God invades the childbirth process and shows us that he uniquely takes up concern for the mother and her rest and also the dedication of children to being a part of his covenant people. He sets boundaries and cares intimately for how his people bring kids into the world. God highly values life.

Many of the cleanliness laws in Leviticus caused the Israelites to pay attention to their nearness to death. Death is not the way things are supposed to be and is a corruption to God's good creation. God was forming a culture to hate death and create the context for a messiah who came to defeat death.

Our church has a unique opportunity to join God in advancing some of his kingdom objectives. There are some really clear next steps in front of us that will set us on a trajectory to become a church that sends people into God's mission in regions and areas beyond our own community!

Suffering in the Christian life plays a significant role - though it may be hard to understand and may even cause us to want to blame God, God always uses it to prepare us for a deeper, richer life with him. The Suffering we face now cause us to look to his future redemption and glory with greater expectation...and it drives us to a greater reliance on him in the here and now.

We don't totally understand or relate to the food laws of the Old Testament and yet, these laws were given by God for the good of his people. What do the mean and what can we learn from the fact that God cares about what people do with food?

Discernement is a spiritual gift listed in the new testament, but it is listed as the ability to discern between spirits. What does this mean? And how can we grow in the skill of knowing when demons are active at particular times and places?

Discernment is something that we are called to exercise, but discernment is also a process that we undergo. The Lord tests us in order to discern, or even to help us discern the nature of our hearts. The world is full of temptations to abandon our commitment to Christ, the purity of our heart is displayed in our faithfulness to him in our circumstances.

The responsibility of the Christian is to concern ourselves with doing that which is in the will of God, but what does this really mean? And how does it become possible to do such a thing if we do not have the mind or heart of God? The bible indicates that it is possible for us to discern God's will but to develop in this skill of discernment requires something of us.

The first in a series on discernment. How do we make decisions in a world where there is much less "black" and "white" and alot more "grey" than we would prefer. Figure out how to understand what's going on under the surface and what is right and good for particular situations is challenging. Discernment is the tool that Christians have been given. But the key is that good Discernment must first come from Holy-Spirit produced love.

Immediately after God blesses his people with his presence a couple of priests decide that they will make up their own way of worshipping God. From our perspective this may seem harmless, but this is the same thing human beings have been doing throughout history: developing our own standards of what is right and expecting that God will align with them. God is holy and we need to sit with that reality in order to understand the significance of his mercy.