Most people instinctively know the difference between ordering at a restaurant and eating at a friend’s table—yet that same distinction somehow disappears in how they approach God. Proverbs 3:9 calls believers to honor the Lord with their wealth and the first fruits of all their produce, not as a business transaction or a path to guaranteed earthly blessing, but as an act of worship that reshapes what winning actually means.
God is with us — that’s what we celebrate at Christmastime! As we enter into this season, we are going to take time to look at how His Spirit led men and women that first Christmas, and leads us now, that we can rejoice in His love.
We're drawn to people who seem useful, impressive, ready to contribute—and in Luke 18, the disciples felt the same way when they turned away parents bringing infants to Jesus. But Jesus stopped them: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”
There's always one thing we'd rather not put on the table when God asks us to give something up—and we usually know exactly what it is. In Luke 18, a rich man walks away from Jesus grieving because that one thing is precisely what Jesus names, and the disciples' stunned question in response—”then who can be saved?”—turns out to be our question too.
We've all got a part of ourselves we refuse to hand over—the place that says, You don't get this, Lord. Heading toward Jerusalem, Jesus told a parable about a nobleman whose citizens hated him and sent word: We do not want this man to reign over us. The question is whether that refusal still has the last word.
We instinctively read our circumstances as a verdict on where we stand with God—ease means favor, famine means failure. In Genesis 26, Isaac is stranded in exactly that famine, holding a promise that the land and its people seem to be disproving, and God's answer to him isn't immediate relief but something harder to trust.
Changing the world for God can sound easier than loving the people close enough to frustrate us. Exodus 20:12 brings that struggle home: “Honor your father and your mother.” If following Jesus takes practice, why does God begin our training in love with the first neighbors most of us ever know?
O Christmas (Faith)Tree is something very special: a celebratory service at 8:00 p.m. on December 9 that interweaves favorite Christmas carols and songs — both old and new and in a range of styles — with the story of Christmas that runs from Genesis through Revelation.
O Christmas (Faith)Tree is something very special: a celebratory service at 8:00 p.m. on December 8 that interweaves favorite Christmas carols and songs — both old and new and in a range of styles — with the story of Christmas that runs from Genesis through Revelation.
When pain makes even sitting in a chair impossible, someone else’s ordinary comfort can suddenly look like the one thing that would make life right. In Exodus 20:17, God forbids coveting anything that belongs to our neighbor—but how do we distinguish a healthy desire for change from a heart dissatisfied with what God has given?
