If Isaiah were alive today, he might’ve written a Christmas carol about God’s salvation. His words burst with joy: “Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid.” It’s the kind of joy that makes you want to sing at the top of your lungs—even if you can’t carry a tune in a bucket!
Christmas is a celebration of salvation. Jesus came to rescue us, not just from sin but also from fear, loneliness, and despair. His salvation is like unwrapping the biggest, most unexpected gift under the tree—nope not the Red Rider BB Gun. I’m talking about joy – pure joy!
This Advent, rejoice in the gift of salvation. Let it lift your spirits and inspire your song.
Reflection: What has God saved you from, and how does that bring you joy today?
Application: Sing! Whether it’s a carol or a simple prayer of thanks, let your joy overflow in praise.
Imagine a group of travelers going hundreds of miles with a treasure chest in tow, guided by nothing more than a star. When they finally found Jesus, their first reaction wasn’t relief or exhaustion—it was joy! They “rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.”
The Wisemen remind us that joy comes from seeking (and finding) Jesus. They didn’t let the long journey or the uncertainty stop them. And when they found Him, they gave their best gifts—not because they had to, but because their hearts were overflowing. Overflowing with joy!
This season, let’s follow their lead. Joy isn’t about perfect plans or shiny packages. It’s about finding Jesus, wherever we are.
Reflection: What would it look like for you to “seek” Jesus this Advent?
Application: Let the joy of Christ fill your heart. Share it with others through laughter, generosity, and maybe a little Christmas smile!
Have you ever tried to measure the love in that perfect Christmas gift? A handmade scarf shows thoughtfulness. A heartfelt card brings tears. But God’s love? That one is immeasurable.
Paul prays that we’d grasp the width, length, height, and depth of Christ’s love—a love so vast it can’t fit under the tree. It’s a love that crosses the galaxies to meet you in your living room, a love that fills every empty corner of your heart.
This Advent, let Christ’s love fill you to overflowing. It’s not just a gift to receive but one to share generously with others.
Reflection: Where do you see God’s love at work in your life this Advent season?
Application: Love big! Go out of your way to show someone they’re deeply loved by God—and by you.
God’s love is bigger than your longest Christmas shopping list! The psalmist says, “Your love, Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.” It’s a love that never fails, even when we do.
Think about the people you love most—family, friends, maybe even that crazy uncle who tells the same stories every Christmas. Now multiply that love by infinity, and you’ve got a glimpse of God’s affection for you. Ok so you don’t even have a glimpse because we can’t even fathom a love that big!
This Advent, bask in the unfailing love of God. It’s a love that doesn’t fade with the season but sticks around all year long.
Reflection: How can you let God’s love shape your relationships this Christmas?
Application: Let love lead! Choose forgiveness, patience, and kindness, reflecting the limitless love of God.
If Christmas had a tagline, it might be John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.” Talk about the ultimate gift exchange! God didn’t give us something small or temporary—He gave His best, Jesus, to bring us back to Him.
And here’s the kicker: Jesus didn’t come to condemn the world but to save it. That’s a part of the story we often leave out. We love that he came to save us, but often act as if he came to have us condemn the world around us. Not cool friends!
Imagine a Christmas where everyone gets a second chance—a fresh start wrapped in the love of God. That’s what Jesus offered you and what he calls us to offer one another.
This season, as you wrap gifts and share cookies, remember the greatest gift of all: God’s extravagant love, packaged in a manger and delivered to your heart.
Reflection: How can you reflect God’s love to others this Christmas?
Application: Spread the love! A smile, a kind word, or an act of generosity could be just the gift someone needs.
Thanksgiving is a time to gather around a table filled with food, family, and tradition. But beyond the turkey and pie, there’s something sacred about the act of sharing a meal. For Christians, the table has always been a place where God’s blessings are celebrated and His provision is remembered.
Throughout the Bible, the table is more than a simple piece of furniture—it’s a symbol of God’s faithfulness. In the Old Testament, we see the Israelites celebrating feasts like Passover and the Feast of Tabernacles, meals rich with meaning and reminders of God’s deliverance and provision. These table gatherings weren’t just about eating; they were acts of worship, opportunities to reflect on what God had done and to anticipate His promises yet to come.
In the New Testament, Jesus took the symbolism of the table even further. He often used meals to teach, heal, and connect with others. Whether feeding the 5,000 with loaves and fish or breaking bread with His disciples at the Last Supper, Jesus made the table a place of grace and abundance.
