When we don’t feel like doing something that we know we need to do, it still needs to get done.

Commitment to ourselves will motivate us to do it.

Compassion for ourselves will keep us from overdoing it.

Even a cursory read through the New Testament reveals a church that is very different from what many of us know today. Things that seem to surprise us now were just part of the normal church culture then.

We’re surprised by healings.

We’re surprised by salvations.

We’re surprised by trials.

We’re surprised by unity.

We’re thrown off — in good and bad ways — when we experience these things that were common occurrences in the church then.

What we call persecution, they called daily living.

What we call revival, they called Sunday.

I can’t speak (or write) for you, but I don’t want my normal Christian experience to be something that looks foreign to the lives of the New Testament followers of Jesus. I want their normal passion and power to become my normal, too.

On the morning that Jesus rose from the dead, before anyone who had followed Him remembered that He would, a woman who had been changed by Jesus stood outside the empty tomb weeping.

It was a time of deep pain and confusion. Even His closest disciples had seen the empty tomb and believed more that it was empty than what its emptiness meant. And so, they left her there crying, confused, hurting.

She was asked about her tears twice. First, by 2 angels who apparently didn’t show up until the other disciples had left, and then by the One she loved but didn’t recognize. In her grief, she mistook her Lord for a gardener. Ironically, what He said next tended to the garden of her soul. One word.

“Mary.”

When the Word speaks, things change. The Greek word for this is “rhema” and it is different from its counterpart “logos” in that it is a spoken word, not just ink on a page.

Hebrews 11:3 tells us that the rhema word of God created the world.

1 Peter 1:25 tells us that the rhema word of God establishes truth that lasts forever.

Romans 10:17 tells us that the rhema word of God produces faith.

Undoubtedly, when the Word speaks, things change. But even more clearly, when the Word speaks to us specifically — remember that He called her Mary, not sister, or woman, or hey you — we change.

That one specific and personal spoken word from the Word to Mary transformed her from a weeping mourner into the first evangelist. She went from being frozen in disbelief to being full of the good news.

Her first report to the disciples had been about an empty tomb. How often do we simply report empty facts that have not connected with us? Jesus died and rose again and wants to save you from hell, we tell others as if we’re reading from a teleprompter. But that spoken word brought those words to life, and it was no longer about what was empty, but about Who was alive. “I have seen the Lord!”

Spend time today with the risen Lord. See Him for Who He is and listen as He speaks, not just to the world, but to you. When the Word speaks, it changes everything, and it starts with you and me.