After Jesus' baptism, He was led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness to face the temptation of Satan. Jesus is not a passive Savior. He went looking for a fight with the devil. A fight that He won.

The contrast between Jacob and his son, Joseph, teaches followers of Jesus that we must choose to believe that God is sovereignly in control of everything that happens to us and that He has promised good to us through all that He allows.

Heroic Faith is distinct from regular Faith. Faith in Jesus, through the gift of grace, results in eternal life with God. Heroic Faith also leads to eternity, but focuses on bringing others along with you.

We all have dusty prayers that have long been not addressed by God - what we discover in the story of John the Baptist's birth announcement is the long memory of a God who keeps His promises to His people.

Many think that after the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the guilty humans saw their depravity and committed their lives to the pursuit of holiness and restoration. The reality is that they have devolved further away from God in their behaviors and pursuits.

When Adam and Eve sinned against God, God confronted them. He did not say, "How dare you sin against me!" or "I cannot believe you?!". God asked a question - He asked, "Where are you?". He was asking not where they were geographically, but where they were in relationship to Him.

As Jesus prepared to go to the cross and return to the Father, He promised the Holy Spirit and taught us what His ministry to us would look like through the Holy Spirit.

Jesus promised us that "In this life you will have tribulations." You may be in such a time, just coming out of one or about to enter one. King Jehoshaphat stood before God in such a time and said, "Lord, I do not know what to do, but my eyes are on you." This made all the difference and serves as a reminder and model for us.

As we consider Nehemiah's prayer, we see four elements of prayer that should be part of our lives: prayers of Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

God desired to accomplish something remarkable through Nehemiah, but first, He had to do something in Nehemiah. That thing was to burden him with love and concern for a people he didn't know and for a city he had never been to.