waiting on that beach was greater than the failure that had driven him back to the boat. Just a heart that dressed itself to meet its Lord and leapt before it could think better of it.

We were there in the boat, going back to what we knew, unsure whether the commission still stood after what we’d done. We are there now. But the fire is already built. Breakfast is ready. And the voice calling from the shore hasn’t changed its mind about us.

Grace Note

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” — 1 John 1:9 (NIV)

John wrote those words. The same John who was in the boat that morning. The same John who said “It is the Lord” and watched Peter throw on his garment and jump into the water. He had seen what restoration looked like when it was fully received — a man who had failed spectacularly, brought face to face with grace that was more specific and more thorough than his failure. That’s what faithful and just forgiveness does. It doesn’t just clear the record. It rebuilds the person. Peter went on to preach at Pentecost and turn the world upside down. The charcoal fire on the beach was where that began.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I have gone back to the boat. That after my own failures — the denials, the retreats, the moments I am not proud of — I have returned to what I knew before You complicated everything. Not in anger. In shame. Because I wasn’t sure the commission still stood.

Thank You for the charcoal fire on the beach. For building it before I arrived. For the breakfast that was ready before I was ready to receive it. For the three questions that reached back into my worst memory and began to replace it with something new.

Give me Peter’s desperate hope. The kind that doesn’t wait for certainty before jumping. The kind that dresses to meet its Lord and leaps before logic can intervene. I want my love for You — and my trust in Your love for me — to be louder than my shame.

I want to receive what Peter received — not just forgiveness in principle, but restoration in practice. The same call, spoken again, with the same authority. Follow me. Not a reduced version. Not provisional. The real thing.

Speak it again, Lord. Over the failure, through it, past it. The words that called me in the first place. I am listening. I am ready. Amen.

Response

1. Name the Boat You’ve Gone Back To: What did you return to after your most significant failure or season of spiritual retreat? The old habit, the old identity, the old way of being in the world that predates your faith? Name it — not to condemn it, but to see it clearly. Peter going back to fishing wasn’t a sin. It was a symptom. What is yours telling you about where restoration still needs to come?

2. Come and Have Breakfast: Before the three questions, before the commission, Jesus fed them. Restoration began with presence and provision — not with a performance review. Today, before you try to fix anything or prove anything or earn back anything, simply come to Jesus as you are. Sit with Him. Receive what He’s already prepared. Let the meal come before the mission.

3. Receive the Commission Again: What is the call Jesus spoke over your life that your failure has made you feel disqualified from? The role you stepped back from, the ministry you walked away from, the purpose you quietly shelved because you didn’t think you deserved it anymore. Hear Him say it again today — “Feed my sheep. Follow me.” Not despite what happened. Through it. The call hasn’t been revoked. The fire is already built. It’s time to come ashore. - This is The Way

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 26: The Doubter Who Believed

John 20:19-29

Introduction

He had missed it.

While the other disciples were locked in a room together on Sunday evening — while Jesus was appearing to them, showing them His hands and His side, breathing the Holy Spirit on them — Thomas wasn’t there. We don’t know why. John doesn’t tell us. Maybe he needed to be alone with his grief. Maybe the togetherness of the group felt unbearable. Maybe he had simply gone somewhere else to try to survive the end of everything he had believed in.

Whatever the reason, he walked back into the room to find ten people with a completely different reality than the one he had left.

“We have seen the Lord.”

And Thomas — loyal, grieving, all-or-nothing Thomas — could not do it. Could not take the leap from their testimony to belief. Could not let himself feel the thing he most wanted to feel on the basis of someone else’s word. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

We have called him a doubter for two thousand years. But look at what he actually said. He didn’t say “I don’t believe in resurrection.” He didn’t say “You’re all deluded.” He named exactly what he needed — specific, physical, undeniable evidence — because the alternative to certainty was a hope so fragile he couldn’t survive it breaking again.

Thomas wasn’t a skeptic. He was a man who had loved Jesus too much to believe something this good on insufficient evidence.

And Jesus came back. For him. A week later.

Scripture

¹⁹ On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” ²⁰ After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.

²¹ Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” ²² And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

²⁴ Now Thomas (also known as Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. ²⁵ So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

²⁶ A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” ²⁷ Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and begin believing.”

²⁸ Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”

²⁹ Then Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

— John 20:19-29 (NIV)

Reflection

What Thomas Actually Said

We have flattened Thomas into a type — the skeptic, the holdout, the one who needed more proof than the others, the doubter. But that reading misses something important about who he was.

This is the same Thomas who, when Jesus announced He was returning to Judea where the religious leaders wanted to stone Him, turned to the other disciples and said: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” That is not a man who held Jesus at arm’s length. That is a man who loved Jesus with the kind of love that runs toward danger rather than away from it.

When Jesus died, that love had nowhere to go. And a week of sitting with ten friends who were telling him the unbelievable thing had happened — the thing Thomas wanted more than anything to be true — was more than he could navigate on their testimony alone. His condition wasn’t cynicism. It was self-protection. He had already survived one shattering. He could not afford another.

“Unless I see... I will not believe.” Read it again with that in mind. This isn’t a philosophical objection. It’s a broken heart drawing a boundary around itself.

Jesus did not rebuke the boundary. He walked through it.

A week later — a full week, while Thomas sat with his grief and his conditions — Jesus came back. Stood in the room. Looked at Thomas. And offered him exactly what he had asked for, word for word: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side.”

We don’t know if Thomas actually touched the wounds. John doesn’t say he did. What John records is the response — two words that form the highest confession in the entire Gospel: “My Lord and my God.” No hedging. No qualification. The man who couldn’t afford to believe on someone else’s word came face to face with the risen Christ and surrendered everything in return.

The doubter who needed the most evidence gave the most complete declaration of faith.

The Beatitude We Live In

And then Jesus said something that reaches across two thousand years and lands directly on us: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

This is not a consolation prize for people who missed the good version of faith. This is a beatitude — a declaration of blessedness — spoken specifically over everyone who would come after Thomas by Jesus himself. Over everyone who would believe without walking into a room and touching His wounds. Over us.

We live permanently in the position Thomas occupied for that one week. We have not seen. We have the testimony — of the disciples, of Scripture, of two thousand years of transformed lives — and we are asked to believe on the basis of that testimony without the physical, undeniable proof Thomas demanded.

That is not a lesser faith. Jesus called it blessed.

But let’s be honest about what it costs. There are weeks — sometimes years — when we are Thomas in that room, hearing people tell us the unbelievable thing and not quite being able to get there. When the grief or the unanswered prayer or the long silence has made hope feel too dangerous to hold. When we have drawn our own conditions around our hearts: unless I see this, unless I feel that, unless something changes — I cannot afford to believe.

Jesus doesn’t despise those conditions. He walked through locked doors to meet Thomas in his. He is not intimidated by our grief-drawn boundaries or our honest declarations of what we need. He has a way of showing up in the room when we least expect it — not to shame us for the time we spent in doubt, but to stand in front of us and say: Here. Look. It’s real.

The question Thomas’s story puts to us is not whether we will ever doubt. It’s whether we will stay in the room. Thomas was with the disciples when Jesus came back. He hadn’t left. He was still there, still showing up, still in community with the people who had seen what he hadn’t — even though their certainty was painful to be around. And that faithfulness of presence, even in the midst of doubt, positioned him to encounter the risen Christ.

Doubt that stays in the room is not the opposite of faith. It is faith under construction.

We were there with Thomas — unable to believe on someone else’s word, drawing conditions around a heart that couldn’t survive another shattering. We are there now. And Jesus is still walking through locked doors. Even yours.

Grace Note

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” — Hebrews 11:1 (NIV)

Faith was never meant to be the absence of doubt. It was meant to be the presence of trust despite uncertainty — confidence in what we hope for, assurance about what we cannot yet see. Thomas didn’t receive a lesser faith when he encountered the risen Christ; he received the same faith, completed. The One who called those who have not seen and yet believed blessed is the same One who came back through locked doors for the one who couldn’t get there yet. He is patient with the construction. He is present in the doubt. And He is not finished with you.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I have been Thomas — unable to get to belief on someone else’s word, drawing conditions around my heart because hope has been too expensive before. I have said my own version of “unless I see” more times than I want to admit. And I have sat with the testimony of others — the answered prayers, the certainty, the joy — and felt the distance between their experience and mine like an accusation.

Forgive me for calling my self-protection unbelief and giving up on it. It wasn’t unbelief. It was a breaking heart trying to survive.

Thank You that You came back for Thomas. That You didn’t let a week of doubt disqualify him from the encounter. That You walked through the locked door and stood in front of him and offered him exactly what he asked for. Thank You that You do the same for me.

I want to stay in the room. Even when everyone else seems more certain than I am. Even when the testimony feels just out of reach. Keep me here, in community, present and waiting — until You walk through the door. And when You do, give me Thomas’s words: My Lord and my God. Nothing held back. Everything surrendered. Amen.

Response

1. Name Your Condition: Thomas said it out loud: “Unless I see... I will not believe.” What is your version of that sentence right now? What condition have you placed on your faith — the thing you need to see or feel or have answered before you can fully trust? Write it down, not as a confession of failure but as an honest conversation with Jesus. He met Thomas’s conditions with presence, not judgment.

2. Stay in the Room: Thomas was with the disciples when Jesus returned. He hadn’t left. He was still showing up — even though their certainty was painful, even though his doubt made him feel like the odd one out. That’s not passive endurance. That’s mustard seed faith in action.

Where is God moving around you right now? Where are there reports of answered prayer, of lives being changed, of the supernatural breaking through? Who are the people closest to those moments? Find them. Position yourself near them. You don’t have to manufacture certainty you don’t have — but you can choose where you show up. Doubt that isolates grows. Doubt that stays in community gets surprised.

Don’t sit alone with your questions when you could be among people whose testimony keeps the possibility alive. That mustard seed of longing in you — the part that would love to see what it struggles to believe — is enough. God is drawn to that kind of reaching. Stay in the room.

3. Receive the Beatitude: Jesus said those who believe without seeing are blessed. Today, receive that — not as a consolation prize but as a specific declaration spoken over your particular kind of faith. You have not seen, and you are still here, still trying to believe. That is not a lesser faith. Write out John 20:29 somewhere you will see it today: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” That verse is about you.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 25: The Road to Emmaus

Luke 24:13-32

Introduction

They were walking in the wrong direction.

Not lost — they knew exactly where they were going. Emmaus was seven miles from Jerusalem, and they had made up their minds. The story was over. The man they had believed was the Messiah was dead and buried. Yes, some women had reported the tomb empty that morning, and yes, others had gone to check and found it exactly as the women said — but only a woman had seen Jesus. And an empty tomb without a risen Christ is just one more thing that doesn’t make sense.

So they walked. Away from Jerusalem. Away from the other disciples. Away from the place where everything had happened and where nothing, anymore, seemed to add up. They did what people do when hope collapses — they moved. They talked it through. They rehearsed the wreckage out loud to each other, because saying it again might somehow make it hurt less, or at least make it feel more resolved.

“We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

Past tense. We had hoped. Hope, apparently, had an expiration date — and it had passed on Friday afternoon when the stone rolled into place.

They had all the facts. They had spent three years watching Him. They had heard Him teach, seen Him heal, watched Him raise the dead. They had the prophecies, the miracles, the empty tomb report — every piece of the puzzle was in their hands. They just couldn’t see the picture anymore.

And into that walk, Jesus fell into step beside them.

Scripture

¹³ Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. ¹⁴ They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. ¹⁵ As they were talking and discussing these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; ¹⁶ but they were kept from recognizing him.

¹⁷ He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?” They stood still, their faces downcast. ¹⁸ One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

¹⁹ “What things?” he asked. “About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. ²⁰ The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; ²¹ but we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place.”

²⁵ He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ²⁶ Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” ²⁷ And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

²⁸ As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. ²⁹ But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.

³⁰ When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. ³¹ Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. ³² They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

— Luke 24:13-32 (NIV)

Reflection

The Wrong Direction

Here is what makes Cleopas and his companion so recognizable: they weren’t faithless people. They were devastated ones. There is a difference.

They hadn’t stopped believing in God. They had stopped believing the story could go anywhere good from here. The cross had ended it — not their devotion, but their expectation. And so they did the only thing that made sense: they left. Not in anger. In grief. They pointed themselves toward the nearest place that wasn’t Jerusalem and started walking.

We need to sit with the detail that Luke gives us almost in passing: Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; but they were kept from recognizing him. He was there. He had been there, arguably, since the moment they set out. He wasn’t waiting for them to turn around, to get their theology straight, to stop walking in the wrong direction before He showed up. He fell into step with them in the middle of their retreat.

That is not a small thing. Jesus did not wait for these two to demonstrate sufficient faith before He joined them on the road. He joined them in their confusion, their grief, their wrong-directioned walking — and started asking questions.

“What are you discussing?” He already knew. He asked anyway. Because sometimes the most important thing isn’t the answer — it’s the act of saying it out loud to someone who is fully present and genuinely listening.

He let them say all of it. The hopes. The crucifixion. The empty tomb they didn’t know what to do with. And then, gently but without softening it: “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken.” Not a rebuke designed to shame them — a diagnosis. The problem wasn’t their grief. It was their incomplete picture. They had read the prophecies their whole lives without seeing that suffering was always part of the Messiah’s story, not the end of it.

And then He opened the Scriptures to them. From Moses through all the Prophets, He traced the single thread that ran through everything — and showed them that every piece of what had happened was not the collapse of the plan but the fulfillment of it.

They had all the right information and the wrong conclusion. Jesus didn’t give them new facts. He gave them a new frame.

The Moment They Recognized Him

They arrived at Emmaus still not knowing who He was. Seven miles of the greatest Bible study in human history — the Author walking them through His own book — and their eyes were still closed. They had felt something on that road, a warmth they couldn’t quite name, but they hadn’t yet understood what it was.

He acted as if He would continue on. And here is a moment that stops me every time: He didn’t force His presence on them. He moved as if to go farther. They had to ask Him to stay.

“Stay with us, for it is nearly evening.”

Something in them wasn’t ready to let this stranger go — even without knowing why. And so He stayed. He sat at their table. He took bread, gave thanks, broke it — and their eyes opened. Not during the seven miles of Scripture. Not during the theological explanation. When He broke the bread. In an ordinary moment, at an ordinary table, doing something they had watched Him do before — and suddenly they knew.

He vanished immediately. And they sat with the burning they finally understood: “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?”

The burn had been there all along. They just hadn’t recognized it until they looked back.

We Are Like Them

We are Cleopas every time we walk away from Jerusalem because we’ve decided the story is over.

The form changes but the retreat is the same. We stop praying because it feels like no one is listening. We drift from community because the church disappointed us. We quietly shelve the promises that haven’t materialized and lower our expectations to something more survivable. We point ourselves toward Emmaus — toward the nearest place that isn’t the scene of the wreckage — and we start walking.

We have all the right information. We know the resurrection happened. We have the whole story in our hands. But grief and disappointment have given us the wrong frame, and through that frame the facts don’t add up to hope. They add up to: we had hoped.

What we miss is that Jesus doesn’t wait for us to turn around before He falls into step beside us. He joins the retreat. He asks the questions. He lets us say all of it — the hopes, the losses, the empty tombs we don’t know what to do with. And then He opens the Scriptures, and begins to show us the frame we’ve been missing — the one where suffering was always part of the story, not the end of it.

