Steven Furtick · April 5, 2026 · 40m
- perspective
- disappointment
- resurrection
from “Pain Can Block Your Perspective”
You know, sometimes our pain has a way of blocking our perspective. Sometimes you can't see the truth through your tears. See, if the enemy gets you so discouraged that you believe this is all it's ever going to be, you'll never see what God is doing because you can't see the truth through your tears. I thought that when the Scripture said that she did not recognize Jesus, she did not know it was him, that maybe she was blinded by her own tears. I thought, how many of us are. Many of us cannot see him through our sorrow, even though he is designated by Isaiah as the man of sorrows. I thought about how sometimes in our life we trust our tears more than we trust what God tells us. We will allow the enemy to get us in a position, whether through depression or isolation or our sin or our addiction, that we cannot see the truth of who God is through our tears. That was a contributing factor for sure. But I also noticed in verse 1 it said that Mary went to the tomb early in the morning while it was still dark. That helped me to realize a second reason that she couldn't see him exactly is that she was in transition. It's difficult to see God through tears, and it's difficult to see God in transition. It's easy to see God when everything in your life looks like you expected it to look. It was easy for her to receive Jesus as a teacher as long as she could see the one that was teaching, but now he's risen. While him being risen will later be a reason for her to praise him, right now it's a problem because she can't see him through her tears, and she can't see him in the transition. The way Jewish people marked time was very different than the way we mark time. We typically take a clock and tell the calendar when to begin a new day. The Jewish people marked the day not by a clock, but from sun down to sun down.
- Scripture match