This is why the Thanksgiving table can be so much more than a family tradition. It’s an opportunity to recognize the abundance of blessings God has poured into our lives—not just the food on our plates, but the people around us, the memories we’ve made, and the hope we have in Jesus.
It’s also a chance to reflect on how we can extend that abundance to others. Just as God’s blessings were never meant to stop with the Israelites or with us, our tables can become places of welcome and generosity. Who might God be inviting you to welcome to your table this year? A neighbor who lives alone? A family member who feels out of place? A friend going through a difficult season?
The beauty of the Thanksgiving table is that it reminds us of a greater feast to come—the heavenly banquet described in Revelation, where every tribe, tongue, and nation will gather in the presence of God. That ultimate table will be a celebration of God’s abundant grace and the fulfillment of every one of His promises.
Until then, our earthly tables can serve as sneak peaks into that heavenly feast. When we sit down to share a meal, we participate in a rhythm that connects us to the past, present, and future work of God. We remember His provision in the wilderness, celebrate His presence in our lives today, and look forward to the day when His Kingdom will be fully realized.
So this Thanksgiving, as you set the table and fill your plates, take a moment to pause. Look at the faces gathered with you, and give thanks to the One who makes it all possible. Let your gratitude overflow into acts of kindness and hospitality, turning your table into a place of blessing for others.
Because at its heart, Thanksgiving isn’t just about what we have—it’s about the God who gives it all. And when we acknowledge Him as the source of every blessing, our tables become sacred spaces where His love is shared and His name is glorified.
We hear it everywhere: “Love wins.” It’s on T-shirts, social media, and bumper stickers. It’s a feel-good phrase, right? Just love each other, and everything will magically work out. But here’s the harsh reality: our love alone doesn’t win a thing.
Our love is conditional, selfish, and pretty pathetic. It gets tired. It gets offended. We say we’ll love unconditionally, but the second someone hurts us, or something doesn’t go our way, that so-called “unconditional” love suddenly has a lot of conditions. We fall in love as easily as we fall out of it, and we struggle to love people who challenge us. So, let’s cut the crap: if love depends on us to “win,” we’re doomed.
But here’s the twist that changes everything: Jesus’ love. Now, that love? That’s the love that wins. It’s not some mushy, feel-good sentiment. It’s radical, all-consuming, and completely unselfish. It’s a love that didn’t just say nice things but laid itself on the line—literally. Jesus gave up everything. He didn’t just love us when it was easy; He loved us when we nailed Him to a cross. His love didn’t give up when it got hard; His love didn’t turn away even when we turned away from Him. He didn’t stop loving when we lied. He kept on loving even in spite of our harsh words and unkind actions. Jesus’ love won in the only way that matters.
Think about it: Jesus’ love goes deeper than a smile or a kind word. Our love for a significant other is pathetic compared to this crazy, radical love. His love stared sin, death, and hell in the face—and it won. Our own efforts to love can’t even touch that. No amount of human effort or good intentions could win the fight against sin. We couldn’t love ourselves into God’s good graces. That’s why Jesus was essential. He did what we couldn’t do, no matter how much we loved.
When people say “love wins,” they’re often thinking of human love fixing things. They’re hoping that if we just love hard enough, the world’s problems will melt away. But here’s the cold, hard truth: without Jesus’ victory, our love accomplishes very little. Our love doesn’t heal hearts or change souls. It doesn’t break chains of sin or death. Jesus’ love does. He won that battle on the cross—one that our love couldn’t even enter.
So, what does that mean for us? Should we just stop trying to love others? Absolutely not. Jesus’ love calls us to love, but it also tells us to recognize our limits. Our love matters, but it’s not the foundation. It’s not the thing that holds eternity in place. That role belongs to Jesus’ love alone. We love others because He first loved us, but let’s not confuse the order here. We’re not the heroes of this story; we’re the ones who needed saving. Our love is the grateful response, not the game-changer.
So, next time you see “Love Wins,” take a moment to think about who made that possible. Let it remind you of the power, depth, and sacrifice of Jesus’ love, the only love that truly won. Without Him, our love is merely a shadow. With Him, our love has purpose.
James 2:10 says, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” In the words of a friend from my small group “Now, that kind of sucks, doesn’t it?” Imagine working hard all week to keep your room clean, finish your homework, and stay on top of everything, only to fail by not taking out the trash. According to this, your whole week is ruined, shot, a total failure, like it was all for nothing.