But here is the part that asks something of us: He acts as if He will go farther. He doesn’t force Himself into the evening. He waits to be invited. And the invitation requires us to want His presence more than we want to arrive at Emmaus. More than we want the comfort of a resolved conclusion. More than we want to be done with the confusion.

Stay with us. Three words. The hinge of the whole story.

And when He stays — when we set a place for Him at the table of our ordinary lives — recognition comes in the most unexpected moments. Not always in the seven miles of theological clarity. Sometimes in the breaking of bread. In the suddenly-familiar gesture. In the ordinary moment that cracks open into something eternal.

We were there on that road — walking away, wrong direction, all the right facts and the wrong conclusion. We are there now. But He has already fallen into step beside us. The question is whether we’ll ask Him to stay.

Grace Note

“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” — Psalm 139:7-10 (NIV)

There is no road to Emmaus that Jesus cannot walk. No retreat far enough, no wrong direction long enough, no grief deep enough to put you outside His reach. The disciples didn’t find Jesus on that road — He found them. He fell into step before they knew He was there. That is still how it works. You may be walking away right now, and He may already be beside you, asking questions, waiting to be invited to stay.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I have walked to Emmaus more times than I can count. I have decided the story was over — picked up my grief and my wrong conclusions and pointed myself toward the nearest exit from the place where hope had died. And I have been so focused on the wreckage that I missed You falling into step beside me.

Forgive me for the times I’ve carried all the right information to all the wrong conclusions. For letting disappointment rewrite the frame without consulting You. For walking seven miles with You and not recognizing You — not because You weren’t there, but because I’d already decided what the story meant.

Open the Scriptures to me the way You opened them on that road. Show me where I’ve been reading the story with the wrong ending in mind. And when You act as if You’ll go farther — give me the sense to say it: Stay with us. Don’t go. We need You here.

I want to recognize You in the breaking of the bread. In the ordinary moments I keep walking past. In the warmth I’ve been feeling but haven’t had words for yet. Open my eyes. Amen.

Response

1. Name Your Emmaus: Where are you walking away from right now — what hope have you quietly shifted to past tense? A prayer you’ve stopped praying, a promise you’ve stopped believing, a place in your faith where you’ve lowered your expectations to something more survivable? Name it. Not to condemn the retreat, but to say it out loud to Jesus — the way Cleopas did — so He can respond.

2. Invite Him to Stay: The disciples had to ask. Jesus acted as if He would continue on. Today, make the deliberate invitation — not in a moment of spiritual intensity, but at your ordinary table, in your ordinary evening. Open the Scriptures and ask Him to open them to you. Sit with one passage long enough for something to burn. Don’t rush toward Emmaus. Let Him stay.

3. Look for the Burning: The disciples recognized the burn only after the fact. Looking back over this week — or this season — where do you think Jesus may have already been walking with you without you fully recognizing Him? A conversation, a verse, a moment of unexpected clarity or comfort? Write it down. Name the burning. Then let that recognition send you back toward Jerusalem — back toward the community, the mission, the place where the story is still unfolding.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 24: The Woman Who Heard Her Name

John 20:1-2, 11-18

Introduction

She came looking for a body.

That’s what love does when hope is gone — it shows up anyway. Mary Magdalene had watched Jesus die. Had watched Joseph and Nicodemus take Him down from the cross and seal Him in a tomb. Had gone home and survived the Sabbath somehow, and then, before the sun was fully up on Sunday morning, had come back. Not because she expected anything. Because her love cried out for action.

She had been delivered from seven demons. Whatever that had meant for her life before Jesus — the darkness, the chaos, the years she’d lost to it — He had ended it. She had followed Him ever since. Supported His ministry. Stood at the cross when the disciples fled. Stayed until there was nothing left to stay for.

And now the tomb was empty.

She didn’t think resurrection. She thought theft. Someone had taken Him, and she didn’t know where they had laid Him, and this — on top of everything else — was more than she could bear. Filled with despair, she stood outside the tomb and wept. She looked inside and saw angels, and even angels couldn’t stop her tears. Someone spoke to her from behind and she turned, and through her grief she saw a man she assumed was the gardener.

“Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

She was three feet from the risen Jesus. And she didn’t recognize Him.

Not until He said her name.

Scripture

¹ Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. ² So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

— John 20:1-2 (NIV)

¹¹ Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb ¹² and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

¹³ They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

“They have taken my Lord,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” ¹⁴ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

¹⁵ He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).

¹⁷ Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

¹⁸ Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.

— John 20:11-18 (NIV)

Reflection

Three Feet Away

She had spoken to angels and hadn’t stopped weeping. That detail matters. The presence of the supernatural wasn’t enough to break through her grief. Even the messengers of heaven couldn’t reach her where she was — locked inside a loss so total that nothing could penetrate it.

And then Jesus asked her a question He already knew the answer to.

“Who is it you are looking for?”

He was standing right there. Risen. Alive. The answer to every tear she had wept since Friday. And she looked straight at Him and saw a gardener.

This isn’t a failure of faith. It’s a portrait of grief. Grief narrows the world down to what has been lost. It makes us fluent in absence and blind to presence. Mary wasn’t looking for a risen Jesus — that category didn’t exist for her yet. She had heard Jesus declare to Mary of Bethany, “I am the resurrection and the life.” She had stood at the edge of a tomb and watched Him call Lazarus out of the grave. She had seen it with her own eyes. And still, on Sunday morning, she was looking for a dead Jesus — because the dead one was the last thing she had left of Him, and even that had been taken.

There is something else worth noticing. Mary knew that Joseph and Nicodemus had placed Jesus in the tomb — she had watched it happen. She may not have known that Nicodemus had already anointed the body with a hundred pounds of spices, or perhaps she simply couldn’t trust that it had been done the way she would have done it. Either way, she came with her own spices, her own hands, her own love that had to do something.

But she had never thought through the stone. The massive sealed entrance that she could never have moved alone. There was no plan for the stone. Grief doesn’t make plans — it just moves toward the thing it loves, logistics be damned. Sometimes love compels action that doesn’t fully make sense. We just have to do something. We just have to go.

And it was exactly that unreasonable, unstoppable love that positioned her to be the first witness of the resurrection.

She asked the gardener where the body was. She would carry it herself if she had to. One more act of love with nowhere left to go.

And then He said her name.

Just that. One word in Aramaic, spoken in a voice she had heard a hundred times — calling her, teaching her, setting her free. Mary. And everything that grief had narrowed and closed and sealed shut broke open in an instant.

The resurrection didn’t announce itself with earthquake or fire. It spoke one person’s name.

That is the kind of God we follow. Not a God of generic declarations, broadcasting good news to crowds who have to sort out whether it applies to them. A God who knows exactly where you are standing, exactly what you have lost, exactly what grief has done to your ability to see — and who speaks your name into the middle of it.

We Are Like Her

We are Mary every time we are so focused on what we have lost that we can’t see what is standing right in front of us.

Grief does this. So does disappointment, and fear, and hopelessness — that particular blindness that comes from having decided, somewhere beneath conscious thought, that things cannot be other than they are. We come to God looking for what we’ve lost — the relationship, the health, the dream, the version of our life we planned on — and we talk to angels without sensing the moment, and we mistake Jesus for the gardener, and we ask Him if He knows where they put the thing we’re mourning.

He is three feet away. Risen. Present. Offering something we haven’t thought to ask for because we’re still processing the loss of what we had.

We also live in a world that tells us the tomb stays sealed. That death is final, that what’s broken stays broken, that the losses we accumulate are simply the shape our life takes from here on out. And we believe it — not because we’ve renounced our faith, but because grief is heavy and a new life is beyond imagination.

We also come, like Mary, with plans that don’t fully make sense. We show up to pray without knowing how we’ll move the stone. We reach toward restoration without a clear path through the rubble. We do something — anything — because love demands it even when logic can’t support it. And we are not wrong to come. The stone was already rolled away. It had been handled by hands that didn’t need our help.

But notice what Jesus didn’t do. He didn’t rebuke her for not recognizing Him. He didn’t say “Mary, after everything, how could you miss me?” He said her name. Gently. Personally. Into the exact center of her grief.

He meets us in the looking, even when we’re looking in the wrong places.

And then He gave her an assignment. “Go and tell my brothers.” The first witness of the resurrection — the one entrusted with the most important news in human history — was a woman who had arrived at the tomb that morning with burial spices and no hope. God didn’t wait for someone with better theology or steadier faith. He met Mary in her grief, spoke her name, and sent her running with an assignment.

We were there outside the tomb, weeping over what we’d lost, missing the risen Jesus standing right in front of us. We are there now. But He knows our name. And He is already speaking it. - This is The Way

Grace Note

“He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” — John 10:3 (NIV)

Jesus said this before the resurrection — before the empty tomb, before Mary in the garden. He already knew then what He would demonstrate on Sunday morning: that He doesn’t relate to His people as a crowd. He knows each one by name. He leads each one out personally. The risen Jesus who spoke Mary’s name into her grief is the same shepherd who knows yours. You are not anonymous to Him. You never have been.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I have stood outside empty tombs and wept over what I’ve lost — and missed You standing right there. Grief has narrowed my vision. Disappointment has closed off categories I didn’t know were still open. I’ve been so focused on finding what I had that I haven’t recognized what You’re offering.

Forgive me for mistaking You for the gardener. For talking to angels without sensing the moment. For deciding, somewhere below the surface, that the story couldn’t go anywhere except through my loss.

And forgive me for coming with plans I never thought all the way through — showing up with spices and no answer for the stone. Thank You that the stone was already handled. That You don’t wait for me to figure out the logistics before You act.

Say my name. Not into the crowd — into the specific place where I am standing right now, with the specific grief I am carrying, in the exact direction I’ve been looking in the wrong places. I want to be Mary in the moment she turned — not the moment before, when she was still asking the gardener — but the moment after, when everything broke open and she knew.

And when You do — give me her instinct. To run and tell someone. To carry the news before I’ve had time to fully process it myself. You are risen. That’s enough to move on. Amen.

Response

1. Name What You’re Looking For: Mary came to the tomb looking for a dead Jesus because that’s the last thing she had left of Him. What are you looking for that may be keeping you from seeing what Jesus is actually offering? A restored version of what you lost? A God who fits the shape of your grief? Name it honestly — not to stop grieving, but to open your hands enough to receive what’s actually there.

2. Listen for Your Name: Find 10 minutes of genuine quiet today — no agenda, no requests, no noise. Just stillness. Then listen. Maybe not for an audible voice, but for the specific, personal way Jesus tends to reach you — through Scripture, through a memory, through a sudden clarity that cuts through the fog. He knows your name. Give Him room to say it.

3. Go and Tell: Mary was sent running with an assignment before she had time to fully process what had happened. Think of one person in your life who is standing outside their own empty tomb right now — locked in grief or loss or the conviction that the story is over. You don’t need a theology degree or a perfectly formed testimony. You just need what Mary had: “I have seen the Lord.” Tell them what He’s done. Today, before you’ve figured out all the rest of it.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 23: The Secret Disciples

John 19:38-42; John 3:1-2; Mark 15:43

Introduction

They had been watching from a distance for a long time.

Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin — the same council that had voted to hand Jesus over to Pilate. Luke tells us he had not consented to their decision, but he hadn’t stopped it either. He was a disciple of Jesus, John tells us, but secretly, “because he feared the Jewish leaders.” A prominent man, a careful man, a man with too much to lose to be seen standing too close to a Galilean rabbi who was making dangerous enemies.

Nicodemus we’ve met before. He came to Jesus in the night — hungry, honest, asking the questions his credentials wouldn’t let him ask in daylight. Jesus gave him the gospel in the dark. And Nicodemus had carried it quietly ever since, defending Jesus once in a council meeting with a procedural objection, never quite stepping all the way into the light.

Two men. Significant positions. Private faith. And then Jesus died.

Something about the cross broke them open in a way the miracles hadn’t. Something about the finality of it — the body that needed to be buried, the dignity that needed to be preserved, the moment that demanded someone step forward — moved them from the shadows into the most public act of devotion either of them had ever attempted.

Joseph went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Nicodemus came with a hundred pounds of spices. Together, they wrapped Him and laid Him in a tomb.

It was too late to save Him. It was exactly the right time to honor Him.

Scripture

³⁸ Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away. ³⁹ He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. ⁴⁰ Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. ⁴¹ At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. ⁴² Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

— John 19:38-42 (NIV)

¹ Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. ² He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

— John 3:1-2 (NIV)

⁴³ Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body.

— Mark 15:43 (NIV)

Reflection

What the Cross Unlocked

For months — maybe years — Joseph and Nicodemus had kept their faith private. And there were reasons. Real ones. A seat on the Sanhedrin wasn’t just a title; it was influence, access, the ability to do good within a system that could crush you if you stepped out of line. Associating publicly with Jesus meant risking everything they had spent their lives building. The calculation kept coming up the same way: not yet. Not openly. Not this much.

And then the cross happened.

Mark’s word for what Joseph did is striking: he went boldly to Pilate. The same man who had been too afraid to dissent publicly in the council chamber walked into the Roman governor’s residence and asked for the body of a man who had just been executed as an enemy of the state. That’s not a small step. Claiming the body of a condemned criminal was itself a political statement — an implicit challenge to the verdict, an act that painted a target on Joseph’s back.

Nicodemus came with a hundred pounds of spices. That’s a burial fit for a king — an extravagant, unmistakable act of honor that could not be explained away as procedural or neutral. He wasn’t hedging anymore. He was declaring, with seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes, exactly where he stood.

Here is what’s easy to miss: none of Jesus’ closest disciples could have done what these two men did. Peter couldn’t walk into Pilate’s office — he was hiding behind a locked door. The Twelve didn’t have the resources, the social standing, or the knowledge of royal burial customs that this moment required. The very things Joseph and Nicodemus had spent their lives accumulating — position, wealth, access to power, fluency with the rites of Jewish nobility — turned out to be precisely what was needed to honor the King in His death.

They came to faith late and declared it later still. But they were the only ones in Jerusalem that Friday who understood, in the way their whole lives had prepared them to understand, what it meant to bury a King.

God had been preparing them for this specific moment all along. They just didn’t know it yet.

We Are Like Them

Notice what God didn’t do. He didn’t arrange for Peter to care for the body of Jesus, or John, or any of the Twelve who had walked closest with Him. Not because they loved Jesus less — but because they weren’t made for that moment. Joseph and Nicodemus were.

That’s a striking thing about how God works in His Kingdom. It isn’t one size fits all. He doesn’t give everyone the same role or the same moment or the same way of expressing devotion. He shapes each of us — through our background, our gifts, our experiences, even the positions we’ve carefully built and the resources we’ve quietly accumulated — for something specific. Something that only we, with our particular combination of who we are and what we’ve been given, are positioned to do.

We tend to measure our usefulness to God against the most visible people in the room. The ones with platforms, the ones up front, the ones whose names get called first. And we wonder if what we have — our particular background, our professional world, our social connections, the influence we’ve spent years earning — actually counts for anything in the Kingdom.

Joseph and Nicodemus answer that question. The things they thought were in tension with following Jesus openly — their prominence, their council seats, their access to Pilate, their knowledge of how kings were buried — turned out to be the very instruments of their most significant act of faith.

