The big moment. After generations of wandering, God tells the people of Israel that it’s finally time to cross the Jordan River and enter the Promised Land. It’s going to require trust, preparation and obedience—and it’s going to be anything but easy. The principles from this story apply to us, too.

A sign of true Christian faith is willingness to take personal risk to help the spiritual condition of others. It can mean going somewhere new. It can mean welcoming the stranger. Both of those elements are present in this story, and both lead to deeper faith and a life filled with great stories.

This week we begin a series on the book of Joshua. On its surface, this book is about real estate – stepping into land that’s been promised, leaving behind lands of slavery or wandering, not stepping back into captivity. But when we take a deeper look at four ways land is described in the Bible, we realize every person finds themselves in one of them.

As we wrap up our series on Mark’s gospel, we look at Jesus on the day he was crucified. Then and now, his identity doesn’t give anyone the option of fence-sitting. Do we follow him as Lord, or do we mock him? And before we say, “I’d never mock Jesus,” let’s go deeper and look at what that means.

Peter makes a heartfelt promise to stand by Jesus, then quickly breaks it. Three times. Know the feeling, from either side? Jesus suffered not only physically, but also by being rejected. That was for us, too.