You know what it is to walk in darkness and wonder if God will ever draw near. Israel knew it too—enslaved, exiled, occupied—praying over every generation that a child would come. In Matthew 1 that child is born, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.
We’ve all felt the temptation, after someone has been called out for sin, to just leave them there and be done with it. But in 2 Corinthians 2, Paul tells the Corinthians this punishment is enough—now they need to forgive and comfort the one they punished.
Decades later, an aged Apostle John still cannot finish a sentence about Jesus without being overwhelmed with excitement. The Gospel has not become ordinary for him, but has it for us?
You can ignore the symptoms, try one more remedy, even rub essential oil on a broken bone—until the pain makes denial impossible. At Israel’s rock bottom, Ezekiel 36 lays God’s people on the physician’s table and names what stricter rules and harder effort cannot heal: a heart hardened against its Maker.
When things feel overwhelming, you reach for comfort food—a buttery potato, a square of chocolate—knowing none of it will fix the job or the diagnosis. In 2 Corinthians 1:3–6, Paul calls God “the God of all comfort” while placing that comfort squarely in the midst of affliction, not beyond it. When God does not remove the pain, could comfort be arriving in a form you did not expect?
When repeated failure makes a person look like a lost cause, writing them off can feel less like cruelty than common sense. Yet Paul opens 2 Corinthians 1 by addressing a fractured, correction-resistant congregation as “the church of God” and “saints”—then speaking grace and peace over people who appear to deserve neither.
It’s a relief when a warning light disappears—unless the problem under the hood is still there. In Matthew 9:35–36, Jesus heals sickness, preaches the good news of the kingdom, and looks with compassion on people who are helpless and without a shepherd. What does his compassion say about the immediate burdens we bring to him and the deeper need we cannot afford to ignore?
We see lots of details but miss the main point when we come to Jesus mainly to eliminate problems here and now. In Matthew 9:18–26, two people reach out to Jesus with needs very much like the ones we have and must wrestle with the deeper point of Jesus’s ministry — just like we do.
We scramble to fix what’s broken, certain we know the one restoration that matters most. But when friends lower a paralyzed man before Jesus in Matthew 9, desperate only to walk, the first words he hears are “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” Do we trust Jesus enough to receive what he says we actually need?
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.