Advent is the season of the year when Christians remember and celebrate the “arrival” of Jesus. But in order to respond rightly to Jesus, you have to understand who he is and why he came. That is a deeply contested question in our culture, but Mary’s story in Luke 1 helps us makes sense of it. Over the next three weeks, we’ll look at her response to the angel’s message. And when we understand the message Mary heard, we’ll be able to respond in the way Mary did.
At the end of Jonah's story, he finds himself sitting alone, in the scorching desert, asking God to take his life. But God is not done with Jonah just yet. Jonah has to confront one last difficult truth: the grace of God is both radically inclusive and radically exclusive. God shows mercy to every kind person, without distinction, even moral distinction. But we can only experience God's grace when we give up living life our way.
Jonah is a rebellious, runaway prophet. In chapter one of Jonah finds himself on a boat, halfway to the end of the earth, accompanied by some unusual companions, and in the middle of a horrific storm, that God Himself has sent. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of storms too. And just like Jonah we start to wonder... is God trying to kill me? But don't worry, just like Jonah, we will find out that there is something fishy about the grace of God.
One of the oldest and most difficult challenges to faith in God is the question of evil and suffering. This is also one of the greatest challenges to finding reconciliation with people who have done us great wrong. Fascinatingly, this final episode in Joseph's story shows us how he was able to do both. Joseph was able to reconcile with his brothers, precisely because he found a way to reconcile everything that happened to him with God.
Everyone experiences hurt over things that have happened to them in the past. And everyone experiences guilt over things that have done in the past. In spite of our secular assertion that guilt and sin are outmoded and harmful expressions of a primitive religion, our experience tells us that these things still need to be dealt with. This passage is an extraordinary and poignant exploration of just how exactly God goes about dealing with those things in our lives.
This episode in the life of Joseph shows us someone who is growing strong in his ability to live a life of integrity, even though he is sorely tempted to compromise in many areas of his life. How was he able to do this? What was the source of his strength? We need the same strength if we're going to live with integrity ourselves. This passage helps us understand the temptations we face, and the way we can withstand them.
Genesis concludes with the story of Joseph. This is fitting, because Joseph's narrative shows us how God is fulfilling his promise to restore the world to a place of blessing. In particular, Joseph's story shows us God's answer to the world's biggest problems. In this story, we see a heartbreaking "God-has-left-the-building" moment. But beneath the evil, we see the amazing, and counter-intuitive, way that God works to overcome evil and restore the world.
On its surface, the last episode in Jacob's life is not very exciting. He blesses his grandchildren. Yet when the New Testament letter to the Hebrews mentions Jacob in its famous "Hall of Faith," this is the episode it holds up as the great example from his life. Why? Because it shows us the culmination of everything Jacob learned about God over the course of his life. It all comes down to the strange logic of grace, and its power to transform our lives in every way imaginable.
Jacob is one of the most important figures in the Bible, because it's through Jacob that Israel goes from being a family to becoming a nation. This passage is the place where Israel gets its name. That's significant for us all, because it shows us how God transforms people. This story is all about life-transformation, but not in the way we think. It shows us that real life change always involves facing things that are deeper than we can see, and dealing with things that are darker than we want to admit. The results, however, are beyond anything we can imagine or produce for ourselves.
For modern people, Jacob is one of the most easily relatable characters in the Bible. This passage shows us one of the ways he is most relatable for us. Jacob is someone who was marked by a deep inner emptiness. In this passage, he's seeking to find healing for that emptiness through finding the love of his life. That is one of the most powerful impulses for all of us. And this passage has a lot to show us, both about the impulse itself, and the way we can truly find its fulfillment.
Of all the people in the Bible, Jacob is one of the most relatable for modern people. His doubts, his struggles, and his failures make him easy to identify with. But one of the most interesting features of his life is the fact that, like many modern people, he wasn't necessarily looking for God. But in this passage, God moves powerfully into Jacob's life, even though Jacob was not seeking him. What's more, God worked in Jacob's life at a time when everything was falling apart for him. Therefore, this passage gives us a great picture of how God transforms our lives in the midst of our fears and failures.
The life of Jacob is the longest story of any single person in the book of Genesis. As the last of the patriarchs, his story marks an important transition point in the narrative arc of the whole Bible. This passage is all about the blessing imparted by Isaac, and Jacob's duplicitous attempt to secure it. As modern people, our notion of "blessing" is pretty weak. But when we begin to understand what blessing really means in the Bible, and how Jacob goes about trying to get it, we begin to get an understanding of just how crucial this is for our own lives as well.
This story is the longest single narrative in the whole book of Genesis. One of the main things it shows us is the providential but hidden guidance of God to bring about the fulfillment of his purposes. That's important for us as late-modern, Western individuals. Because two things we crave are control and personal fulfillment. Therefore we put a lot of emphasis on receiving guidance, and have a lot of anxiety over the possibility of "messing up" our lives. This passage has a lot to show us about how God guides us, but in ways that are quite unexpected.
Facing the challenges and hardships of life is extremely difficult. Facing the challenges and hardships of loving people who are different from us can seem impossible. Is there a way to do either. Even more hard to imagine, is there a way to do both? In this passage, we explore the true nourishment Jesus gives us to move out into the world in strength, hope, and love. We can only do so because he is our "soul food."
At the end of this letter, the apostle Paul reminds the Galatians once again the reason he wrote in the first place: "Don't forget the gospel!" In other words, there is only one gospel, not many. It's common to hear people today say, "What really matters is not what you believe, but how you live." In this passage, Paul both deconstructs that mistake and also shows us how the gospel gives us the answer to our souls deepest (and most vulnerable) questions about worth, value, and significance.
The world we live in can be a place of seemingly relentless evil. Our lives also are filled with times that are so difficult and heartbreaking that it's often hard to find the strength to keep going. When the world and life knock you down, where do you get the resources to persevere? How can you persist in "doing good" when you feel weary and want to give up? This passage shows us by pointing us to the hope that only the gospel can offer.
Everyone wants to be a person of integrity, someone whose everyday life matches their professed beliefs. But what does that look like for Christians? We who claim to have the Holy Spirit inside of us, what does it actually look like for us to have true, Gospel integrity? Paul gives us several crucial directives in this passage on what it looks like when the Church's walk matches our talk. And what is interesting is that all of the commands he gives us, have to do with how Christians treat one another.
One of the most common struggles for everyone is knowing intuitively that there are things in our life that need to change. Not change in our circumstances, but change in us. Whether it's anxiety, fear, anger, bitterness, addiction, shame, loneliness, greed, selfishness, or any number of issues, we all have struggles in our lives. One could call this the quest for character. And that wouldn't be entirely incorrect. But the gospel tells us something very different about the source, nature, and cultivation of that character. In fact, it tells us that it is not even our character, but the work of God's Holy Spirit within us. This week we take a look at how God transforms us in the midst of our struggles.
The question is frequently asked, "If God loves and accepts us by grace, and not because of anything we do, then what motivation do we have for living a good life?" That is a huge question, and a fair one. What kind of motivation does the Christian have for living a good life? Why obey, if God accepts us no matter what we do? The surprising answer of this passage is that the gospel actually gives us a far greater motivation for goodness, and therefore a far deeper call to obedience.
"Freedom" stands at the center of most of our culture's most deeply cherished values. Yet it hardly seems to many people to be an accurate way of describing religion, including Christianity. With its lists of rules and regulations, religion seems to be more about restricting freedom than enhancing it. Nonetheless, the apostle Paul tells us in this passage that freedom is actually what the gospel is all about. How can that be? Join us this week as we explore what the Bible has to say about it.