The criminal on the cross yesterday had nothing, and recognized the King with nothing. Joseph and Nicodemus had everything — and recognized the King by honoring Him with everything. Two opposite ends of the social spectrum, the same recognition, the same devotion, expressed in the only way each of them could express it.

God’s love for us is that specific. He doesn’t just save us generally. He shapes us individually — for moments only we can fill, with what only we have been given.

Secret discipleship is still worth naming honestly: both men had kept careful distance, and there is a real conviction in that. But the deeper invitation isn’t simply stop hiding. It’s look at what God has been building in you all along — and ask whether you’re willing to let it finally be used for Him.

We were there in the council chamber, keeping faith private, waiting for a safer moment. We are there now. But the moment God prepared us for doesn’t wait forever. And it may require exactly what we’ve been so carefully protecting.

Grace Note

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” — Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

You are not a generic follower of Jesus. You are His handiwork — crafted specifically, shaped deliberately, placed precisely. The good works He prepared for you in advance weren’t designed for someone else and handed to you by default. They were made for you — for your background, your gifts, your access, your particular way of seeing and serving. Joseph and Nicodemus didn’t know their careful, costly act of devotion was preparing the site of the resurrection. They just did the next faithful thing with what they had. That’s all He asks. - This is The Way

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I have kept more distance than I should. That I’ve followed You genuinely but quietly — in the rooms where it costs me nothing, less openly in the rooms where it might. I’ve called it wisdom. Sometimes it’s fear.

But I also confess that I’ve underestimated what You’ve been building in me. I’ve looked at my background, my position, my resources — the things I’ve accumulated and the world I move in — and wondered if any of it counts for anything in Your Kingdom. I’ve assumed that the most useful people are the ones who look nothing like me.

Joseph and Nicodemus undo that assumption. You didn’t send Peter to bury a King. You sent two men whose whole lives had prepared them for exactly that moment — and they almost missed it by playing it safe for too long.

Don’t let me miss mine. Show me what You’ve been preparing in me for a moment only I can fill. Give me the courage to stop protecting it and start offering it. And where I’ve kept faith private out of fear, give me the boldness Joseph found when he walked through Pilate’s door. Amen.

Response

1. Inventory What You’ve Been Given: Joseph and Nicodemus brought their position, their resources, and their specific knowledge to their moment of faithfulness. Take stock of what you’ve been given — your professional access, your social connections, your financial resources, your cultural fluency, your hard-earned expertise. Ask honestly: have I ever considered that these things might be for the Kingdom, not just alongside it?

2. Name the Room Where You Go Quiet: In what context do you consistently pull back from identifying with Jesus — at work, with certain friends or family, in a specific conversation you’ve been avoiding? Name it. Joseph and Nicodemus both had a name for their room: the council chamber. What’s yours? And what would it look like to walk into it with the same boldness Joseph found at Pilate’s door?

3. Prepare Something for the Resurrection: They prepared a tomb without knowing it would be empty by Sunday. Ask Jesus today: What have You been preparing me for that I can’t yet see? Then take one step of faithfulness in that direction — not because you understand where it leads, but because you trust the One who shaped you for it. The works were prepared in advance. You just have to show up for them.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 22: The Criminal Who Believed

Luke 23:32-43

Introduction

He had nothing left to offer.

No track record of faithfulness. No years of devoted service. No theological training, no spiritual disciplines, no good works to point to in his defense. By the time he turned to Jesus, he was hours from death — nailed to a cross, body wrecked, life already forfeited by his own choices. There was nothing left to negotiate with. Nothing left to bring.

And he became the first person Jesus personally promised paradise to.

We don’t know his name. We don’t know what he had done to earn a Roman crucifixion — only that he admitted, in his final hours, that he had done something, that the sentence was just, and that the man dying on the cross beside him was innocent. Three things: honesty about his guilt, acknowledgment of Jesus’ innocence, and a single desperate request to the King: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

That’s it. No sinner’s prayer. No time for baptism. No opportunity for discipleship or growth or fruit. Just a dying man, a few honest words, and a turn of his head toward the one person on that hill who still had something to give.

What he received in return should undo every one of us.

“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

Not eventually. Not conditionally. Not “if you can hold on long enough” or “once you’ve done enough penance” or “when the books are balanced.” Today. With Me. Paradise.

The cross would be his end. But it was the beginning of everything he’d never imagined.

Scripture

³² Two other men, both criminals, were also led out with him to be executed. ³³ When they came to the place called the Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals—one on his right, the other on his left. ³⁴ Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided his garments by casting lots.

³⁵ The people stood watching, and the rulers even sneered at him. They said, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s Messiah, the Chosen One.”

³⁶ The soldiers also came up and mocked him. They offered him wine vinegar ³⁷ and said, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself.”

³⁸ There was a written notice above him, which read: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

³⁹ One of the criminals who hung there hurled insults at him: “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

⁴⁰ But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? ⁴¹ We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”

⁴² Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

⁴³ Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

— Luke 23:32-43 (NIV)

Reflection

The Last Man Anyone Expected

Two criminals flank Jesus at the crucifixion. Matthew tells us that at first, both of them mocked Him. One of them kept it up — hurling insults until the end, demanding rescue from the very man he was helping crucify with his words. The other one stopped.

Something shifted. Maybe it was Jesus’ prayer from the cross — “Father, forgive them” — spoken while soldiers were still hammering nails. Maybe it was the sign above Jesus’ head, the charge that read THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS. Maybe it was simply proximity: hours of dying next to a man who was somehow, inexplicably, more at peace than anyone else on that hill.

Whatever it was, he stopped mocking and started seeing. He rebuked the other criminal with a clarity that shames the religious leaders who had spent their lives studying Scripture: “We are punished justly. This man has done nothing wrong.” Guilt acknowledged. Innocence recognized. And then — with nothing left to lose and everything to hope for — a request of the King so simple it almost doesn’t feel like enough: “Jesus, remember me.”

Not “save me.” Not “get me down from this cross.” Not even “forgive me,” though that was surely underneath it. Just: remember me. See me. Don’t let me just disappear from this life. Know that I existed, and that in my last hour, I turned toward You.

That was enough. It has always been enough.

Jesus didn’t make him prove it. Didn’t ask him to wait and see if the sentiment held. Didn’t say “I’ll consider it” or “we’ll talk about this further.” He gave him the most extravagant promise in the history of last words: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

We Are Like Him

We like to think we come to Jesus with something. Years of good behavior, or at least decent effort. A track record that isn’t entirely embarrassing. Some contribution we’ve made that might tip the scales in our favor when that final moment comes.

The criminal on the cross strips all of that away. He had nothing. He brought nothing. And Jesus gave him everything.

Because that’s what grace actually is. Not a reward for the nearly righteous. Not a recognition of spiritual effort. Not the last percentage point of a mostly-passing grade. Grace is what Jesus gives to a dying man with empty hands who simply turns his head and asks to be remembered.

We come to Jesus with our résumés. He’s looking for exactly what the criminal offered: honesty about who we are, recognition of who He is, and a simple request that dares to believe He might respond.

And here’s what this moment means for Week 4, for the resurrection we’re about to step into: the criminal on the cross didn’t just receive forgiveness. He received paradise. Today. With Jesus. The very day the disciples were hiding, the very day the women were weeping, the very day hope would be sealed behind a stone — a criminal with empty hands walked into paradise with the Savior.

He didn’t wait for Sunday morning. It was Friday, and paradise found for one man who had nothing to offer and everything to receive.

Whatever you’ve done. However long you’ve waited. However empty your hands feel right now. The promise Jesus made on that cross is still being spoken: Today. With Me. Paradise.

We were there on that hill — some days mocking, some days asking to be remembered. We are there now. And His answer hasn’t changed.

Grace Note

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.” — Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV)

The criminal on the cross is the purest illustration of these verses in the entire Bible. No works. No track record. No time to build one. Just faith — imperfect, desperate, empty-handed faith — and the grace of a Savior who gave him paradise before the sun went down. That’s the gospel at its most undiluted: grace received by faith alone, with nothing to add and nothing withheld. What Jesus gave him, He gives to you.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I come to You with clenched hands more often than open ones. I want to bring something — to earn what You’ve already freely given, to add my contribution to a salvation that needed nothing from me to be complete. Forgive me for the pride hiding underneath my effort. For the subtle belief that grace is for the desperate, and I’m not quite that far gone.

The criminal on the cross undoes all of that. He had nothing. He brought nothing. And You gave him paradise.

That’s what You offer me. Not because I’ve been faithful enough or failed minimally enough or finally gotten my act together. Because You are exactly who he recognized You to be — innocent, sovereign, and full of grace toward the ones who turn to You with nothing left to hold back.

I want to ask what he asked. Not for rescue on my terms. Not for the cross to come down or the circumstances to change. Just: remember me. See me. Let me be with You.

And I trust — the way he trusted, with everything already gone — that Your answer is the same one You gave him. Today. With You. Amen.

Response

1. Open Your Hands: The criminal came with nothing. Today, identify one thing you’ve been holding onto as if it contributes to your standing before God — your track record, your church attendance, your moral effort, your spiritual disciplines. These things have their place. But they are not the ground of your salvation. Spend five minutes in prayer with physically open hands, receiving what Jesus has already given rather than presenting what you’ve done.

2. Say the Simple Thing: The criminal’s prayer was simple: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Not elaborate. Not polished. Just honest and direct. Today, pray the simplest, most honest prayer you can — not the one that sounds right, but the one that’s actually true. Whatever is underneath the surface, say that. Jesus answered the criminal’s unpolished request with paradise. He’ll meet your honest words too.

3. Tell Someone Who Thinks They’ve Waited Too Long: The criminal came to Jesus in the final hours of his life. He is proof that there is no such thing as too late. Think of one person in your life who believes they’ve done too much, waited too long, or drifted too far to come back. Reach out to them today — not with a sermon, but with this story. A dying man. Empty hands. And the words “Today you will be with me in paradise.”

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 21: Saturday Silence

Psalm 46:10; Lamentations 3:25-26

¹⁰ “Be still, and know that I am God.”

— Psalm 46:10 (NIV)

²⁵ The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; ²⁶ it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

— Lamentations 3:25-26 (NIV)

Reflection

This is the day nobody talks about.

Good Friday has its solemnity. Easter Sunday has its celebration. But Holy Saturday — the day between — belongs to silence. To waiting. To the strange, suspended grief of not knowing what comes next.

The disciples didn’t know Sunday was coming. They knew only that Jesus was dead, that the tomb was sealed, that everything they had given the last three years of their lives to was over. The Sabbath held them in place — no traveling, no working, no doing anything at all — while the weight of Friday settled into their bones.

They couldn’t rush to the tomb. They couldn’t make plans. They could only sit with what had happened and wait for a morning that, as far as they knew, would bring nothing but more grief.

That is where we sit today.

This week we have walked through the darkest territory of the series. We fell asleep in the garden when Jesus needed us most. We found our own ways to betray Him for far less than thirty pieces of silver. We stood by a courtyard fire and denied Him — not always in words, but in our distracted, plan-running, self-sufficient ways. We washed our hands of hard choices and called it wisdom. We let the crowd do our thinking for us. We sat at the foot of the cross and rolled dice while He died above us.

It has been a heavy week. The heaviest of the series.

But every conviction this week came wrapped in grace. Jesus carried Gethsemane alone — and kept coming back for the disciples anyway. He called Judas friend at the moment of betrayal and held the door open to the end. He turned and looked at Peter across the courtyard — not in judgment, but as a touchpoint of grace. He stood sovereign and silent before Pilate, already interceding for those who didn’t know they needed it. He absorbed the crowd’s worst words and turned them into the ground of three thousand salvations. He prayed “Father, forgive them” while the soldiers were still rolling dice — before they had any idea they needed forgiving.

Every hard thing this week had a tender thing underneath it. That’s who He is. That’s what the cross reveals.

Now we rest. Not because the story is over — it isn’t. Not because everything is resolved — it isn’t yet, not on this side of Sunday. But because Holy Saturday is its own kind of grace: the grace of enforced stillness, of sitting with what we don’t yet understand, of trusting that God is working in the silence even when we cannot see it.

The women prepared spices on Friday and rested on Saturday, not knowing Sunday was coming. They were faithful in the waiting. So can we be.

Be still. Sunday is coming. But we don’t go there yet. We sit here first, in the silence, and we trust the God who works in tombs.

Prayer Prompts

Take your time with these. Don’t rush. Pick the ones that resonate, or pray your own. There’s no hurry today.

For the Garden You Keep Falling Asleep In:

Jesus, I keep showing up without being present. My spirit is willing and my flesh is weak — and the gap between them is wider than I want to admit. Wake me up. Not just in my devotional life, but in all of it. And on the days when exhaustion takes everything I have, remind me that You are watching even when I cannot. You never sleep.

For the Ways You’ve Traded Him:

Lord, I know what I’ve been exchanging You for — quietly, gradually, in ways I’ve been calling something other than betrayal. Approval. Comfort. Convenience. The things I want more in weak moments than I want You. Forgive me. The door You held open for Judas is still open for me. I’m walking through it.

For the Courtyard:

Jesus, I’ve been so absorbed in my own plan — so focused on fixing what I thought needed fixing — that I’ve missed what You were actually doing right in front of me. Forgive the self-sufficiency dressed up as devotion. I don’t want to be running scenarios while You’re at work. Turn and find me. I want to see Your eyes.

For the Basin of Water:

Father, I confess the hand-washing. The careful language. The non-decisions I’ve dressed up as prudence. I’ve chosen my reputation over Your truth more times than I want to count. Forgive me. The basin of water never cleaned what only Your blood can. Receive me as I am — and give me the courage to choose rightly, whatever it costs.

For the Crowd I’ve Been Part Of:

Jesus, I’ve let consensus replace conscience. I’ve amplified what I should have questioned and stayed silent when I should have spoken. Forgive me for the times I’ve let the loudest voices in the room do my thinking for me. Give me the courage to be a different kind of voice — not louder, but clearer. Not angrier, but truer.

For the Dice:

Lord, I confess the numbness. The familiarity that has become its own kind of blindness. I’ve sat at the foot of Your cross and thought about other things. Forgive me for the desensitization — for hearing the story so many times that I’ve stopped being broken open by it. Make me the centurion. Draw me to my Savior. You are the Son of God. Let that be enough.

For Holy Saturday:

Father, I don’t always know what You’re doing. There are sealed tombs in my life — dreams that seem finished, prayers that seem unanswered, hopes that feel buried beyond recovery. Teach me to sit in the silence without rushing to resolution. The disciples didn’t know Sunday was coming. Help me trust that You are working in the dark, in the sealed places, in the waiting I cannot yet understand. You are the God who works in tombs.

Practices for Today

Choose one or more of these to practice Holy Saturday rest:

Silence — Set aside 20-30 minutes to sit in complete stillness. No agenda. No requests. No trying to resolve what this week has stirred up. Just be still and know that He is God. Let the silence be the practice.

Walk — Take a slow walk outside. No earbuds. No destination. Let the rhythm of movement quiet the weight of the week. Notice what is still alive around you — creation continuing, unhurried, while the story pauses.

