This year, rather than a full series, we are offering one Advent message. In it, we focus on what lies at the heart of Advent—and at the heart of Christianity itself—the defining characteristic of Jesus and of everyone who seeks to follow him: love. 

This week, we reflect on Judah’s life after the Temple’s destruction. God sends them, as His children, into exile—but even there, He calls them to live out the covenant: to be a blessing to the world. This call is not easy. We naturally seek security, comfort, and certainty before turning outward. Yet God reverses that order, inviting His people to find peace and prosperity by seeking the peace and prosperity of their host nation.

This week, we examine the posture and attitude of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms—attitudes that ultimately opened the door to their destruction. They mistook wealth, military strength, land, and even the Temple as signs of God’s blessing. In truth, these were not blessings of approval, but expressions of God’s patient mercy. He had not destroyed them…yet. He had warned them, but they would not listen.

This week we make our way through King Saul and David, and spend most our time time talking about Solomon.  Solomon, often referred to as the wisest man in the world, is also the King responsible for the fall of Israel.  But Why?  This week we look at the very things that drew Solomon's affections away from God and toward the glories and riches offered by empire.  

In our Journey to Advent, this week we cover what it was the the Jews so faithful to the purity and holiness law kept missing that caused them to continually miss the life of their covenant calling.  

In this week's story we jump ahead to the story where Moses encounters God.  This text not only moves our story forward, but it begs the question from all of us, is our idea of God shaped by our position in life? Answer: Probably.  The texts challenge us to move beyond that which is comfortable to learn God in a way we may not have known him before. 

In this week's bridge talk we are going to take about thirty minutes to cover 600 years of Biblical narratives, bridging where we left off with Abraham and connecting the next part of our story with Moses.  In addition we are going to highlight many of the repeated patterns within these stories and the significance of those patterns.  

Today's story brings us to the end of Abraham and the idea of Covenant.  We explore what scripture means by covenant and how it is, those of us who are in covenant with God are called to approach the promises of God. 

This week we jump from the tower of Babel and we are introduced to our new man or character, Abram.  Abram, is a man who understood God, like most of us, according to the myths of his home society.  In our story today, we learn how God begins to change Abram's understanding of who God is, to make him into the man ready to live into the covenant. 

In this week's bridge talk we bridging the story between Babel and Abram, but we are doing this by looking all the way back at repeated motifs being told at larger levels of graduating magnitude.  We first see the same theme in the opening scene of scripture before there are humans, then we see it again in the first family, and so on.  Abram, begins God's new humanity called to live differently.