We easily draw safe boundaries around God’s grace, welcoming those who seem familiar while overlooking those who feel foreign or difficult. Yet the distant wise men of Matthew 2 and the rejoicing Gentiles of Acts 13 confront those boundaries: Jesus came to reach the world. Who might God be placing beyond our comfort, yet within the reach of his good news?
God takes us as those who are lost in the dim darkness and offers us a light so overpowering that nothing can stop it — or His mission He sends us on.
Once the Christmas packages are cleared away, the dark sections of life can become painfully visible again—and we may have no idea how to fix them. Revelation 22 meets that helplessness with a river of life, a tree for the healing of the nations, and a coming day when night will be no more.
As we give gifts small or large, simple or snazzy, this Christmas, this year’s devotional booklet invites us to reflect on the profound ways in which God gifts us to give the best sort of gifts to others. We will go on a twelve day journey through Galatians 5:22-26, exploring how the Holy Spirit transforms us to embody the essence of Christmas hope in the year ahead.
Christmas has a way of feeling like a destination—the carols, the decorations, the nativity—as though the manger is where everything finally arrives. John 1 won’t let it stay there: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the question John presses is what exactly that birth was launching toward and what it means for us now.
Jesus shows us both His nature and a recognizable “name” so that we can understand Him — and understand what we really need to know.
We all reach for something we can actually recognize and hold on to—some concrete person or presence we can truly know, not just a philosophy about. That hunger is exactly what John 1 puts its finger on: the Word who was with God in the beginning became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.
We need something that lasts, not just a temporary banner of God’s love. Fortunately, that’s exactly what God provides for us.
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.
Are we looking for the right thing and do we understand the right “time” for it? As we get everything synchronized for Christmas, the author of Hebrews encourages us to be synchronized with Christ.