NCC Daily began because of one simple conviction — that the ceiling on our intimacy with God and our impact on the world is dependent on our daily spiritual disciplines. None of that changes as we enter a new year. On Monday, January 4, NCC Daily will return with Pastor Mark Batterson. He releases a brand new book on December 29 entitled, Win the Day: 7 Daily Habits to Help You Stress Less & Accomplish More. We’ll spend Monday through Friday digging deeper into the seven practical, yet life-changing habits that will set you on a path to harnessing the power of twenty-four hours.

Today we have an invitation to you from Pastor Jimeka Jones Setzer. Identify a situation where you need to believe God again. Journal your answer, and get ready for your faith to be stretched to lead a life of hope.

This advent season, this Christmas, is a time to reorient. To fix our eyes and train our minds to seek the good, the beautiful, the true, and align our lives, our energy, our time to participate in it however we’re able to. We can welcome inconvenience as invitation and interruption as gift.

Maybe you’re in that place where your family has experienced unimaginable loss this year, and not only because of COVID-19. Sometimes the unimaginable happens, and we don’t understand, and there’s no explanation. In these moments we are so thankful for Romans 8:26.

As we talk about having hope in this special Christmas season, the Bennett family from NCC NoVA share a story about the prophetess Anna meeting baby Jesus, and also a brief song about looking on the face of Jesus.

Our hope should never grow tiresome, because we know that God will always be there for us.

To many, hope is excitement for things to come. It’s expectancy. It’s that feeling of knowing something great is about to happen. But for some of us, the word hope can be a reminder of broken promises, broken dreams, heartache, and a life that was opposite of what we had imagined. For some of us, it hurts to hope, because hope has been tainted with the sting of disappointment.

A couple weeks ago, NCC Worship released a new rendition of the Christmas hymn, In The Bleak Midwinter. We're going to play an acoustic version of it for you today. As we continue our Advent journey together, we pray the song helps you to tune into the wonder and mystery of the incarnation of God becoming human in Jesus Christ.

In this Genesis poem we see God simultaneously creating and categorizing. Heaven and earth. Light and dark. Firmament and water. Day and night. It’s easy in our minds to understand it as God delineating good from the bad. That’s not what the text — the poem — actually says. After creating and categorizing in each stanza God calls the creation, “good.”

Lamentations is a collection of songs written by the prophet Jeremiah right after the fall of Jerusalem. And true to the definition of lament, a passionate expression of grief or sorrow, it is a book that’s filled with words of deep anguish, despair, and dismay at the state of Jeremiah’s beloved home.