Lament — If grief is present — your own grief, not just the disciples’ — bring it. Read Psalm 22 or Lamentations 3 slowly. Let Scripture give language to what you’re carrying. Lament is not the absence of faith. It is faith being honest.

Prepare — The women prepared spices on Friday, faithful in the waiting, not knowing what Sunday would bring. Is there something you need to prepare — a conversation, an act of obedience, a step of faith — that Sunday’s arrival will make possible? Do the Friday work today. Be ready.

Rest — If the week has taken everything you have, sleep. Nourish your body. Let yourself be restored. The resurrection is coming and it will ask something of you. Be rested enough to receive it.

Rest well today. The tomb is sealed — but Sunday is coming.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 20: The Soldiers at the Cross

Matthew 27:35-36, 45-54; Luke 23:34

Introduction

They were just doing their job.

That’s the most unsettling thing about the soldiers at the cross. They weren’t driven by ideology or hatred or religious conviction. They hadn’t plotted against Jesus or argued for His death or stirred up the crowd. They were Roman soldiers assigned to carry out an execution — one of dozens they had probably performed, in a province where crucifixion was routine enough to be unremarkable.

They did what soldiers do. They followed orders. They drove the nails. They raised the cross. They divided His garments among themselves — standard procedure, the condemned forfeited their possessions — and then they sat down and waited for Him to die.

And while they waited, they gambled for His clothing.

Not out of cruelty. Out of boredom. The shift had to be worked regardless. The hours had to pass. There was nothing to do but wait, so they made a game of it. The dice came out. The tunic went to the winner. And above them, three feet away, the Son of God was dying for the sins of the world.

They didn’t know that, of course. They had no framework for it. To them He was another convicted criminal on another slow afternoon in Jerusalem.

But that’s exactly what makes this the most quietly devastating portrait in the whole Easter story. Not the cruelty. The indifference. The capacity to be present at the most important moment in human history and feel nothing at all.

We know that capacity better than we’d like to admit.

Scripture

³⁵ When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots. ³⁶ And sitting down, they kept watch over him there.

— Matthew 27:35-36 (NIV)

³⁴ Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” And they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

— Luke 23:34 (NIV)

⁴⁵ From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. ⁴⁶ About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

⁴⁷ When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.”

⁴⁸ Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink. ⁴⁹ The rest said, “Now leave him alone. Let’s see if Elijah comes to save him.”

⁵⁰ And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.

⁵¹ At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split ⁵² and the tombs broke open. The graves of many holy people who had died were raised to life.

⁵⁴ When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”

— Matthew 27:45-52, 54 (NIV)

Reflection

Sitting Down to Watch

Matthew’s phrase is almost unbearable in its plainness: “And sitting down, they kept watch over him there.”

They sat down. They got comfortable. They had a job to do and they did it without ceremony or feeling or any apparent awareness that something was happening above them that would split history in two. The earth hadn’t shaken yet. The curtain hadn’t torn. From where they were sitting it was just another execution on just another Friday afternoon.

So they divided His garments — fulfilling Psalm 22:18 without knowing it, executing a prophecy written a thousand years earlier without any idea that a prophecy was being executed. They cast lots for His tunic. And while darkness gathered over the land and the Son of God cried out to His Father from the weight of every sin ever committed, the soldiers watched and waited and passed the time.

Jesus looked down at them from the cross and said: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Not after it was over. Not from a safe distance. In the middle of it. While the nails were fresh and the dice were still rolling and the soldiers were dividing up the last earthly possessions of the man they had just crucified — Jesus was interceding for them.

He prayed for the people who didn’t know they needed prayer. He forgave the people who didn’t know they needed forgiveness. He died for people who were too busy with a card game to notice He was doing it.

That is either the most scandalous thing in Scripture or the most liberating. Possibly both.

And then the earth shook. And the centurion — the commanding officer of the detachment, the man responsible for the execution, a soldier who had watched men die before and thought he knew what death looked like — looked up. And something broke open in him.

“Surely he was the Son of God.”

One man in that detachment who let it land. One soldier who looked up from the dice and the darkness and the routine of it all and saw what was actually happening. We don’t know his name. We don’t know what became of him. But Matthew records his words — the first human confession of Jesus as Son of God at the cross — as if they matter. Because they do.

In the middle of indifference, one person looked up. And that was enough.

We Are Like Them

We are not most like the soldiers in their cruelty. We are most like them in their capacity to be entirely present at the cross and feel nothing.

We have heard the Easter story so many times that we have become desensitized to it. We know how it ends. We know the theological categories. We can explain substitutionary atonement and the significance of the torn curtain and the fulfillment of Psalm 22 — and still sit through Good Friday without anything actually landing. We have become, in our familiarity, as numb as soldiers who had seen too many crucifixions to be moved by one more.

We take communion and think about lunch. We sing about the cross and compose our grocery lists. We read the passion narrative in church on Palm Sunday and follow along in our bulletin, turning the pages on schedule, and walk out into the parking lot talking about the game last night.

We are there. We are just not present in it.

The soldiers’ sin wasn’t that they hated Jesus. It was that they were so desensitized to the machinery of death that they couldn’t recognize life when it was dying in front of them. They had a framework for execution, for death. They had no framework for redemption, for life.

We have the framework. The Gospel. We’ve just stopped letting it do anything to us.

But the centurion is also in this story. And the centurion is the invitation.

He wasn’t looking for a revelation. He was doing the same job as everyone else. But somewhere between the darkness at noon and the earthquake and the way Jesus died — not cursing, not begging, but forgiving and commending His spirit to the Father — something cracked the centurion’s professional detachment wide open. He looked up. He saw. He said what he saw.

We don’t have to stay at the dice. We can look up. Even now. Even after years of familiarity and going through the motions and sitting through services without being touched. The cross is still there. Jesus is still interceding. The invitation to look up has never been withdrawn.

We were there at the foot of the cross, keeping watch without watching, present without presence, too familiar with the story to let it break us open. We are there now. But the centurion shows us another way: look up. Let the darkness and the earthquake and the way He died draw us to our Savior. Let it do what it was always meant to do.

Grace Note

“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” — Romans 5:8 (NIV)

While the soldiers were gambling. While the crowd was mocking. While the disciples were hiding. While we were going through the motions, too familiar with grace to feel it. While. Not after we cleaned ourselves up. Not when we finally got serious. While we were still exactly as we are — indifferent, distracted, numb, going through the motions — Christ died for us. The soldiers didn’t earn His prayer of forgiveness. The centurion didn’t earn his revelation. We don’t earn the grace that meets us at the foot of the cross. We just have to look up.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I have sat at the foot of Your cross and rolled dice. Not out of hatred — out of familiarity. I have heard this story so many times that I have learned to process it without being pierced by it. I know the words. I know the theology. I can explain what happened and why it matters — and still walk away unchanged because I never really let it land.

Forgive me for the numbness. For the going through the motions. For being present at the most important moment in history and being somewhere else entirely in my heart.

Thank You that You prayed for the soldiers while the nails were still fresh. That You said “Father, forgive them” before they had any idea they needed forgiving. That Your intercession didn’t wait for my awareness or my gratitude or my willingness to be moved.

Make me the centurion. Crack open whatever professional distance I’ve put between myself and what You did. Let the darkness matter. Let the earthquake land. Draw me to my Savior. Help me really see what is happening three feet above my head.

You are the Son of God. Let that be enough to break me open. Amen.

Response

1. Put Down the Dice: What are you using to pass the time at the foot of the cross? What occupies your attention during worship, communion, prayer — the mental noise, the to-do lists, the phone you’re fighting the urge to check? Name it specifically. Not to condemn yourself, but to see clearly what you’ve been reaching for instead of looking up. The soldiers weren’t evil. They were just distracted. So are we.

2. Read It Slowly: Today, read the crucifixion narrative slowly — Matthew 27:32-54 in full. Not to get through it. To let it get through you. Stop at “Father, forgive them.” Stop at the darkness at noon. Stop at the torn curtain. Stop at the centurion’s confession. Give each moment the space to land. This is not a story to be processed. It is a death to be received.

3. Say What You See: The centurion looked up and said out loud what he saw: “Surely he was the Son of God.” Today, find one person — a family member, a friend, someone in your life who needs to hear it — and tell them what Jesus means to you. Not a rehearsed explanation. Just what you see when you look up. The centurion’s confession changed nothing about the crucifixion and everything about him. Saying it out loud has a way of doing that.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 19: The Crowd at the Trial

Matthew 27:15-26; Acts 2:36-38

Introduction

Nobody came to that trial planning to call for a crucifixion.

Think about who was in that crowd. Jerusalem was full for Passover — hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who had traveled from across the known world to celebrate Israel’s deliverance from Egypt. Many of them had heard Jesus teach. Some had been fed by Him on a hillside. Others had watched Him heal. A few days earlier, crowds very much like this one had lined the road into the city waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

These were not bloodthirsty people. They were ordinary people — caught in an extraordinary moment, being pushed in a direction by voices louder and more organized than their own.

The chief priests and elders had worked the crowd before Pilate even appeared. Matthew tells us they “persuaded the crowd” to ask for Barabbas and to call for Jesus’ destruction. By the time Pilate came out and offered them a choice, the choice had already been made for them. All they had to do was repeat what they were hearing — louder and louder, until it became the only thing anyone was saying.

“Crucify him!”

It’s the easiest thing in the world to say what the crowd is saying. And one of the hardest things in the world to say something different.

We know. We’ve been in that crowd. You may be in it right now.

Scripture

¹⁵ Now it was the governor’s custom at the festival to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. ¹⁶ At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus Barabbas. ¹⁷ So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?” ¹⁸ For he knew it was out of self-interest that they had handed Jesus over to him.

²⁰ But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the crowd to ask for Barabbas and to have Jesus executed.

²¹ “Which of the two do you want me to release to you?” asked the governor. “Barabbas,” they answered.

²² “What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked. They all answered, “Crucify him!”

²³ “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

²⁴ When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!” ²⁵ All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!”

— Matthew 27:15-18, 20-25 (NIV)

³⁶ “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” ³⁷ When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” ³⁸ Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

— Acts 2:36-38 (NIV)

Reflection

The Sound of a Crowd

Nobody decided to crucify Jesus. They just went along with it.

That’s the mechanism Matthew exposes with one quiet sentence: “The chief priests and elders persuaded the crowd.” The persuasion didn’t require logic or evidence. It required momentum. One voice, then another, then the pressure of everyone around you saying the same thing — until dissent feels not just difficult but impossible. Until the question isn’t “What do I actually think?” but “What happens to me if I say something different?”

The crowd didn’t reason their way to “Crucify him.” They were carried there. Swept along by the current of what everyone else was doing, amplifying a verdict they hadn’t formed themselves, until their own voices were indistinguishable from the noise around them.

And when Pilate pressed them — “Why? What crime has he committed?” — they didn’t answer the question. They couldn’t, because they didn’t have an answer. They just shouted louder. Because that’s what crowds do when the question gets too hard: they increase the volume and hope the noise becomes its own justification.

The crowd didn’t crucify Jesus out of hatred. They crucified Him out of the path of least resistance.

And then came the moment that should chill every one of us: “His blood be on us and on our children.” Spoken as a declaration of mob solidarity. A way of saying — we own this, collectively, so no single one of us has to own it individually. Diffused guilt feels like no guilt at all. That’s the lie the crowd told itself as it dispersed back into the city.

We Are Like Them

We are never more like the trial crowd than when we let the loudest voices in the room do our thinking for us.

It happens in every arena of our lives. The group chat that turns on someone and we add our voice to the pile-on rather than ask whether it’s fair. The workplace culture that agrees something is acceptable and we go along rather than be the one who raises a concern. The political tribe that has decided what faithful people believe and we adopt the package wholesale rather than think each issue through before God. The church culture that has an unspoken consensus about who is in and who is out — and we stay quiet rather than be seen standing with the wrong person.

We don’t usually make a decision to join the crowd. We just fail to make a decision not to. And in the absence of a decision, the current takes us.

Social media has made this worse, not better. The mechanisms that once required a crowd gathered in a courtyard now operate at scale, at speed, with algorithmic assistance. The pressure to amplify what everyone is already saying — to add our voice to whatever is loudest — has never been more constant or more invisible. We shout “Crucify him” with a share button, a retweet, a laugh react, a silence that the algorithm reads as assent.

The crowd’s sin wasn’t passion. It was the abdication of conscience to consensus.

But here is where the story takes a turn that should take our breath away. Seven weeks after the crucifixion, Peter stood up in Jerusalem — in front of a crowd that included many of the same people who had been in that courtyard — and told them plainly: “God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

He named what they had done. Directly. Without softening it.

And they were cut to the heart.

“What shall we do?” they asked. And Peter’s answer was not condemnation. It was invitation: “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.”

The crowd had called His blood down on themselves. And Peter offered them exactly that — the blood of Jesus, not as judgment but as forgiveness. The worst thing they had said became the ground of the best thing they could receive.

Three thousand people from that crowd said yes.

We were there in the courtyard, carried by the current, adding our voice to what everyone else was saying. We are there now. But the same Peter who was warming himself by a courtyard fire — and who found his way to a beach and a commission — stood up and told that crowd that the blood they called down was available to them as mercy. It is available to us too.

Grace Note

“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.” — Ephesians 2:8-9 (NIV)

The crowd couldn’t save themselves by shouting louder. They couldn’t undo what they’d done by feeling bad about it. Salvation wasn’t available to them through better crowd behavior or stronger individual conscience. It was available through grace — the unearned, undeserved gift of the very One they had handed over. That’s still how it works. We don’t find our way out of the crowd by trying harder. We find our way out by receiving what the crowd rejected: Jesus, Lord and Messiah, whose blood covers exactly what we called down on ourselves.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I know the sound of the crowd. I’ve added my voice when I should have stayed silent. I’ve stayed silent when I should have spoken. I’ve let the current carry me to places I never consciously decided to go — and told myself it wasn’t really my fault because everyone else was going there too.

Forgive me for the times I’ve let consensus replace conscience. For the pile-ons I’ve joined, the silences I’ve kept, the tribal packages I’ve adopted wholesale rather than bringing each one before You. For the ways I’ve let the volume of the room drown out the quieter voice that knew better.

Thank You that the blood the crowd called down became the blood that covers them. That Peter stood up in front of that same crowd and offered mercy instead of judgment. That You make the same offer to me — not because I’ve managed to stay out of the crowd, but because Your grace is larger than the worst thing I’ve shouted.

Give me the courage to be a different kind of voice. Not louder — clearer. Not angrier — truer. Help me think before I amplify. Help me stand before You before I stand before any crowd. Amen.

Response

1. Audit Your Crowd: What groups, feeds, or communities are currently doing your thinking for you? Where have you adopted a consensus without examining it before God? Pick one specific area — political, cultural, relational — where you’ve gone along with the current without deciding to. Bring it to Scripture and prayer this week. Ask: Is this what I actually believe, or is this what my crowd believes?

2. Find Your Dissenting Voice: Think of one situation — current or recent — where you went along with something you knew wasn’t right, or stayed silent when you should have spoken. You don’t have to fix the whole thing today. But take one small step toward the voice that knew better. A private conversation. A quiet word. A decision not to amplify next time. Practice being the person in the crowd who doesn’t shout louder when the question gets too hard.

