Most of us admit that we do not have consistent faith lives. But we aren't quite sure what the remedy is. The quality of our faith seems so dependent on how we are doing as individuals at any particular point in our lives. However, this is not the way the New Testament understood faith. When we understand faith only in a private, personal way, our faith will end up being dependent only on us. The problem is, we are an incredibly unreliable anchor for our own souls.

We are crushed by the weight of having to justify our existence to everyone else. All day long we strive to prove our worth. We live with the fear that we will fail - as a parent, as a child, as a provider, as a spouse, as a friend - and that we will be seen for what we are when we do. How could we ever actually be accepted if we don't produce? But God's justification of us offers radical freedom from all of this. Join us as we explore God's righteousness and justification in Romans 5:18-21.

Many of us will try to have a magical Christmas this year. So why won't we? The holidays exaggerate the false belief that we can curate our lives. We want to know our lives are headed in the right direction, and the holidays become a time for us to confirm that they are. But what if they aren't? The Advent of Christ relieves us of the burden of trying to manufacture our lives to produce results that will make us feel ok about ourselves. Instead, if we can use the Advent season to face our life (and our powerlessness over it) as it really is, we will find the Incarnate Christ waiting for us in love and mercy.

Join us as we spend this final week of our series on justice discussing where exactly we as people of faith fit into that story. What does it look like for us as believers to live out Christ's Kingdom and God's universal mission for justice, today?

Christ has come and He brought with Him a kingdom of eternal blessing and justice. The better we seek to understand that kingdom, the better we may begin to understand the nature of justice itself.

Justice can feel like a loaded term. As we begin our three-week series on the topic, it's important we know what we mean when we say it. It's important we know what God means when He asks us to pursue it. Let's start from the very beginning and learn what God's heart and mission for justice have been all about throughout the past, present, and future.

One year ago we started out to be a part of God's plan to restore all people to His love.

When trying to understand hell, we have a simple challenge. If God is love (which He is!), and if God is everywhere (which He is!), then we are left with only one option when we are trying to understand hell: we can only understand it in light of His love and His presence.

Church is not something you go to. You are church! You are in Christ, and Christ is in you. And did you know that others in your church are called to imitate the Christ they see and learn about in you? You may not even know that you have this kind of leadership in your church, but you do!

For Paul, the end times meant one thing - hope. And this hope meant that Paul could love with reckless abandon because he knew that in the end, no matter how messy loving others in Christ might be, God would ensure His goodness would prevail.