Methuselah lived 969 years — longer than anyone else recorded in Scripture. Does that mark success or remind us of failure that creeps around even that long of life?
Deep down, even people who come to God carry a fear that He will eventually give up on them — that sooner or later they’ll be shown the door. That fear is exactly what Jesus meets head-on in John 6.
When we see where God is actually headed with all of us, He equips us to run from “Fake Jesuses” and towards the true Jesus and His victory.
Right in the Christmas story, we read the incredible mystery and wonder of what God has done for us.
Even timeless Christmas traditions ultimately prove… less than timeless. Is there anything we can really hold onto?
We all arrive at Advent carrying something broken—a diagnosis, a fraying relationship, a season that feels anything but joyful—and our instinct is right: we want God to fix it. In John 6, the crowd feels exactly that after watching Jesus feed five thousand people, so they move to do something about it. The question the passage presses on us is whether we actually understand what problem he came to fix.
All that anticipation, all that preparation—and then it amounts to nothing. Do you ever feel like your life is like that? That’s exactly where Ecclesiastes begins, with a preacher who achieved everything a person could want and still found his toil was vanity, a striving after wind.
Sometimes the deck appears to stacked and it’s hard to see how life will do anything but go from bad to worse. How do we have joy then?
As we wrap up “alive,” we find that the resurrection speaks to more than just us having a body again: it speaks to restoration for the world.
What does it mean to be resurrected? We have lots of ideas, but are they what God is actually promising? Join Pastor Tim tonight as we consider that question.