3. Receive What the Crowd Rejected: The crowd rejected Jesus and then discovered His blood was available to them as mercy. Today, receive that mercy specifically for the ways you’ve been carried by crowds — online, in your community, in your own heart. Read Acts 2:36-38 slowly. Hear Peter’s offer as directed at you. Repent of the specific consensus you’ve adopted that you know isn’t His. And receive the gift that covers it.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 18: Pontius Pilate

Matthew 27:11-26; John 18:33-38

Introduction

He knew.

That’s what separates Pontius Pilate from almost everyone else in the Easter story. The crowds were swept up in the moment. The religious leaders had convinced themselves they were serving God. The soldiers were following orders. Peter was lost in his own fog. Even Judas had talked himself into believing he was doing what needed to be done.

But Pilate had no such cover. He was a Roman governor — a man trained to read situations, to weigh evidence, to make judgments. And everything in him said the same thing: this man is innocent.

His wife sent a message mid-trial: “Don’t have anything to do with that innocent man, for I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him.” The crowd’s hostility struck him as transparently political. Jesus Himself stood before him answering questions with the quiet authority of someone who had nothing to hide and nothing to fear.

Pilate tried to find a way out. He offered to release a prisoner — surely they’d choose Jesus over Barabbas. He sent Jesus to Herod, hoping to pass the problem along. He came back to the crowd again and again: “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

Three times he declared Jesus innocent. Three times the crowd pushed back harder.

And then Pilate took a basin of water, washed his hands in front of the crowd, and handed an innocent man over to be crucified.

He knew. And he chose anyway. That’s the mirror we have to look into today.

Scripture

¹¹ Meanwhile Jesus stood before the governor, and the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” “You have said so,” Jesus replied.

¹² When he was accused by the chief priests and the elders, he gave no answer. ¹³ Then Pilate asked him, “Don’t you hear the testimony they are bringing against you?” ¹⁴ But Jesus made no reply, not even to a single charge — to the great amazement of the governor.

¹⁵ Now it was the governor’s custom at the festival to release a prisoner chosen by the crowd. ¹⁶ At that time they had a well-known prisoner whose name was Jesus Barabbas. ¹⁷ So when the crowd had gathered, Pilate asked them, “Which one do you want me to release to you: Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called the Messiah?”

²⁴ When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!” ²⁵ All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!” ²⁶ Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified.

— Matthew 27:11-14, 15-17, 24-26 (NIV)

³³ Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

³⁶ Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

³⁷ “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

³⁸ “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him.”

— John 18:33, 36-38 (NIV)

Reflection

What Could Not Be Washed Away

Pilate’s question — “What is truth?” — is one of the most haunting in all of the Easter story. Not because it’s a genuine inquiry. Because it isn’t. He doesn’t wait for an answer. He asks the question and walks straight back out to the crowd. It’s the question of a man who has already decided he can’t afford doing what is right.

What Pilate wanted wasn’t truth. He wanted a way to escape — to be technically uninvolved. The hand-washing was theater. A public performance of innocence that he hoped would transfer his guilt to someone else. “It is your responsibility.” As if responsibility worked that way. As if his non-decision wasn’t a decision. As if a basin of water could clean what his choice had made dirty.

It couldn’t. It can’t. The hands that washed themselves in front of the crowd were the same hands that signed the order. No ceremony changes that.

Pilate didn’t lack information. He lacked the courage to choose what was right over his own self-interests. And he dressed the lack of courage up as a lack of options.

He had options. He had authority. He had three declarations of innocence already on the record and a crowd that, however loud, could not actually compel a Roman governor to do anything. The crowd frightened him less than Caesar did. A riot in Jerusalem, a complaint to Rome, a whisper in the emperor’s ear that Pilate couldn’t control his province — that was the real threat. Everything else was negotiable.

What he didn’t have was the willingness to pay what holding the right position would cost him — his standing, his relationship with Caesar, his carefully managed political future. He overruled his own conscience. He dismissed his wife’s prophetic warning. He betrayed his civil duty as governor — Caesar’s appointed instrument of truth and justice — in order to protect his place in Caesar’s world.

So he washed his hands. And handed Jesus over.

We Are Like Him

Pilate is the most uncomfortable mirror in the series because he’s not a monster. He’s a pragmatist. A reasonable man doing what reasonable men do when the cost of conviction exceeds what they’re willing to pay.

We know him well.

We know what it is to see something clearly — the right thing, the true thing, the courageous thing — and then find a reason why this particular moment isn’t the right time to act on it. We know the hand-washing ritual: the disclaimer that distances us from a decision we’re about to make anyway. “I don’t really agree with this, but...” “I know this probably isn’t right, however...” “I want to go on record as saying...” — and then we go along with it.

We stay silent when we should speak because speaking would cost us the room. We go along with what we know is wrong because disagreeing would cost us the relationship. We choose the path that keeps our options open, our reputation intact, our future uncompromised — and we find language that makes the choice sound like something other than what it is.

We ask “What is truth?” not because we want the answer but because the question buys us time and makes us sound thoughtful while we’re deciding what we can afford.

Pilate stood in front of the Truth and chose his career. He walked out of that conversation, washed his hands, and signed the order. And history remembers him for one thing.

But here is where grace enters even the darkest story: Jesus, standing before the most powerful man in Jerusalem, was not a victim of Pilate’s decision. “You would have no power over me,” He told him quietly, “if it were not given to you from above” (John 19:11). The cross was not Pilate’s idea succeeding. It was the Father’s plan unfolding — through Pilate’s failure, despite it, redeeming it.

The one who stood silent before a governor’s questions is the one before whom every knee will bow. The accused became the Judge. And the judgment He renders is not what we deserve — it is mercy, offered to everyone who does what Pilate would not: stops asking what truth will cost, and simply receives it.

We were there in the governor’s hall, finding our own reasons why this moment isn’t the one to take a stand. We are there now. But the basin of water was never going to clean what only the blood of Jesus can.

Grace Note

“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.” — 2 Corinthians 5:10 (NIV)

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” — Romans 8:1 (NIV)

One day we will all stand where Pilate stood — before Jesus, with our choices laid bare. But there is a profound difference: Pilate stood before Jesus as a judge with the power to condemn. We will stand before Jesus as the condemned, recipients of grace He purchased at the very trial Pilate presided over. The one who was handed over is the one who will receive us. And the verdict He renders is not what we deserve. For those who receive what Pilate refused — the Truth standing right in front of him — there is now no condemnation. None. The basin of water couldn’t clean what Pilate’s choice had made dirty. But the blood of Jesus already has.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I know the basin of water. I know the hand-washing ritual — the disclaimer, the caveat, the careful language I use to distance myself from decisions I’m making anyway. I’ve stood in front of what I knew was right and asked “What will this cost me?” instead of “What does this require of me?” And I’ve chosen my comfort, my reputation, my carefully managed future over the courage You were asking for.

Forgive me for the times I’ve dressed cowardice up as prudence. For the silences that weren’t wisdom but self-protection. For the moments I’ve handed You over to whatever crowd was loudest because holding the right position felt like too high a price.

You stood silent before Pilate’s questions — not because You had nothing to say, but because You had already decided what You were willing to pay. You paid it for me.

Give me that kind of courage. Not the courage that never feels the cost — but the courage that feels it fully and chooses rightly anyway. Help me stop washing my hands and start following Yours. Amen.

Response

1. Name Your Basin: Where are you performing innocence rather than choosing courage? The relationship where you’re using careful language to avoid taking a clear position. The workplace situation where you’ve gone along with something you know is wrong. The moment you’ve been waiting for the right time to speak — which somehow never arrives. Name the specific basin you’ve been reaching for. Pilate’s problem wasn’t that he faced a hard choice. It was that he chose comfort and called it something else.

2. Ask the Right Question: Pilate asked “What is truth?” as a way of avoiding it. Today, ask it genuinely — in one specific area where you’ve been managing ambiguity rather than pursuing clarity. Bring it to Scripture. Bring it to prayer. Bring it to a trusted friend if you need to. Stop asking what the truth will cost you and start asking what it requires. Then take one step in that direction.

3. Stand Before the Right Judge: Pilate tried to manage his verdict by managing his audience — the crowd, Caesar, his own conscience. We do the same. Today, spend 10 minutes in silence simply standing before Jesus — not performing, not explaining, not managing. Just present. Let Him be the only audience that matters. What does He see? What does He say? What does He ask you to do that you’ve been too afraid to do in front of everyone else?

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Wednesday: Eight Weeks. One Journey. What Now?

Introduction

We began eight weeks ago with a single longing.

“Oh that my ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes.”

Not a declaration of arrival. Not a confident announcement of spiritual achievement. A longing. The honest cry of a heart that knows where it wants to go and knows just as clearly that it cannot get there on its own. The psalmist opened the longest psalm in the Bible the way every genuine journey with God begins — with desire, with dependence, and with a Word he was not yet sure he could keep.

And now we are at the end. 176 verses later. Eight weeks later. And the last word of the journey is not triumphant arrival either.

“I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant.”

The journey began with longing and it ends with honest dependence. And everything in between — every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, every season of the human soul, every declaration of love and cry of desperation and midnight meditation and pre-dawn prayer — has been the most beautiful, costly, grace-dependent walk with the Word that Scripture gives us.

This is what it looks like to walk with the Word. Not perfectly. Not without wandering. But faithfully — always anchoring, always seeking, always coming back to the only place where the lamp is lit and the honey is sweet and the hiding place holds.

The Arc

Think back over what these eight weeks have shown us.

We started with the blessed life — the one who walks in the law of the LORD, whose whole heart seeks Him. We discovered that blessing is not comfort but alignment — the deep rightness of a life ordered around God’s Word.

We moved into the whole heart — the lamp for our feet, the light for our path, the Word hidden in the heart that keeps us from sin. We learned that the Word is not just instruction. It is illumination.

We sat with the honey — sweeter than honey from the comb, more precious than gold. We found that love for God’s Word is not manufactured by discipline alone. It is discovered — tasted — and then chosen again and again because nothing else compares.

We found the hiding place — the shelter of God’s presence, the refuge of His Word in every season of affliction and trouble. We learned that the Word doesn’t just light the path. It holds us when the path disappears.

We walked the Emmaus road — hearts burning within us as He opened the Scriptures, eyes opened at the breaking of bread. We remembered that the Word has always been alive, always been personal, always been walking alongside us even when we didn’t recognize Him.

We stood with the psalmist in his urgency — rising before dawn, crying through the night watches, pressing desperate requests before a God who is great in mercy. And we discovered that wholehearted desperation produces wholehearted presence. He was always near.

And we ended with the lost sheep — the most honest, most grace-dependent, most theologically profound ending the psalm could have given us. Not arrival. Not achievement. A sheep that knows it is lost and knows exactly who to cry to.

The Shepherd came. He always does.

Prayer Prompt

Lord, I come to the end of this journey the same way the psalmist did — not with everything resolved, not with every question answered, not with the wandering permanently behind me. I come with what eight weeks in Your Word has produced in me — the places of growth, the places still unfinished, the questions that have opened up where I didn’t expect them, the love that has quietly grown in ways I am still discovering.

Thank You for what You have done in me across these weeks. Not just what I have learned — what You have produced. The understanding I didn’t have at week one. The hunger that has grown rather than diminished. The honesty I have found to bring You what is actually true rather than what I think You want to hear. Thank You that You have been faithful to every cry — the urgent ones and the quiet ones, the midnight ones and the pre-dawn ones.

I don’t know exactly what comes next. But I know the Word is still a lamp. The Light is still shining. The Shepherd is still seeking. And You have shown me across eight weeks that walking with the Word is not a program with a finish line — it is a life with a direction. Keep me walking in that direction, Lord. When I drift — seek me. When I hunger — feed me. When the path disappears — hold me.

I’m listening. I’ll follow You. Amen.

What Is Your Next Step?

1. What is the one truth from these eight weeks that has settled most deeply in you? Not the most interesting or the most surprising — the one that has taken up permanent residence. The one you will still be carrying a year from now. Write it down today and put it somewhere you will see it. On a card, in the margin of your Bible, on your phone. Let it be the Tav — the seal — that you place on this journey.

2. What has changed in how you approach God’s Word? Not what you know differently — how you come differently. Your posture. Your appetite. Your expectations of what the Word can do in you. Name it honestly, even if the change is smaller than you hoped or different than you expected. What is your next adventure in God’s Word? If you don’t know yet, who can help you?

3. The psalmist ended as a lost sheep asking to be sought. Where do you need the Shepherd to find you right now? Not in general — specifically. The place you have wandered, the place you have been pretending you haven’t wandered, the place where you need Him to come after you today. Tell Him. Out loud, in your own words, without cleaning it up first. Then take the next faithful step — not the whole journey, just the next step. The Shepherd knows the way home. Follow Him — This is The Way.

My Prayer for You

Lord, I’m praying for my friend. I know it hasn’t always been easy but I hope they have found light for their journey and its source in You. If they are like me, they have been inspired and challenged — help us to cement what we’ve learned, honor the emotion and the call we have felt, be faithful to the decisions we’ve made, and focus our faith and life on following You and Your Word. Oh that our ways may be steadfast in keeping your statutes.

Give them courage to follow without hesitation, faith to obey without having all the answers, and endurance for the road ahead.

Following You, wherever You lead.

Amen.

God’s Word is still a lamp to your feet. The Light is still shining. The Shepherd is still seeking. Walk with the Word — all the days of your life.

The journey continues. This is the way.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: Walking with the Word — Psalm 119

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 17: Peter’s Denial

Luke 22:54-62; John 21:15-17

Introduction

He had meant every word.

Just hours earlier, at the table, Peter had said it with everything he had: “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” And when Jesus told him he would deny Him three times before the rooster crowed, Peter pushed back harder: “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.”

He wasn’t performing. He wasn’t posturing. Peter genuinely believed he was the kind of man who would die before he denied. He had the track record to back it up — he was the one who stepped out of the boat, the one who drew his sword in the garden, the one who followed Jesus all the way to the high priest’s courtyard when the other disciples had already fled.

And that’s what we usually miss. Peter followed. Into the courtyard. Alone. At night. Into the belly of the opposition.

Cowards go home. Peter went closer.

So what was he doing there? Not hiding — watching. Assessing. Working the angles the way a fisherman works a problem, turning it over, looking for the opening. Jesus was inside, the trial was moving fast, and Peter’s mind was almost certainly somewhere ahead of the moment — running scenarios, formulating a plan, looking for something, anything, he could do.

He wasn’t afraid. He was desperate. There’s a difference.

And then a servant girl looked across the fire and said: “This man was with him.”

And the words came out before Peter was even fully present to the moment.

Scripture

⁵⁴ Then seizing him, they led him away and took him into the house of the high priest. Peter followed at a distance. ⁵⁵ And when some there had kindled a fire in the middle of the courtyard and had sat down together, Peter sat down with them. ⁵⁶ A servant girl saw him seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said, “This man was with him.”

⁵⁷ But he denied it. “Woman, I don’t know him,” he said.

⁵⁸ A little later someone else saw him and said, “You also are one of them.” “Man, I am not!” Peter replied.

⁵⁹ About an hour later another asserted, “Certainly this fellow was with him, for he is a Galilean.” ⁶⁰ Peter replied, “Man, I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Just as he was speaking, the rooster crowed. ⁶¹ The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: “Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.” ⁶² And he went outside and wept bitterly.

