When we try to live by 220;Don217;t Be Evil,221; we find that we end up being evil in the end. There217;s a better way.
Pastor Tim begins our journey through the Bible this year by turning to Genesis ch. 3.
Waiting is hard—praying for years with silence the only reply, watching others move while you stand still, wondering if God has forgotten or if you took a wrong turn. That was Isaac in Genesis 25: married at forty, still childless nearly twenty years later, the promise hanging unfinished. What do we do in the long stretch when nothing seems to move?
Family conflict. Our attempts to force a good outcome. So often our all too human messes and efforts leave life looking like a train wreck that gives sin the final word. Yet Genesis 35 closes Isaac’s story by calling him “old and full of days” and placing his divided sons together at his burial. Maybe even our broken lives still have hope of being full?
Most of us navigate life by a quiet, practical question: what217;s the minimum I need to get by with my time and my money? In Matthew 2, the wise men travel months across dangerous roads and then open their best treasures before the child—and the gap between what they did and what they could have gotten away with is exactly where this passage challenges us.
Rules, hypocrisy, conflict—those are the words people most often reach for when they describe the church, and if we217;re honest, we217;ve sometimes given them reason to. Galatians 5 doesn217;t flinch from that indictment; it sets the works of the flesh against a vision of the church so different, so beautiful, that it could only come from one source.
Clear words can still sail right past us when they aren217;t the news we want. In Luke 18, Jesus tells the Twelve exactly what217;s about to happen to Him, yet they were just like us: they didn217;t want to hear.
God had been leading Israel every step of the way—parting the Red Sea, dropping food from the sky, guiding them with a pillar of fire at night—and still, when twelve spies came back from the promised land, ten of them said it couldn217;t be done, and the crowd went with them. Numbers 13 and 14 ask a question we face too: when the majority says no, does that settle it?
O Christmas (Faith)Tree is something very special: a celebratory service at 7:00 p.m. that interweaves favorite Christmas carols and songs 212; both old and new and in a range of styles 212; with the story of Christmas that runs from Genesis through Revelation. This year, making use of the live-streaming format of the service, we are celebrating Christmas around the world, with Scripture readings from readers on almost every continent. We also have several special musical pieces from JGM Church's choirs in Nairobi, Kenya to accompany the FaithTree worship teams musical contributions to the service.
As Pastor Tim begins our new series on the six poisons listed in Proverbs 6:16-19, we turn to one that often leads to the others: pride.