The decorations come down, the calendar turns, and Christmas recedes into memory—but Matthew 2 insists there’s something that doesn’t go out of season. And if the Gospel doesn’t go out of season, are we keeping ourselves focused on where it is pointing us?
Pharmaceutical commercials fill the screen with daisy fields and frolicking joy so you’ll tune out the side effects. Are God’s Commandments filled with killer side effects, too?
We’ve always been better at hailing the leader who delivers what we want than trusting the one God has actually sent. Way back in Numbers 12 and 16, even Moses’ own family turns on him for not being the kind of leader they expected. Can we see God’s working any more clearly than they did?
Most of us are quicker to panic over a dying phone battery than over a dying spiritual one—we coast along, confident we’re fine, while the indicator drops lower than we’d ever admit. As Jesus calls a written-off man in Jericho, He challenges all of us on this: “Do we know how much we need Him?”
We love remembering that Jesus overturned tables in the temple—especially when we imagine them belonging to someone else. But in Luke 19:45–48 when Jesus drives out those who sold, and declares, “My house shall be a house of prayer,” His challenge isn’t just to those people who annoy us. What might He overturn when our own convenience, usefulness, and preferences begin to define worship?
You think the picnic went great until you start to itch and realize you brought ticks home with you. What tick bites—those sneaky sins whose venom is already inside before you notice—do you have? Those are the ones Jesus came to rescue us from.
We can be inclined to delay approaching God, too busy obsessing on our doubts to come, much like Thomas in John 20. But Thomas _did_ come and so should we.
When the wicked seem to win and justice feels nowhere in sight, fury rises faster than faith. At the close of Psalm 10, God does justice for the fatherless and the oppressed—that’s the firm promise. As we look to that, will we choose faith, or will we choose fury?
We tend to skip the genealogy at the start of Matthew—all those names, so many of them people we know nothing about. In doing so we miss something that matters deeply to ordinary people like us who wonder whether God actually works through lives like theirs.
