Pastor Tim encourages us to look to the snow outside as a reminder of something that might not strike us at first when looking at it: that God cares enough to reveal Himself to us.
When things go badly, it's easy to assume God's favor has lifted—and that assumption runs deep enough that entire churches have been built on promising the opposite. Yet in Acts 13, the disciples who have just heard the gospel find themselves filled with joy and the Holy Spirit at precisely the moment Paul and Barnabas are driven out of the district, which raises a question worth sitting with: what if hardship isn't the absence of God's blessing at all?
God isn’t just the God of the universe, he also is the God who wants us to know Him. Pastor Tim helps us think about this by turning to Exodus this week.
Why are we so fascinated with angels and the spiritual world as a culture but often pause when it comes to fully embracing who Jesus is? It isn’t necessarily a new problem.
Being in the right group, studying the right things, living a decent life—it feels like that ought to be enough. But in Acts 13, Paul announces to a synagogue full of people who had done exactly that: there are things the Law of Moses simply could not free you from, and being part of the in-group won’t close that gap.
Sin is really sticky — far more persistent than those obnoxious tags stuck on things that we struggle to get off. But, Jesus’s mission in this world was to do what we can’t: remove that sin from us.
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?
