We tend to skip the genealogy at the start of Matthew—all those names, so many of them people we know nothing about. In doing so we miss something that matters deeply to ordinary people like us who wonder whether God actually works through lives like theirs.

Are we looking for the right thing and do we understand the right “time” for it? As we get everything synchronized for Christmas, the author of Hebrews encourages us to be synchronized with Christ.

When a winter forecast keeps bouncing around, most of us know better than to cancel everything over what might never arrive. Luke opens his Gospel with the opposite claim: this is no chance of grace next week, but the report of what has already been fulfilled among us—Jesus actually coming in history.

We don’t want to simply know about a miracle that happened long ago and was forgotten thereafter. We need to know that there is a consistency in God’s care, too.

Christmas can arrive wrapped in lights and joy while grief, loss, and the sense that this world is deeply broken remain close at hand. The Gospel of Mark opens with “the beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ,” echoing creation itself and pressing an Advent question beneath all the decorations: What kind of beginning can Jesus bring to lives that do not feel whole?

We tend to assume God works through the right people, in the right places, with the right credentials. Isaiah 44–45 is genuinely jarring to our assumptions: the Lord names a pagan, idol-worshiping foreign king as the one who will restore His people to their land.

As we continue in Ephesians 2, Paul helps us to think about the difference between being called to do “good works” and earning God’s favor through our works.

Comfort, institutional preservation, and tribal identity can crowd out obedience to God’s call in our lives. Do we hear His call to reach those in need of His Grace and to live in the “risky repentance” that involves?

The wonder of what God does for us is so much greater when we don’t forget the story behind it.

Solomon, Rehoboam, and Jeroboam all treated God’s promises like something they could improve on or control on their own terms only to encounter the pavement courtesy of the black ice of sin. Our efforts end like that, but God’s faithfulness outlasts our failures.