God invites us to share the good news in word and deed with the right motivation of empathy for all.

God gives us different ways, like rational discourse, powerful experiences, and embodied character to relate others, so they may receive the good news of Jesus Christ in relevant and authentic ways.

The good news creates the possibility for a new kind of life. Throughout this next week, we invite you to pray for someone you care about to receive the Good News of Jesus Christ.

When we recognize the core message of our faith, we can better share it with others. 

When Jesus conquered death, He conquered darkness. When we walk through darkness, it isn't permanent. When we release our grip on our struggles, we can find healing and wholeness. 

In holy week we realize the various ways that Jesus experienced rejection. As we get honest about naming the pain of rejection that has happened to us and the ways we have rejected Jesus, we realize we can experience healing because of the rejection that Jesus experienced on our behalf so that we do not need to experience rejection from God.

Jesus models how to deal with overwhelm by consenting, not succumbing.

Jesus heals shame by seeing us and reminding us of our identity as children of God.

This sermon includes a brief clip from Brené Brown's TED Talk, We need to talk about shame and is being used under a Creative Commons License, Attribution--Non Commercial--No Derivates (or the CC BY -- NC -- ND 4.0 International)

When we learn to become single-minded in the presence of Jesus we will experience less anxiety in our lives, no matter what circumstances we are facing in our lives.

In life’s darkest places, such as in the midst of significant depression, God does not abandon us. God invites us to share all of our feelings—no matter how hopeless, angry, or depressed we may feel—with the knowledge that because Jesus took the abandonment of God for us, we never have to be abandoned.