Because Jesus has made us His people and given us the church as a gift, let’s fully engage that gift—coming ready, being fully present, and living as Jesus’ people when we leave.

The gathered church is a blood-bought gift to steward. So might we draw near to God, hold fast to His promises, and consider one another so that we can all make it home together.

Sin drives humanity from the garden, but God does not abandon His children: He clothes their shame, mercifully guards them from endless life under the curse, and promises the Savior who will restore tov and shalom.

Sin leaves us hiding, afraid to take responsibility, and living amid the painful fallout of shattered shalom, but the God of goodness comes seeking us and promises Jesus, the Snake Crusher, who restores us to life with God.

Humanity shattered shalom by distrusting God’s goodness and grasping the right to define goodness on our own. But Jesus, the faithful last Adam, defeated the serpent and opened the way back to life with God.

The God who gives us one another gives marriage as a covenant of joy, shared strength, faithful union, and vulnerable love, through which His goodness is multiplied and the love of Jesus for His Church is displayed.

God meets our relational deficit by giving us one another, calling all people into relationships of shared strength and mutual need and specifically calling male and female to stand face-to-face as equal image-bearers and co-laborers in His goodness through the reconciling grace of Jesus Christ.

God’s good design for His people is that we trust Him enough to simply receive His abundant goodness by faith instead of grasping for lesser things through our own wisdom and autonomy. And this invitation still comes to us in and through Jesus Christ.

The God who forms dust with His breath gives abundant tov to real people in real places, calls us to cultivate and guard His goodness, and restores what we failed to steward through Jesus Christ.

Because God completed His work and made the seventh day holy, Sabbath rest invites us to receive creation as gift, trust the Creator’s care, and look to Jesus as the one who restores the rest, renewal, and goodness we lost in Eden.