— Luke 22:54-62 (NIV)

¹⁵ When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”

¹⁶ Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”

¹⁷ The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.”

— John 21:15-17 (NIV)

Reflection

The Courtyard

We’ve always assumed Peter denied Jesus because he was afraid. But look at where he was.

This is the man who swung a sword at a soldier in the garden. Who followed the arresting party through the dark, alone, all the way to the high priest’s house. Who sat down at the fire in the middle of the courtyard — not on the edges, not near the gate, but in the middle, where he could see and hear everything. This is not the behavior of a man in the grip of fear. This is a man with a plan. Or trying to find one.

Jesus was inside. The trial was moving. And Peter’s mind was almost certainly running ahead of the moment — turning the problem over, scanning for an opening, doing what fishermen and men of action do when someone they love is in danger. There has to be something I can do. There has to be a way through this.

He was so absorbed in solving the problem that he was somewhere else entirely when the servant girl looked across the fire and said: “This man was with him.”

The words came out before he was fully present to the moment. Reflexive. Startled. A man whose cover was blown before he was ready.

Then it happened again. And again. And by the third denial the fog was lifting — and then the rooster crowed. And Jesus turned.

With everything happening to Him inside that room — the accusations, the mockery, the machinery of the crucifixion grinding into motion — Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter across the courtyard.

Not in judgment. Not in condemnation. In the middle of His own suffering, Jesus found Peter in the crowd and held his gaze. I see you. I haven’t forgotten you. I told you this was coming and I’m still here.

A touchpoint of grace in the darkest moment of the night.

And Peter, coming out of the fog, saw himself clearly for the first time — not who he believed himself to be, but who he actually was in that moment. And he went outside and wept bitterly.

The tragedy wasn’t just that he denied Jesus. It was that he was so focused on saving Jesus his own way that he missed what Jesus was actually doing.

We Are Like Him

This is a sharper mirror than cowardice, because most of us don’t think of ourselves as cowards. But nearly all of us know what it is to be so consumed with our own plan that we are spiritually absent from the moment we’re standing in.

We do it with God constantly. We bring our problem to prayer and spend the whole time telling God how to fix it — running our own scenarios, proposing our own solutions, so locked into what we think needs to happen that we can’t hear what He’s actually saying. We’re in the courtyard. We’re just not present in it.

And we deny Jesus in our distraction as much as in our fear. Not always with words — often with our absence. The conversation that needed our courage while we were busy formulating the perfect response. The moment that called for simple obedience while we were calculating the smarter strategy. The place where Jesus was clearly at work while we were focused on the problem three moves ahead.

Peter wasn’t a coward. He was a devoted, desperate, thoroughly human man who got so lost in his own plan that he missed the moment — and then came out of the fog to find Jesus looking at him across the fire.

Not to shame him. To reach him.

Jesus saw the denial coming and prayed Peter through it before it happened — “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). Not that he wouldn’t fall. That his faith would survive the falling.

And then, after the resurrection, He made breakfast on a beach. And He asked three questions — one for each denial — not to humiliate Peter but to restore him. To let love answer where distraction and fear had spoken.

“Do you love me?”

Three times. Until the courtyard was covered.

We were there by that fire — present in body, somewhere else in spirit, missing the moment until the rooster called us back. We are there now. But the beach is also coming — the same Jesus who turned and found Peter across the courtyard is the one making breakfast on the shore, asking us the only question that matters.

Grace Note

“Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them.” — Hebrews 7:25 (NIV)

Jesus prayed for Peter before Peter failed. He is praying for us now — not because we’ve held up our end, but because intercession is what He does, always, without ceasing. The courtyard doesn’t get the last word. Neither does the rooster. The last word belongs to the One who lives to intercede — who took Peter’s three denials and answered them with three invitations, who takes our worst moments and meets us there with breakfast and a question full of grace.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I know the courtyard. I’ve sat by that fire — not always in fear, but lost in my own plan. So absorbed in solving the problem, in finding the angle, in figuring out how to fix what I thought needed fixing, that I missed what You were actually doing right in front of me. And in my distraction I’ve denied You — not always with words, but with my absence, my self-sufficiency, my insistence on running my own scenarios instead of trusting Yours.

Forgive me. And thank You — that You turned and found me anyway. Not to condemn. To connect. To let me know that even in my worst moment, in the middle of everything You were carrying, You hadn’t forgotten me.

I don’t want to stay outside weeping. I want to get to the beach. I want to hear You ask me the question — not to reopen the wound, but to let love have the last word. So here, before You ask:

I love You. You know all things. You know that I love You. Help me feed Your sheep. Amen.

Response

1. Name Your Courtyard: Where do you get so lost in your own plan that you become spiritually absent from what God is actually doing? The prayer that’s really a strategy session. The problem you’re solving instead of surrendering. The moment requiring simple obedience while you’re calculating the smarter move. Name it specifically. That’s where the rooster crows for you.

2. Let the Look Land: Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter — not in judgment, but to reach him across the noise and the firelight. Find a quiet moment today to receive that look directed at you. Not the eyes of a disappointed judge. The eyes of someone who knew you would fail, prayed for you anyway, and is already making breakfast on the other shore. Let it break you open toward restoration, not despair.

3. Answer the Question: Read John 21:15-17 slowly today — but substitute your name for Peter’s. Let Jesus ask you three times: “Do you love me?” Answer honestly. Then receive what Peter received: not a lecture about the courtyard, but a commission. “Feed my sheep.” Your failure is not the end of your usefulness to Him. It never was.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

I’m Not Feeling It

At some point in most believers’ lives, someone tells them that God wants to bless them. And it sounds wonderful. It is, in fact, true. The trouble comes with what we quietly assume that blessing looks like.

Usually it looks like things going well, prospering.

I don’t say that to be cynical. I say it because I have assumed it too. There have been seasons of my life when the gap between where I was and where I believed God was taking me felt less like a journey and more like evidence — evidence that I had gotten something wrong, or that the blessing had been rerouted to someone more deserving. The good thing I was trusting God for hadn’t arrived. The door I believed He had opened had closed. And somewhere in the silence, a quiet question formed: does He still have this?

Maybe you know that question. If you do, I want to introduce you to my friend Joseph.

A Man Who Had Every Reason to Wonder

Genesis gives us more of Joseph’s story than almost any other figure in the Old Testament — fourteen chapters, more than Abraham, more than Isaac, more than Jacob. Which tells you something. God wanted this one told slowly, in full, so we wouldn’t miss what He was doing in it.

The broad strokes are familiar. Favored son. Coat of many colors. Brothers who couldn’t stand him. A pit. A slave caravan heading to Egypt. A household in Potiphar’s service. A false accusation. A prison cell. Years of silence.

And then — improbably, dramatically — the throne room of Pharaoh. Second in command over all of Egypt. The man who had been thrown into a pit by his own brothers ends up holding the grain supply for the known world.

That’s quite the arc. That’s the story most people know.

What most people gloss over is Genesis 39.

Five Times in One Chapter

Genesis 39 is not the triumphant chapter. It is the hard chapter — the one where Joseph is enslaved, falsely accused, and thrown into prison. It is the chapter where, if you were reading without knowing the ending, you would wonder whether God had lost the thread entirely.

And yet, five times in that single chapter, the text pauses to tell us the same thing:

“The Lord was with Joseph, and he prospered.”

“The Lord was with him and gave him success in everything he did.”

“The Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph.”

“The Lord was with him; he showed him kindness and granted him favor in the eyes of the prison warden.”

“The Lord was with Joseph and gave him success in whatever he did.”

Five times. In the chapter where everything is going wrong.

The repetition is intentional. The author of Genesis, Moses, wants you to feel the collision — between the outward circumstances and the inward reality of Joseph’s life. And Moses knows that gap intimately.

But in that gap the favor of God was present. Not in spite of the suffering. Not waiting on the other side of it. Present. In it.

That reframes everything.

What “Blessing” Actually Looks Like

There is a version of Christianity — well-funded, loudly promoted, impossible to avoid if you spend any time in American church culture — that has collapsed the idea of God’s blessing into a single category: material prosperity and physical health. If God is blessing you, things are going well. If things are not going well, something is wrong.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s actually a very old one. Job’s friends believed it. The disciples believed it — “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” It is a deeply intuitive framework, and it is deeply wrong.

The story of Joseph isn’t the only counterevidence. The heroes of Hebrews 11 — the ones commended for extraordinary faith — were stoned, sawed in two, destitute, persecuted. The prophets were rejected. Paul catalogued his credentials as an apostle and the list included shipwrecks, beatings, and a thorn that didn’t go away. Jesus Himself — in whom the fullness of God’s favor dwelt — was crucified.

If the prosperity framework were true, none of that would make any sense.

What Joseph’s story reveals is that the currency of God’s blessing is wider than we think. It includes — but is not limited to — material provision and health. It also looks like insight and wisdom. Favor with people in positions of influence. Clarity in darkness. The capacity to hold together when circumstances would otherwise unravel you. The slow, patient development of character that only adversity can produce.

Thirteen years. Joseph spent thirteen years in slavery or prison. Thirteen years God was with him, favoring him, shaping him — for purposes Joseph couldn’t yet see from inside the cell.

Blessed to Be a Blessing

There’s something else in Genesis 39 worth sitting with. When the text says that “the Lord blessed the household of the Egyptian because of Joseph” — it’s telling us something about the direction of the blessing. The favor of God wasn’t primarily self-contained, just for Joseph. It flowed through Joseph outward. Potiphar’s household flourished. Pharaoh’s kingdom was preserved. Joseph’s family — and through them, the future nation of Israel — was saved from famine.

God blessed Joseph so that Joseph could be a blessing to others.

This pattern runs deep in Scripture. It goes all the way back to Abraham: “I will bless you... and you will be a blessing.” The blessing was never meant to be a destination. It was always meant to be a channel.

Which means that when I am in a season where I can’t see the outward evidence of blessing — when the ventures haven’t survived and my reality doesn’t match my map — the question worth asking isn’t only where is my blessing? It’s also: who am I being prepared to bless? What is being formed in me right now that will one day flow through me toward someone else who needs it?

I don’t always have a clear answer to that question. But asking it changes something in me.

What Joseph Understood

At the end of the Joseph narrative, after the dramatic reunion with his brothers — the ones who sold him into slavery — there is a moment of extraordinary clarity. His brothers are afraid that, with their father Jacob now dead, Joseph will finally take his revenge. And Joseph says something that only makes sense if you have lived through thirteen years of hard grace and come out the other side with your theology intact:

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

He isn’t minimizing what happened to him. He isn’t pretending the pit wasn’t real or the prison wasn’t dark or the years weren’t long. He’s saying something more precise: God was in it. Not despite it. In it. The same pit his brothers dug became the first step in a journey that saved a civilization.

The favor of God doesn’t always look like what we call a blessing. Sometimes it looks like preparation. Sometimes it looks like refinement. Sometimes it looks like thirteen years in a place you didn’t choose, being shaped for a purpose you can’t yet see.

But it is favor. It is real. And He is with you — in the middle of it.

“You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” — Psalm 139:5

The Question That Changes Things

I want to offer you the same question that has slowly been changing how I read my own story.

Not: why isn’t God blessing me? But: what does His favor actually look like right now?

Because I suspect it is there — present in the chapter that doesn’t feel triumphant yet. Present in the insight you gained from the season that didn’t work out. Present in the character being quietly formed in you during the years that aren’t making it into the highlight reel. Present in the favor you’ve found with people you didn’t expect, in places you didn’t choose.

Joseph couldn’t see the throne room from the prison cell. He couldn’t connect the dots forward. But they were being connected. Every one of them.

The favor of God doesn’t require an explanation to be real. It requires trust.

And maybe — if we look carefully — we’ll find that we’ve been living inside it all along. - This is The Way

If this landed somewhere real for you, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And if you know someone in the middle of a season that doesn’t look like blessing yet — feel free to pass it along.

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For Reflection

Before you close this page, sit with one of these:

• When you hear that “God wants to bless you,” what do you automatically picture? How does Joseph’s story challenge or expand that picture?

• Where in your own story have you been able to look back and say: God was in that — even though it didn’t feel like it at the time?

• Joseph couldn’t see the purpose of his suffering from inside it. Is there a hard season you’re currently in — or have recently come through — where you’re beginning to wonder what God might have been building? What would it look like to trust the pattern even before it’s fully visible?

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Tuesday: The Shepherd Who Seeks - Luke 15:3-7 / John 10:14-15

Introduction

Yesterday the psalmist spoke the last word of his 176-verse journey. Not a declaration of arrival. Not a summary of everything he had learned. Just the most honest thing he knew to say at the end of all of it:

I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek your servant.

It is a prayer. A cry. An admission that after everything — the love and the affliction and the midnight praise and the pre-dawn darkness and the great peace and the whole-heart crying — he still cannot find his own way home. He needs to be sought. He needs the Shepherd to come after him.

And Jesus answers.

Not eventually. Not after the sheep has found its way back on its own. The Shepherd leaves. He goes after the one that is lost. He searches until He finds it. And when He finds it He doesn’t send it home with directions — He lifts it onto His shoulders and carries it back rejoicing.

This is the gospel answer to the final verse of Psalm 119. The prayer the psalmist prayed at the end of his greatest psalm — seek your servant — is a prayer that has already been answered in Christ. Before the psalmist finished the sentence. Before any of us knew we were lost. The Shepherd was already leaving the ninety-nine.

And there is one more thing Jesus says — not in the parable but in His own voice, His own identity, the great I am that echoes through every page of John’s Gospel and back through the entire Old Testament: I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.

He knows the lost sheep by name. He knows where it wandered. He knows the way home. And He is already on His way.

Scripture

³ So he told them this parable: ⁴ “What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? ⁵ And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. ⁶ And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ ⁷ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance.”

— Luke 15:3-7 (ESV)

¹⁴ “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵ just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep.”

— John 10:14-15 (ESV)

Reflection

The One Who Goes After

Jesus sets the scene simply: a man has a hundred sheep, one goes missing, and he leaves the ninety-nine to go after the one that is lost. “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing” (Luke 15:5). The shepherd doesn’t wait at the gate. He doesn’t send word that the sheep is welcome back whenever it finds its way. He leaves. He searches. He goes to where the sheep is rather than waiting for the sheep to come to him.

This is the answer to the psalmist’s final cry that has been true since before the psalm was written. Actually, before time began God determined He would come and seek the sheep of His flock.

Seek your servant. That is what the psalmist asked. And what Jesus shows us in this parable is that seeking is precisely what God does. Not reluctantly, not as a last resort, not after the sheep has demonstrated sufficient remorse and made enough effort to deserve being found. The shepherd goes after the one that is lost because it is lost — because it cannot find its own way back and he knows it and he goes anyway.

The prayer “seek your servant” is not a request God needs to be persuaded to answer. It is a description of what He was already doing. The psalmist asked to be sought at the end of 176 verses. The Shepherd had already left the ninety-nine. The search was already underway. The shoulders were already ready. All that remained was the finding — and the finding was never in doubt.

