We all love the mountaintop moments in our walk with God. These are the spiritual highs when His presence feels near, His voice seems louder, and we just know He is moving. But when you experience spiritual victory, you can almost always expect a spiritual attack. If it can happen to Jesus, it will most certainly happen to us.

Immediately after His baptism, a powerful moment of divine affirmation, Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. He went directly from a heart-to-heart moment with the Father to a face-to-face encounter with the devil. This passage is more than a historical event; it is a model for our own victory. It’s not whether we won’t be tempted, but how we should respond when we are.

Walter Dixon was a soldier in the Korean War who was captured in combat. After a long time, the military presumed he was dead and sent a letter to his family declaring him "killed in action." His family grieved, held a funeral, and tried to move on. Two years later, there was a knock at the door. When they opened it, Walter was standing there, alive. The weeping started again, but this time, they were tears of joy. The son they thought was gone had returned.

That story is a picture of Easter. The world thought Jesus was dead and gone. Hope was crucified on a cross and buried in a tomb. But on the third day, Jesus walked out alive. In this passage from John 20, we see the very first person Jesus appeared to after His resurrection: Mary Magdalene. Her encounter shows us the heart of the resurrection and what it means for our lives today.

There is something about facing the end of life that makes people brutally honest. When eternity is staring you in the face, the unimportant things fade away, and only the truth remains. We see this reality on full display in Luke’s account of the crucifixion. Jesus is hanging on a Roman cross between two criminals, both at the end of their roads. In their final moments, they each have an encounter with the King of Kings. One man dies with a heart full of mockery, while the other dies with a heart full of faith, forever changed by a simple conversation with Jesus.

This moment reveals a powerful truth: it is never too late to turn to Jesus. Grace is always available to those who seek it. No matter your past, your encounter with Christ today can change your eternity.

Some moments in life change everything. An encounter with Jesus, the day you get married, or the moment you become a parent are all experiences that can redefine your story. The disciples had many such encounters with Jesus, and each one shaped their faith, built their character, and defined their mission.

Imagine being invited to dinner by someone you deeply admire. You arrive expecting a wonderful evening, but instead, they announce that this will be your last meal together. This is precisely what happened at the Last Supper. The disciples walked into the upper room expecting a celebration, but Jesus used this encounter to prepare them for a reality that would shatter their assumptions and change the world forever.

Your response to failure will either move you away from God or it'll make you more like God. In this message, Pastor Jordan reflects on Peter’s life and how God can use the failure in your life to develop you as a disciple of Jesus Christ in a way that success never will.

Imagine Joseph of Arimathea—the man who offered Jesus his own tomb—going home on the night of the crucifixion and telling his wife, “Honey, I need to tell you something… I gave my tomb away.” You can almost picture her staring back in disbelief: “Joseph, how could you do that? Do you know how much we paid to have that tomb carved out of the rock for us, for our family, for our children and grandchildren?”

But Joseph’s response would have been simple and confident: “Don’t worry. He’s only borrowing it. He’ll be out of there in three days."

As we continue our journey through the Holy Land with a meaningful stop at Golgotha, which is the very place where Jesus was crucified and gave His life for our sins. This is one of the most pivotal moments on our Holy Land Highlights tour, because everything we believe centers on what happened here.

If Jesus had not died, there would have been no resurrection, and without the resurrection, there would be no Savior of the world. That’s what makes this location so sacred and so essential to our faith.

In our next Holy Land Highlights message, we’ll focus on Caiaphas’s house—a place of great significance in Jesus’ final hours before the crucifixion. This is where Jesus was taken on Thursday night, and while Scripture doesn’t describe every detail of what happened there, history suggests He may have been beaten and held alone in a dark underground dungeon beneath the house. In this message, we’ll explore this place of suffering and why it plays such an important role in the story of Jesus.

As we continue through the Gospel of Matthew, we see how the disciples responded to everything Jesus endured in the final hours before His crucifixion. In His moment of greatest need, His closest friends scattered, leaving Him alone.

But before that happened, Jesus brought His disciples to the Mount of Olives. When they arrived in the garden, He told them to sit. That detail may seem small, but it’s significant. Why would Jesus ask them to sit at such a critical moment? That’s the question we’re going to explore together in this message.

Jesus was an incredible teacher, and one thing that made Him so effective—beyond the fact that He is the Son of God—was His ability to use what was right in front of Him to communicate truth. Jesus often taught through vivid, tangible illustrations, helping people see and understand His message more clearly.

As we come now to Matthew 16, imagine what it must have been like for the disciples as they walked through the gates and into the heart of a thoroughly pagan city. The setting itself became part of the lesson. I believe the account we’ll focus on today could be called the greatest field trip ever, and I say that because of four key things we see in this story. Let’s begin by looking at those four things together.