Most people instinctively know the difference between ordering at a restaurant and eating at a friend’s table—yet that same distinction somehow disappears in how they approach God. Proverbs 3:9 calls believers to honor the Lord with their wealth and the first fruits of all their produce, not as a business transaction or a path to guaranteed earthly blessing, but as an act of worship that reshapes what winning actually means.
How does a people God has blessed so richly turn their backs on him? Isaiah 1 opens with God’s lament over Jerusalem—once full of justice, now a harlot filled with murderers—and brings the question home for Lent: when he looks at you, does he lament?
Little sins that seem almost harmless still multiply until they leave us too blind even for grace. In Genesis 4, Cain’s story is one of just such little sins and it serves as a caution as we tend our own “harmless sins.”
Amid turkey and pie and football, we can list what we’re thankful for and still miss the point. Psalm 95 won’t let us settle for vague gratitude; it calls us to sing to the Lord and come into His presence with thanksgiving to the rock of our salvation.
We’ve grown so busy we’ve forgotten why we gather, and our culture whispers that rest is laziness—but Exodus 20:8 calls us to remember the Sabbath as a gift, not a rule, a weekly sign that we belong to the God who rescues us and knows what we actually need.
Most of us hear “You shall not make for yourself a carved image” and assume the second commandment is aimed for some folks worshipping a metal statue long ago. But the same human frailty that raised the golden calf still reaches for something visible, manageable, and reassuring. What have we begun to trust, protect, or worship in place of the God who rescued us?
We love remembering that Jesus overturned tables in the temple—especially when we imagine them belonging to someone else. But in Luke 19:45–48 when Jesus drives out those who sold, and declares, “My house shall be a house of prayer,” His challenge isn’t just to those people who annoy us. What might He overturn when our own convenience, usefulness, and preferences begin to define worship?
How do we come before God when our prayers so easily become empty phrases, desperate demands, or distant formalities? In Matthew 6, Jesus says our Father knows what we need before we ask, then gives His disciples words for approaching Him: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
Most of us navigate life by a quiet, practical question: what’s the minimum I need to get by with my time and my money? In Matthew 2, the wise men travel months across dangerous roads and then open their best treasures before the child—and the gap between what they did and what they could have gotten away with is exactly where this passage challenges us.
We begin a new series in Genesis 4, looking at the impact of sin on early human beings… and all of us today.