Successfully Move from One Year to the Next I never really understood the allure of staying up late on December 31 to welcome in the new year. As such, I saw no reason to celebrate New Year’s Eve. As a teenager, however, I embraced the idea of staying up until midnight as confirmation I was […]
Baby Jesus in the Temple Luke 2:21–24 He was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived. (Luke 2:21) The shepherds arrived shortly after Jesus’s birth to see the child the angel had told them about. Our story picks up eight days later, when it’s time to circumcise him. We’re […]
John’s Vision for These Churches Provides Us With Practical Insight Today Many people love the Book of Revelation, the apostle John’s supernatural treatise of the end times. It’s an epic read of God’s awesome power and the amazing, scary, exciting events that will usher us from this world into our eternal reality. Yet readers are […]
Segregating the Two Sides of Christmas Is Christmas an important holiday to you? I suspect you’ll say, “yes.” And if you follow Jesus, you may say Christmas is the most important holiday because it celebrates his birth some 2,000 years ago. That’s when Jesus came to earth to live among us and die in our […]
Anticipating the Arrival of Baby Jesus I don’t really think of Christmas Eve as a holiday as much as the prelude to one. Yet there is—or should be—a spiritual reason to celebrate Christmas Eve. Anticipating Christmas As a child I looked forward to Christmas Day with much excitement. On Christmas Eve I found it hard […]
Too Often We Place Our Personal Needs Over What God Is at Work Doing When Jesus’s friend Lazarus dies, Jesus goes to where the man is interred and, with a dramatic flair, raises him from the dead. When the people see this miracle of miracles, many believe in Jesus. Bringing someone back to life is […]
Make God Your Number One Priority When asked which commandment was the greatest, Jesus said we’re to love God with all our heart, our soul, and our strength (Mark 12:29-31, quoting Deuteronomy 6:4-5). We’re to love him more than anything else, to make him our number one priority. And when we understand God as referring […]
Today’s passage: 1 John 2:3–6 Focus verse: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did. (1 John 2:6) Today’s passage talks about knowing God and keeping his commands. If we claim to know God and don’t do what he says, we’re only deluding ourselves from the truth, and our claim is false. But when […]
Three Easy Ideas If the Word Evangelism Scares You In the post Are You Reluctant to Invite Friends to Church? we looked at the New Testament church and saw that people first invited others to follow Jesus. Then they went to church. Therefore, we shouldn’t invite people to go to church with us until after […]
Prepare the Way, Part 1 Malachi 2:17–3:5 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me.” (Malachi 3:1) The opening of Mark’s gospel quotes two Old Testament prophecies about John the Baptist. The first is from Malachi, the final book in the Old Testament. But Malachi isn’t speaking his own words. He […]