That’s the image we get of how the law works from this verse. We can strive to keep it perfectly, and honestly we can be rocking it for a good little bit. But if we break just one small part, we’re guilty of breaking the whole thing. That means if you’ve done a bang up job following Jesus. I mean reading the Bible, going to church, giving that perfect tithe off your income, keeping your language clean, discipling a group from work. Then your child leaves a lego on the floor in the living room, and you get up early in the morning. Yeah you know where this is going. You stop on that little grenade of pain buried in your carpet. The pain shoots through your body like a jolt of electricity, and a phrase of what we’ll call colorful language comes bursting from your lips like Niagara Falls.
Yep the whole deal is down the tubes. One little lego ruined your streak of perfection and now it’s all over.
Another way to look at it is to think of it like a chain. Each commandment is a link, and together, they form a strong chain. But break just one link, and the entire chain is useless. Whether you lie, steal, hate, or gossip, by breaking that one command you’ve broken the whole law completely.
The truth is, we will never be able to fully obey all of the law. We try to be good, to do what’s right, to keep things as neat and tidy as we possibly can, but we mess up. It’s just that simple. Even when we’re doing our best, we slip. And in God’s eyes, stumbling once is enough to declare us guilty of all of it. It’s an all or nothing kind of thing, if you let the law be in the driver seat.
As impossible as this all sounds, there is some hope. Here’s the good news: that lego grenade is exactly why Jesus came. He knew you’d step on it and blow your stride of perfection. He knew we couldn’t fulfill the law on our own, so He did it for us.
The Bible tells us that Jesus lived his life perfectly. That means he didn’t sin. He didn’t cuss when he stepped on his little brother’s lego. He didn’t fly off the handle when Mary told Him to clean His room. Being a carpenter’s son, He didn’t fly off in a fit of rage when He measured once and had to cut three times. He did it all perfectly. And His perfection covers our imperfection. His sacrifice wipes out our failures. We don’t have to live in fear of breaking the law anymore because His grace is greater than our flaws.
True, it’s impossible to keep the law perfectly. And yeah, that kind of sucks. But because of Jesus, we’re not stuck in the suck of failure—we’re set free in grace.
It’s no secret, many churches in the United States are declining or dying. I could spit out some statistics but as soon as I type them it feels like they are invalid. The landscape is changing so rapidly and many don’t know what to do or how to do it.
The social dynamics of our culture have shifted so far and so fast that many don’t even see the church anymore. Someone can drive past a dozen churches in their day and they’ve become largely invisible. And that my friends is not a good thing but it’s our own fault (for the most part).
Now I’m going to say a few things that some are going to want to take out of context. And yes I know the thought here is a tad edgy for some, but stick with me and I really think you might be able to understand where my heart really is.
The world around the church has shift to a different course. It’s like a ship going through the open waters. You turn that wheel just ever so slightly and in a hundred nautical miles, you’re on a totally different course. It doesn’t take much at all to get a large ocean liner off course and totally miss its destination.
The world has shifted its views on marriage, sexuality, medical care, the concept of benevolence, race, gender, and family just to name a handful. What once was unheard of now is the norm in our society.
In the midst of all of this shifting and moving and realignment, where is the church? Largely it’s in the same place it was 60, 70, even 100 years ago. And if I’m being honest that’s terrific and terrible at the same time!
We most certainly need to hold to some never changing truths. We call those the Bible by the way. That we can’t change. That is constant and forever and frankly the only thing we really can count on being consistent. But the way we do church and approach the world and talk to people and interact in our communities…those are all up for grabs.
Now I know some might disagree. Some are likely to think the way we do it needs to look different than how the world goes about living. But I would disagree. I’ve done the church planting gig once upon a time. We gathered in a local watering hole and watched football just like the rest of the guys. I had my seat at the bar where everyone knew my name. I had my regular waiting for me when I sat down on Monday nights. They just knew. I was one of them but at the same time I wasn’t.
It took me a while to earn my seat at that table, or in this case bar. But once I did I was in. And it wasn’t some weird bait and switch tactic either. I genuinely wanted to know the people around me. I cared about their kids and marriages and jobs. And this is where I think we’ve fallen off the rails as the church. We’ve done two things that have gotten us here.
We’ve started caring more about ourselves than those around us. Yep I said it. The church has become in many ways one of the most selfish institutions around. We see people hurting and try to make them believe what we believe before we care for them at all. It’s something Jesus even warned against in the parable of the Good Samaritan. We’ve forgotten what it means to be someone’s neighbor.