This is what the whole series has been building toward. Not just the psalmist’s love for God’s Word, magnificent as it is. Not just his faithfulness through affliction, costly as it was. Not just his great peace or his whole-heart crying or his declaration that the sum of God’s Word is truth. All of it — every verse — was a lost sheep calling out in the dark. And the Shepherd heard every word.

I Am the Good Shepherd

Then Jesus steps out of the parable and speaks in His own voice: “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father” (John 10:14-15). I am. The words that stopped every Jewish listener in their tracks — the name God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, now spoken by a carpenter from Galilee standing before them.

I am the good shepherd. Not a good shepherd among many. Not one option among several for the lost sheep to consider. The good shepherd — the One the whole Old Testament had been pointing toward, the One the psalmist’s cry had always been addressed to even when he didn’t have a name for Him yet. Every time the psalmist declared you are my hiding place and you are near, O LORD and deal with me according to your steadfast love — he was speaking to the One who would one day look His people in the eye and say: I am the good shepherd. I know you. I have always known you.

“I know my own.” Not know about. Know. The same deep, personal, covenant knowledge the psalmist had been building across 176 verses of intimate devotion — the Shepherd has it too, and He had it first. The sheep didn’t introduce itself to the shepherd. The shepherd knew the sheep before the sheep knew it was lost. The relationship was always His initiative. The seeking was always His first move.

And then — the line that takes the breath away: “just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” The knowing between the Shepherd and the sheep is drawn from the same well as the knowing between the Father and the Son. That is not a small thing. That is the most intimate knowledge in the universe offered to a lost sheep on a hillside.

Joy in Heaven

The parable ends somewhere nobody expected: “And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost’” (Luke 15:6). The finding produces a party. Not a quiet relief, not a private satisfaction — a celebration that spills out into the neighborhood, that cannot be contained, that has to be shared with everyone within reach.

And Jesus makes the application explicit: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (v. 7). More joy. The mathematics of heaven run differently than the mathematics of earth. On earth the ninety-nine who stayed seem more valuable than the one who wandered. In heaven the one who was lost and is found produces more joy than all the rest combined.

This reframes the psalmist’s final confession completely. I have gone astray like a lost sheep — those words, spoken honestly and without pretense at the end of 176 verses of passionate devotion — are not a disappointment to heaven. They are an occasion for celebration. The honest admission of wandering, the undefended cry of seek your servant — this is not the sound of faith failing. This is the sound of a lost sheep being found. And heaven throws a party every time.

The finish line is not perfection. It is not triumphant arrival or sustained faithfulness or a spotless record of devotion. The finish line is this: honest confession, empty hands, and a Shepherd who was already on His way.

The lost sheep is home. The party has already started.

“I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me.” — This is the way.

Prayer Prompt

Lord, I am the lost sheep. I have said it out loud now — yesterday in the psalmist’s words and today in my own. I have wandered. Not always dramatically, not always in ways that are visible from the outside — but I know the places I have drifted, the places where Your voice got quieter and the noise got louder, the places where I chose my own path over Yours and ended up further from home than I intended.

And You already knew. Before I said it. Before I found the words. Before I even knew I was lost. You knew — because You are the good shepherd and You know Your own. Not know about. Know. By name. By the specific shape of my wandering and the specific sound of my cry and the specific place on the hillside where I ended up when I ran out of my own direction.

Thank You that the seeking was never my idea. That before time began You determined You would come after the sheep of Your flock. That the search was already underway before the psalmist finished his sentence, before I finished mine. That the shoulders were already ready. That the finding was never in doubt — because You are the Shepherd and leaving the ninety-nine is simply what You do.

I receive that today. Not just as a beautiful truth about someone else — as the truth about me. You left the ninety-nine for me. You searched until You found me. You lifted me onto Your shoulders and You carried me home rejoicing. And somewhere in heaven a party started that I didn’t know I was the occasion for.

Good Shepherd — keep me close today. Not because I have finally learned to stay but because You are faithful to seek. Lead me in the paths that keep me near Your voice. And when I drift — seek me again. You always do. Amen.

Response

1. The One Who Goes After: The shepherd doesn’t wait for the sheep to find its way back — he leaves and seeks. And before time began God determined He would come after the sheep of His flock. That seeking was never a response to your wandering. It was always the plan. Today sit with this: the Shepherd was already on His way before you asked. Before you knew you were lost. Before you had the words for it. Where do you need to receive that today — not as a general truth about God but as a specific truth about you? Let the prayer be simple: You were already on Your way. Thank You. Then rest there for a few minutes before the day begins. Let the finding land before you move on.

2. I Am the Good Shepherd: Jesus doesn’t say He knows about His sheep. He says He knows them — the same deep, covenant knowing that exists between the Father and the Son, offered to a lost sheep on a hillside. That knowing was His initiative. The relationship was always His first move. Think back over these eight weeks — where have you heard the Shepherd’s voice most clearly? Not the loudest moment or the most dramatic — the most personal. The place where something landed with your name on it. Write it down today in the margins of your Bible so the next time you go there the feeling and the knowing will return. Your testimony to your future self. That is the evidence of a Shepherd who knows His own. That is the sound of being known.

3. Joy in Heaven: The honest confession of wandering — I have gone astray like a lost sheep — is not a disappointment to heaven. It is an occasion for celebration. The finish line is not perfection. It is honest dependence and empty hands and a Shepherd who was already on His way. Before you move into Wednesday’s Series Finale take a few minutes to say it out loud in your own words — not the psalmist’s words, yours. Name where you have wandered. Name what it means to you that the Shepherd came after you anyway. Then listen — somewhere in the distance, if you are quiet enough, you can hear the party that started when He found you. You are the occasion for that joy. Your name was on that banner. Don’t let the week end without receiving it.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: Walking with the Word — Psalm 119

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 16: Judas the Betrayer

Matthew 26:14-16, 47-50; Luke 22:47-48

Introduction

We don’t want to be in this story.

Every other character in the Easter narrative offers us some distance. The crowds were fickle — but crowds are unpredictable. The religious leaders were self-protective — but power corrupts. Peter denied Jesus — but fear does strange things to brave people. We can hold those mirrors up, wince, and still feel like the reflection is slightly softer than the original.

But Judas.

We don’t want to be Judas. We want him to be a category unto himself — a uniquely evil man, a special case, an aberration. The villain of the story so that the rest of us can be something else.

The problem is that Judas wasn’t uniquely evil. He was uniquely positioned. He had walked with Jesus for three years. He had heard every sermon, witnessed every miracle, eaten every meal. He had been trusted with the group’s money. He had been sent out to heal the sick and proclaim the kingdom. He was one of the Twelve — chosen, called, close.

And he betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.

Scholars have debated for centuries what drove him. Greed, certainly. But maybe also disillusionment — a Jesus who kept talking about dying instead of conquering, who washed feet instead of raising armies, who wasn’t becoming the Messiah Judas had signed up to follow. Maybe Judas thought he could force Jesus’ hand. Maybe he thought the money was simply a bonus for doing what needed to be done.

We don’t know exactly what he told himself. But we know what we tell ourselves. And that’s the mirror we need to look into today.

Scripture

¹⁴ Then one of the Twelve — the one called Judas Iscariot — went to the chief priests ¹⁵ and asked, “What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?” So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. ¹⁶ From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.

— Matthew 26:14-16 (NIV)

⁴⁷ While he was still speaking, Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived. With him was a large crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests and the elders of the people. ⁴⁸ Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: “The one I kiss is the man; arrest him.” ⁴⁹ Going at once to Jesus, Judas said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him.

⁵⁰ Jesus replied, “Do what you came for, friend.”

— Matthew 26:47-50 (NIV)

⁴⁷ While he was still speaking a crowd came up, and the man who was called Judas, one of the Twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him, ⁴⁸ but Jesus asked him, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”

— Luke 22:47-48 (NIV)

Reflection

The Slow Drift

Judas didn’t wake up one morning and decide to betray Jesus. That’s not how betrayal works. It accumulates. One small compromise at a time. One quiet resentment nursed in private. One expectation unmet, then another, then another — until the gap between the Jesus he followed and the Jesus he wanted had grown so wide that crossing to the other side felt, somehow, justifiable.

John tells us Judas had been stealing from the disciples’ money bag for some time (John 12:6). The thirty pieces of silver wasn’t his first transaction. It was just the largest. The pattern had been established long before the chief priests made their offer. He had already learned to take what he wanted from his proximity to Jesus. The betrayal in the garden was simply the final withdrawal from an account he’d been quietly draining for years.

And here is the detail that should stop us cold: at the Last Supper, Jesus knew. He knew what Judas was about to do. He washed his feet anyway. He passed him the bread anyway. And when Judas walked into the garden with a crowd carrying swords and clubs, and pressed his lips to Jesus’ cheek as a signal to the soldiers — Jesus called him friend.

Not enemy. Not traitor. Friend.

That word cost Jesus something to say. It was the last thing He offered Judas before the arrest. An open door. A final invitation. You are still, even now, someone I call friend.

Judas walked away from it.

We Are Like Him

We betray Jesus for far less than thirty pieces of silver.

We trade Him for approval — staying silent about our faith when speaking up would cost us socially. We trade Him for comfort — choosing the easier path when obedience would require sacrifice. We trade Him for convenience — setting aside what we know He’s asked of us because this week is too busy, this season too hard, this particular surrender too costly.

We don’t think of it as betrayal. We think of it as being realistic. Practical. Appropriately balanced. We tell ourselves we’ll follow more fully when circumstances are better, when we’re stronger, when the cost is lower. And in the meantime, we kiss His cheek on Sunday and hand Him over to whatever it is we love more by Monday.

The difference between us and Judas is not the capacity for betrayal. It’s what we do with it afterward.

Judas felt the weight of what he’d done — Matthew tells us he was seized with remorse, returned the silver, declared Jesus innocent. But he brought his guilt to the wrong place. He took it to the chief priests instead of to Jesus. He let despair have the last word instead of mercy. And it destroyed him.

Peter betrayed Jesus too — loudly, publicly, three times in one night. And Peter wept bitterly. But Peter came back. Peter let Jesus meet him on a beach after the resurrection and ask him three times: “Do you love me?” Peter let the failure become the ground of restoration rather than the end of the story.

The sin of Judas and the sin of Peter were not so different. What was different was where they took their failure.

Jesus called Judas friend at the moment of betrayal. He was still calling. The door was still open. Judas just couldn’t believe it was open for him.

We were there in the garden, finding our own ways to hand Jesus over to whatever we love more. We are there now. The question isn’t whether we’ve betrayed Him. It’s where we take it when we realize we have.

Grace Note

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” — 1 John 1:9 (NIV)

Not some sins. Not small sins. Not sins committed before we knew better. Our sins — the ones we committed with full knowledge, the ones that cost Him most, the ones we are most ashamed to name. He is faithful and just to forgive. The door Jesus held open for Judas in the garden is the same door He holds open for us now. It has not closed. It will not close. Bring what you’ve done and lay it at His feet. That’s all confession is — taking our failure to the right place. He will meet you there.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I’ve found my own ways to betray You. Not with a kiss in a garden — but with my silence, my comfort, my small and daily trades. I’ve handed You over to approval, to convenience, to the things I want more in weak moments than I want You. I’ve told myself it wasn’t betrayal. It was.

Forgive me for taking my guilt everywhere except to You. For letting shame convince me that the door You hold open for others isn’t open for me. You called Judas friend at the moment of his worst. You are calling me by name right now.

I don’t want to be the one who brings his remorse to the wrong place. I want to be Peter — broken, yes, but returning. Letting You ask me on the beach: “Do you love me?” And meaning it when I say yes.

I love You. Even when my choices don’t show it. Especially then. Amen.

Response

1. Name the Trade: What have you been exchanging Jesus for — quietly, gradually, in ways you’ve been calling something other than betrayal? Approval? Comfort? Silence? Control? Name it specifically. Not to condemn yourself, but to stop pretending it isn’t happening. Judas’s problem wasn’t just what he did — it was the years of small transactions that made the final one feel normal.

2. Take It to the Right Place: Judas took his guilt to the chief priests. Peter took his to Jesus. Today, take one specific failure — something you’ve been carrying in shame rather than bringing to confession — directly to Jesus. Out loud if you can. Write it if that’s easier. Don’t clean it up first. Just bring it as it is. He already knows. He’s already calling you friend.

3. Receive the Beach: After His resurrection, Jesus didn’t avoid Peter. He went looking for him — made him breakfast, met him in his shame, restored him with the same number of questions as denials. Spend 5 minutes today reading John 21:15-17. Read it as if Jesus is asking you — not Peter — “Do you love me?” Let Him restore what betrayal has damaged. That’s what He came back to do.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Monday: ת Tav — Let My Cry Come Before You - Psalm 119:169-176

Introduction

We have arrived at the last letter.

Tav (ת) is the final letter of the Hebrew alphabet — the seal, the mark, the sign of completion. In ancient Hebrew tradition it represents the end of all things, the place where the journey comes to rest.

And then read the final stanza.

Because here is what is remarkable about where we have arrived. The psalmist has given us 175 verses of some of the most passionate, costly, beautiful devotion to God’s Word in all of Scripture. He has loved it above gold and honey. He has meditated on it through the night watches. He has cried before dawn with his whole heart. He has declared the sum of it truth and found great peace in the middle of princes and persecution and pre-dawn darkness. He has walked with the Word through every season a human life can know.

And the last words — the final verse of 176 — is not triumphant arrival.

“I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.”

After everything. After all of it. The last thing the psalmist says is: I have wandered. Find me.

This is not failure. This is the most honest, most theologically profound, most grace-dependent ending the psalm could have. The one who loves God’s Word most deeply — who has staked everything on it, who has held on through every dark season — still knows at the end that he needs to be found. Not because the journey was wasted. Because the journey taught him exactly who he is and exactly who God is.

The finish line is not self-achievement. It is throwing yourself on the Shepherd.

We are almost home.

Scripture

¹⁶⁹ Let my cry come before you, O LORD; give me understanding according to your word! ¹⁷⁰ Let my plea come before you; deliver me according to your word. ¹⁷¹ My lips will pour forth praise, for you teach me your statutes. ¹⁷² My tongue will sing of your word, for all your commandments are right. ¹⁷³ Let your hand be ready to help me, for I have chosen your precepts. ¹⁷⁴ I long for your salvation, O LORD, and your law is my delight. ¹⁷⁵ Let my soul live and praise you, and let your rules help me. ¹⁷⁶ I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.

— Psalm 119:169-176 (ESV)

Reflection

The Final Petition

After 168 verses the psalmist opens his final stanza with something that should reframe everything we think we know about spiritual maturity: “Let my cry come before you, O LORD; give me understanding according to your word!” (v. 169). He is still asking for understanding. Still dependent. Still coming to God rather than arriving on his own.

This is not a failure of the journey. This is its deepest fruit.

We tend to measure spiritual growth by what we no longer need — the questions we have answered, the struggles we have resolved, the dependence we have outgrown. But the psalmist at the end of 176 verses is still crying out, still asking, still coming. Not because nothing has changed — everything has changed. But because what the long journey of God’s Word has produced in him is not self-sufficiency. It is a deeper and more settled dependence on the only One who can give what he needs.

The mark of genuine faith is not graduation. It is continued seeking. The one who has walked with the Word longest is not the one who needs it least. He is the one who knows most clearly how much he still needs it. Every meditation, every midnight cry, every declaration of love above gold and honey — all of it has been forming not an independent soul but a more deeply dependent one. Still asking. Still coming. Still crying before the God who hears.

