When pain makes even sitting in a chair impossible, someone else’s ordinary comfort can suddenly look like the one thing that would make life right. In Exodus 20:17, God forbids coveting anything that belongs to our neighbor—but how do we distinguish a healthy desire for change from a heart dissatisfied with what God has given?
Maybe you’ve had a Christmas where the lights and the music were all there, but it felt like you were watching from the other side of a piece of glass—present for the season, yet not really in it. Isaiah 53 describes a Savior understands how we feel on that other side of the glass and came to break it.
We’re always drawn to the new and the shiny. In Genesis 3, the serpent made the one tree God forbade look irresistable. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything we shouldn’t do just clearly didn’t look right?
Gaps make us uneasy, so we fill them by hook or by crook—inventing tidy origins for old phrases or forcing plans into place. Genesis 27 opens on Isaac’s household doing the same around the blessing he means to give, each scrambling to close what feels unfinished.
We think we’re so strong until we’re not—and Genesis 26 puts that uncomfortable truth right in front of us, as Isaac moves almost without pause from a mountaintop moment of God’s renewed covenant promise straight into lying about his own wife out of fear.
God told Rebekah before her sons were born that the older would serve the younger—yet in Genesis 25, Isaac loves Esau most. Nothing looks like it’s heading where God said it would. When the path to God’s promises feels unnecessarily tangled, can we still believe he’s working?
Pastor Tim thinks about how God tells us to show care for others in a different way than our natural impulse — and why that matters.
Pastor Tim cools off in the pool as we think about cooling off our uncontrolled wills and being more focused on the things God values.
We’ve all got a part of ourselves we refuse to hand over—the place that says, You don’t get this, Lord. Heading toward Jerusalem, Jesus told a parable about a nobleman whose citizens hated him and sent word: We do not want this man to reign over us. The question is whether that refusal still has the last word.
Most of us are quicker to panic over a dying phone battery than over a dying spiritual one—we coast along, confident we’re fine, while the indicator drops lower than we’d ever admit. As Jesus calls a written-off man in Jericho, He challenges all of us on this: “Do we know how much we need Him?”