After 400 years of silence God finally speaks through the Angel Gabriel to a handful of individuals. They are all shocked and terrified. Some probably had began to think maybe their great-grandparents stories were wrong and God was fictional. And so some respond in faith and some respond with fear. Zechariah is an example of what happens when you give up on your prayer before God has and he learns that just because you move on from a prayer doesn't mean God isn't going to move on it when He's ready.

Life is full of ups and downs and for many followers of Jesus we feel like we're doing good in our spiritual journey when things are good and we feel like we're being punished for something when things are going wrong. But what happens when we do everything right and everything wrong continues to happen? Does God actually cause bad things to happen? Is our faith strong enough to accept both good and bad from God's hand like Job? One of the things we learn from Joseph's story in Genesis 45 is that you cannot tell what God has planned for your life based on what is going on in the present.

For many disciples suffering is a part of life that we would rather avoid but if we were honest with ourselves we probably cause the vast majority (if not all) of our own suffering. But that was not the case for Daniel, he's like the one guy who did everything right and still he suffered. But Daniel teaches us some valuable lessons about how to manage the valleys and peaks. Through Daniel's story we learn the suffering isn't always about our weakness it's about increasing our witness. When a disciple suffers personally they actually stand powerfully for Jesus.

Life is a rollercoaster of valleys and peaks, circumstances and events that we perceive as either bad or good and then we react to them. The Apostle Paul had it worse than any other follower of Jesus and yet he claims to have found the secret to being content regardless of the circumstances of his life. Paul has discovered what the writer of Proverbs 30 might call the middle ground between being conceited because you have too much or being a criminal because you have too little. And it's all about where your confidence lies.

When we're faced with spiritual times of torment, maybe physically, mentally or financially, it's easy to blame God and retreat to relying on our own abilities. But it's in those times we spend in the spiritual desert that we discover God is just as powerful in the times of torment as He is in the times of triumph and He can be trusted in both. Don't let the struggles go to waste use them to draw closer to God.

The Exodus is a HUGE story but it's actually even bigger than Israel's freedom from slavery, it's a paints a picture of a loving and powerful God interested in a relationship with his unloveable and helpless creation. The Exodus is a picture of relationship that points us to Jesus' sacrifice on the cross - killed as the passover lamb for humanity and instituting a new covenant relationship not based on our ability to obey but on Jesus' sacrificial death in our place. The Exodus story, is my story and yours.

God is very consistent, from the garden to Abraham, then Moses and to Israel then to Jesus and ultimately leading to the marriage between the Kingdom of Heaven and the kingdom of earth God's desired one singular thing, a personal relationship with all people. The story of the Exodus is a picture of how God ultimately works in every individual life to lead them out of their slavering to sin and into a life of freedom through the Savior. When we understand what He wants, we see how important we are to His work.

The Israelites know where they've been, slaves to Egypt, and they know where they're going God's promised land - Canaan but their GPS (God's positioning System ) appears to be broken. Because instead of taking them on the shortest and easiest route, he takes them on a long and difficult journey. The destination is the same, but the journey has a much greater purpose.

The Israelites know where they've been, slaves to Egypt, and they know where they're going God's promised land - Canaan but their GPS (God's positioning System ) appears to be broken. Because instead of taking them on the shortest and easiest route, he takes them on a long and difficult journey. The destination is the same, but the journey has a much greater purpose.

As Israel prepares to leave Egypt God is at work on multiple levels to prove He is the One True God. Of course He wants the people of Israel to see Him as their God, protector and deliverer. But He also wants the Egyptian people to see that He is more powerful than the numerous false gods they currently follow and finally He wants Pharaoh to come to grips with his own mortality and weakness. All of this hinges on an individuals obedience that leads to deliverance.