The horizon of what we don’t yet know expands with every step toward God. The psalmist at verse 176 sees his need more clearly than he did at verse 1 — not because he has grown less but because he has grown more. And that is exactly right.

Lips Poured Out in Praise

But the final petition gives way to something unexpected — not more urgency, not more desperate pleading, but song: “My lips will pour forth praise, for you teach me your statutes. My tongue will sing of your word, for all your commandments are right” (vv. 171-172). The mouth that has cried and pleaded and declared and confessed across 170 verses ends in praise. Not argument. Not demand. Song.

Tav means mark — the seal, the sign. And this is the seal the psalmist places on everything that has come before it. Not a theological conclusion. Not a summary of lessons learned. Praise. The overflow of a heart that has been formed by God’s Word across every season and arrived at the end with more love for it than it started with. What the Word has done in him is not reducible to information or understanding or even wisdom. It has produced a worshipper.

And notice the reason for the praise: “for you teach me.” Present tense. Still teaching. The journey is not over. The formation is not complete. The mouth that pours forth praise does so not because the lessons are finished but because the Teacher is faithful — and the one being taught has learned enough to know that being taught is itself the gift.

Seven times a day the psalmist praised on Friday. Now his lips pour it forth. The great peace has found its voice.

I Have Gone Astray Like a Lost Sheep

And then the last verse of the entire psalm arrives — and it lands like nothing we expected: “I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments” (v. 176).

Stop here. Don’t rush past it.

176 verses. The longest psalm in the Bible. The most sustained, passionate, costly declaration of love for God’s Word in all of Scripture. And the final word — the seal, the mark, the Tav — is not triumphant arrival. It is honest confession. I have wandered. Find me.

This is not the psalmist’s faith collapsing at the finish line. This is his faith arriving at its truest and most mature expression. Because this is what the whole journey has been teaching him — not how to need God less but how to know, with increasing clarity and without shame, how much he needs God more. The one who loves God’s Word most deeply is also the one who sees most clearly the gap between that love and perfect faithfulness. He has not arrived. He has learned to ask to be found. And that is the deepest theology of grace in the entire psalm.

I have gone astray. Seek me. I have not forgotten Your commandments — but I cannot find my own way back. I need the Shepherd to come after me.

After everything the psalmist has declared and loved and suffered and praised — the last posture is the first posture. Empty hands. Open arms. A sheep that knows it is lost and knows exactly who to cry to.

The finish line is not the end of needing. It is the beginning of knowing — really knowing — that the Shepherd always comes.

“I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek your servant, for I do not forget your commandments.” — This is the way.

Prayer Prompt

Lord, I come to You at the end of this journey the same way the psalmist did — not with triumphant arrival but with honest dependence. I have not graduated. I have not outgrown my need for You. If anything the journey has shown me more clearly than when I started how much I still need what only You can give. The horizon of what I don’t yet know has expanded with every step toward You. And I am grateful — because that expanding horizon means I have been moving in the right direction.

Thank You that You are still teaching me. Present tense. Still patient. Still faithful to the one who keeps coming back to Your Word even when the coming is imperfect and the understanding is incomplete. Thank You that Your response to my continued asking is not disappointment but delight — that the cry that rises from me after all these weeks is not an embarrassment to You but a prayer You are already leaning toward.

I confess it plainly today, the way the psalmist did at the very end: I have gone astray. Not dramatically, not catastrophically — but I have wandered. There are places where I have drifted from Your voice, where the noise has been louder than Your still small whisper, where I have trusted my own understanding more than Your Word. I am not pretending otherwise. I have gone astray like a lost sheep.

Seek me, Lord. That is the prayer. Not I will find my way back — I cannot always find my way back. Seek me. Come after me the way the Shepherd leaves the ninety-nine. Find me in the places I have wandered and bring me home on Your shoulders. I do not forget Your commandments — but I need You to find me. I have always needed You to find me.

And let my lips pour forth praise. Not because everything is resolved. Not because the wandering is over. But because You are the God who seeks. And that is more than enough to sing about. Amen.

Response

1. The Final Petition: The psalmist at the end of 176 verses is still asking for understanding — still coming to God rather than arriving on his own. The horizon of what he doesn’t yet know has expanded with every step toward God. Where are you right now in that journey? Not where you think you should be — where you actually are. Take a few minutes today to write down one thing you understand about God now that you didn’t when this series began. Then write one question that has opened up that wasn’t there before. Both of those things are evidence of growth. Bring them both to God — the understanding as gratitude and the question as the next petition.

2. Lips Poured Out in Praise: The psalmist’s mouth that cried and pleaded and declared across 170 verses ends in song — not because the journey is over but because the Teacher is faithful and being taught is itself the gift. Where has God been faithful to you across these eight weeks? Not in the grand resolved moments — in the quiet, consistent, still-teaching faithfulness that shows up every time you open His Word. Name one specific moment from this series where something landed — where the Word did something in you that you didn’t expect. Then tell someone today. Let the praise pour forth. That is the seal Tav places on everything that has come before it.

3. I Have Gone Astray Like a Lost Sheep: The psalmist’s final word is the most honest word in the entire psalm — I have wandered, seek me. Not triumphant arrival. Honest dependence. Before you move into Tuesday take a few minutes to sit with that final verse. Say it out loud in your own words — name the specific place you have wandered, the specific place you need the Shepherd to find you. Not in shame. In the same honest, undefended posture the psalmist brings to the very last line of 176 verses. Then rest in this: the Shepherd already knows where you are. He was already on His way before you asked. That is what tomorrow is about.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: Walking with the Word — Psalm 119

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Day 15: The Sleeping Disciples

Matthew 26:36-46

Introduction

He asked for one thing.

After three years of miracles, after the Last Supper, after washing their feet and breaking the bread and pouring the cup — Jesus led His closest friends into a garden and made one simple request: “Stay here and keep watch with me.”

Not a complicated assignment. Not a test of theology or courage or skill. Just presence. Just wakefulness. Just: be here with me while I go through this.

They fell asleep.

Not once. Three times. Each time Jesus returned from prayer — sweat like drops of blood falling to the ground, soul overwhelmed to the point of death — He found them sleeping. And each time, He woke them gently. Gave them another chance. Returned to the weight He was carrying alone.

We read this and feel the sting of it. The disciples had walked with Jesus for three years. They had heard Him say, more than once, that this moment was coming. He had told them He would suffer. He had told them to watch and pray. And in His darkest hour, in the garden where everything was about to break open — they couldn’t stay awake.

But before we shake our heads at them, we should recognize something: they were not indifferent. They were not defiant. They were not somewhere else entirely, having decided Jesus wasn’t worth their time. They were there — just not all the way there. Present in body. Absent in spirit. Close enough to hear Him if He called, but not close enough to actually share the weight.

That’s a portrait of us too. More often than we’d like to admit.

Scripture

³⁶ Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” ³⁷ He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. ³⁸ Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”

³⁹ Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

⁴⁰ Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter. ⁴¹ “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

⁴² He went away a second time and prayed, “My Father, if it is not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done.”

⁴³ When he came back, he again found them sleeping, because their eyes were heavy. ⁴⁴ So he left them and went away once more and prayed the third time, saying the same thing.

⁴⁵ Then he returned to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and resting? Look, the hour is near, and the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners. ⁴⁶ Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”

— Matthew 26:36-46 (NIV)

Reflection

What Happened in the Garden

Jesus didn’t go to Gethsemane because He had nothing left to say to the Father. He went because He had everything to say — and it was almost too heavy to say it. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” This is not a man performing anguish for the disciples’ benefit. This is the Son of God, fully human, facing the full weight of what lay ahead — the cross, the separation, the bearing of every sin that had ever been committed or ever would be.

He asked three times for the cup to be taken from Him. Three times He surrendered His will to the Father’s. And three times He returned to find His closest friends asleep.

Notice what He didn’t do. He didn’t wake them in anger. He didn’t dismiss them. He didn’t say “Fine — I’ll do this without you.” He woke them gently. He named the gap between intention and capacity — “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” — with more compassion than accusation. And He went back to pray again, alone, until the hour came.

Jesus carried Gethsemane without them. And He still came back for them.

We Are Like Them

We are the sleeping disciples every time we are almost present with Jesus but not quite.

We show up to church but let our minds wander through the whole service. We open our Bibles but don’t actually read — our eyes move across the page while our thoughts are somewhere else entirely. We begin to pray and find ourselves, minutes later, composing emails in our heads. We sit down to be with God and spend the time being with our phones instead.

We are there. Just not all the way there. Close enough that we’d call ourselves followers. Not close enough to actually share the weight of what He’s carrying — or to let Him share the weight of what we’re carrying.

And it isn’t always laziness. Sometimes it’s exhaustion. The disciples weren’t awake at that hour making selfish choices about how to spend their evening. Luke tells us they were asleep “exhausted from sorrow” (Luke 22:45). Grief had worn them down. The weight of what they sensed was coming — without fully understanding it — had taken everything they had.

Jesus knew that. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” He didn’t condemn the exhaustion. He named it honestly and asked them to try again.

We fall asleep in the garden for the same reasons. Not because we don’t love Him. Because we are human, limited, worn thin by grief and worry and the relentless demands of being alive. And still He returns to us. Still He wakes us gently. Still He says — not with condemnation but with urgency — “Rise. Let us go.”

The grace of Gethsemane isn’t that the disciples stayed awake. It’s that Jesus kept coming back.

We were there in the garden, eyes heavy, spirits willing but flesh too weak to close the gap. We are there now — present enough to call ourselves His, not yet awake enough to watch with Him the way He deserves. But He hasn’t left the garden. And He hasn’t stopped coming back for us.

Grace Note

“He will not let your foot slip — he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” — Psalm 121:3-4 (NIV)

The disciples couldn’t watch for one hour. Jesus watched through the whole night — and then through the whole of human history. While we sleep, He keeps vigil. While we drift, He intercedes. The One who asked them to stay awake was Himself the only one who never closes His eyes. He doesn’t need us to be perfectly present to remain perfectly faithful. He is the Watcher who never sleeps — and He is watching over you right now.

Prayer Prompt

Jesus,

I confess that I fall asleep in the garden more than I want to admit. I show up — but not all the way. My spirit is willing and my flesh is weak, and the gap between them is wider than I like to acknowledge. I have been there without being there. Present in body, somewhere else in heart.

Forgive me for the half-presence. For the wandering attention. For the prayers that drift and the Scripture that slides past without landing. For the moments You came back and found me sleeping again.

Thank You that You didn’t leave the garden without us. That You came back — gently, again and again — and said “Rise.” Not in anger. In love. With urgency, yes, but also with the same hands that washed feet and broke bread and would soon be stretched out on a cross.

Wake me up. Not just in my devotional life — but in all of it. Help me be all the way here with You. And on the days when I can’t manage it — when grief or exhaustion has taken everything I have — remind me that You are watching even when I cannot. Amen.

Response

1. Name Your Garden: Where do you consistently fall almost-asleep with Jesus? In prayer? In worship? In Scripture? In serving — going through the motions without your heart in it? Be specific. Not to condemn yourself, but to see clearly where the gap is between showing up and being present. Jesus named it without shame: “The spirit is willing.” Start there.

2. Watch for One Hour: Today, set aside one uninterrupted hour to be genuinely present with Jesus. No phone. No multitasking. No agenda beyond staying awake. Read slowly. Pray honestly. Sit in silence if words run out. This isn’t a performance — it’s practice. The disciples couldn’t do it. Try anyway. See what Jesus does with your imperfect attempt.

3. Let Him Wake You Gently: Think of one area of your life where you’ve been going through the motions — church attendance, a ministry commitment, a spiritual discipline that has become habit without heart. Instead of guilt, receive His invitation: “Rise. Let us go.” Take one step today to re-engage with presence rather than just performance. Not because you have to. Because He came back for you.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: That First Easter... I Was There

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way

Sunday: Sabbath Rest - Great Peace

Today we rest. We pause from new input to let this week’s truths settle into the deep places where they can do their lasting work. It has been an urgent week — rising before dawn, crying through the night watches, pressing desperate requests before a God who is great in mercy. And then, without warning, the turn. Awe instead of fear. Joy like found treasure. Great peace that nothing can shake. The God of peace standing watch at the gate. As you enter this Sabbath space bring all of it — the urgency and the peace, the pre-dawn darkness and the dawn that finally broke. He is not anxious about your progress. He delights in your presence.

Prayer Prompts

Thanksgiving

Lord, thank You for this week. Thank You that You meet wholehearted desperation with wholehearted presence — that the one who rises before dawn finds You already there. Thank You for the pivot — for the surprising turn from pre-dawn crying to joy like found treasure, from desperate pleading to great peace that nothing can shake. Thank You that the sum of Your Word is truth and that truth has a name and a face. Thank You that the peace You offer is not passive but a sentinel standing watch — in Christ Jesus, personal and present. Thank You that You don’t command what is impossible. That rejoice always is not cruelty but invitation. That the God of peace promises to be with the ones who think on what is true and lovely and just. You have been faithful this week. You are always faithful.

Surrender

Father, I confess the places this week where I have been afraid instead of awestruck — where I have let the princes have more room in my heart than Your Word. I confess the gates I have left open to the noise, the scroll, the relentless input that exhausts before it informs. I confess the moments I have been anxious instead of at peace — not because peace wasn’t available but because I wasn’t stopping long enough to receive it. I surrender the noise today. The open gates. The exhaustion I have been carrying that was never mine to carry. You stand watch. I will rest behind the guard You have posted. Take what this week stirred up in me — the urgency, the desperation, the places still unresolved — and do with it what only You can do.

Anticipation

Lord, as I look toward the week ahead I feel the weight of it and the wonder of it in equal measure. We are coming to the end. Tav — the last letter, the finish line. And I already know how the psalm ends — not with triumphant arrival but with a lost sheep asking to be found. After 175 verses of passionate devotion, the psalmist ends in honest dependence. I am leaning toward that ending, Lord. Because it is my ending too. Prepare me for what the final week will ask of me — the honest reckoning, the laying down of every pretense of arrival. And prepare me for the wonder: the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine. The One who was always going to come after me. Meet me there.

Rest

Jesus, right now I simply rest in the great peace You have promised. Not the peace that requires circumstances to cooperate. Not the peace I have to manufacture or perform or earn. The peace that surpasses understanding — standing watch, guarding what I cannot guard myself, keeping what the noise and the darkness and the pre-dawn urgency could not take from me. I am not striving today. I am not scrolling. I am not managing the noise or processing the input or trying to close gaps in my own strength. I am resting in the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. The One who prayed for me by name on the night before the cross. The One who stands at the gate.

You’re enough. You’ve always been enough. You will always be enough.

May the Lord bless you and keep you this Sabbath. May the great peace that nothing can shake — the peace that guarded the psalmist through the night watches and the pre-dawn darkness — guard your heart and mind in Christ Jesus today. Rest in the God of peace. He is already standing watch.

We’ll continue our journey Monday with Week 8 — the final letter, the finish line, and the most honest ending in all of Scripture. The lost sheep is coming home.

To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: Walking with the Word — Psalm 119

© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way