Jesus said to love your neighbors. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, aka do you wrong. I don’t hear a lot of that from the church today. I hear a lot of complaining and grumbling and wanting the world to conform to its way of thinking, but loving the world in tangible ways isn’t really a prevalent theme.
We’ve become known more for what we’re against than what we’re for. We have a litany of things that are not acceptable behaviors for those who are in Christ and we believe the world should mirror those good behaviors. And we’re right. But we’re also wrong.
We have elevated some of our pet sins to get greater screen time than others. You can likely find the ones I’m talking about without thinking too hard. I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this but could you imagine what would happen if we spent time helping people find where their real identity is found instead of condemning them?
If we look at the life of Jesus we see that he was compassionate toward the woman caught in adultery before he told her to change her life. He does this over and over again. Loves the person. Then he shows them a better way. If the church would live the better way, love the outcast, confused, challenged, broken people it really wouldn’t matter how far to one direction or another the world went. We’d be able to love them and stay relevant in their lives.
Look I know this sounds like I’m saying the church has it all wrong so let me end with this. We have the greatest message the world can use right now. We’ve just communicated it in a way that is less than helpful. Why not instead of waiting for the world to come to us, we go to them? Why not instead of making people believe what we believe before we make them feel welcome, we help them gain a sense of belonging then help them understand more fully what we believe?
If you’re a pastor or a church leader or church member, I’d love to chat about specific ways your church can reconnect with its community. There are some practical steps that can be made that won’t compromise your beliefs or confession at all. Would love to connect!
Tall or short. Fat or skinny. Rich or poor. Black or white. Old or young. Popular or unknown. It really doesn’t matter. Death doesn’t care about any of these things. When it shows up, it’s blind to all of these peripheral matters.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been in the presence of death more than I really care to be. From responding to emergency calls as a chaplain with the Sheriff’s office to pastoral care at life’s end for members of the church I serve, I’ve stood toe to toe with death the past two weeks on more than one occasion.
Death doesn’t care what time of day it arrives or who it comes to claim. It just shows up when the time has come. Some are prepared for it whatever that means. While others are totally blindsided by its presence on the doorstep.
One of the calls I received was a total shock to the family while the other was somewhat predicted. One was devastating and heartbreaking, while the other was filled with hope and joy for what was to come. One was calm and peaceful while the other was anything but peaceful. One was young and the other was a life well lived.
The two scenarios couldn’t be much different actually! But they still had something in common. Death came knocking and death seemingly won, at least for the moment.
In life we try to do everything we possibly can to prepare for every possible scenario. We squirrel money away for retirement. We stockpile food for a catastrophe. We have security systems to keep us safe. We even buy life insurance in the event we can’t outrun death when it does show up.
We try so very hard to control the outcome of our actions. We diet and exercise. We get good sleep and have mindfulness times throughout our week. We take vitamins or use those voodoo oils (yeah I said that for some friends but I really mean those essential oil things).
We can be healthy in every aspect of life medically speaking but when death knocks sometimes there’s nothing you can do to stop it. And it really doesn’t care.
The most recent couple of times death has come knocking it hasn’t even been during daylight hours. It wasn’t in the middle of the day when I could break away. It was overnight and interrupted sleep. Death just doesn’t care who it impacts or when or where.
Death is blind, but we don’t have to be. The most recent death I experienced was for a woman who lived a very long life. She died at 104 years old. Just a few months shy of 105 actually! And while death at any age or time really stings, she was ready. She wasn’t blind to death even though it was blind to her.
She was ready, but what does that even mean? You don’t pack a bag to get ready to die. You don’t typically put it in your day planner. But she was ready. She prepared for this day for most of her life. She did it by knowing what death meant for her.
She was a church person, as am I. She knew that death was never meant to be part of her story. But she also knew that since death was one day going to come and find her, she needed to arm herself with the only thing proven to beat death. What beats death? What beats a blind and indiscriminate killer of all?
She knew the only thing she could arm herself with was the promise of the one who died willingly and rose powerfully to give us hope unceasingly. She would always say that her life was mostly good and that the only way life could be fully good was when she was with Jesus. She knew that Jesus was her death defeater. So now she’s not just mostly good. She’s more than mostly good. And I bet she even gave death a little sassy grin because she knew what death forgot. In Jesus, life always wins and that’s more than mostly good!
