What if life in Jesus was less about trying to find out what's right and wrong with you, and more about discovering the joy of God's Spirit within you?

Trust and hope are deeply connected. Losing hope first involves losing trust. Learning to trust again means having hope again. Paul encouraged his church in Thessalonians by ensuring their trust in one another stayed alive.

Church is family! This Sunday is going to be an extra beautiful Sunday because we get to share it with our precious little ones! Pastor Nicole will walk us through what it is like to see one another as our joy and glory, just as Paul so affectionately saw his churches in 1 Thessalonians 2. Our children will be leading us in worship, and we will be dedicating several of our children to the Lord and to His great love for them!

The church is relational. It is a space of deep affection and love. Did you know this is how God exists? The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit flows forth in grace and peace from them to us! It's so easy to forget this, but the early church in Thessalonians 1 was defined by strange friendships. And to make it even weirder, these relationships of deep connection and love looked a lot like God Himself. This Sunday we kick off our Thessalonians series by exploring how beautifully relational God is and how we are made to exist just like Him.

Psychiatrist Thomas Hora believed that most modern relationships would be characterized primarily by disappointment. A western consumerist mindset has shaped how we relate to one another, even our loved ones, creating relationships that constantly feel discontent. Like interlocking fingers of two hands placed together, the fingers can intertwine only to a point before no more movement is possible except by going backward, causing friction and pain among the too tightly woven fingers. But Psalms 146 shows us a different path to joy for every part of our lives, including our relationships. It starts by letting go of our need to justify ourselves or to justify others' presence in our lives and ends in unrestrained happiness which flows from a genuine trust in God.

We all want to control our lives, but we often end up controlled by our need to control. Not being in control is a gentle invitation to trust God. Trusting Him means He will teach us to dance freely even in the spaces that have always most defeated us.

God’s love for us is so beautiful and so profound that it is often unrecognizable to us at first. And so for us to learn to see it, God must lead us through unrecognizable places. These unknown places are often the most uncomfortable. But when we begin to see all the days of our lives as places of God’s mercy, we cannot stay resentful or discouraged about even the most disappointing moments of our lives because they all become moments that God uses to shape us for his purposes.

You might have been a part of a church or religious setting where your righteousness was the price of your acceptance. But such a price is a crushing weight to carry. So why do we think God's acceptance of us is similar? With grace, our greatest failures become the space where we meet God.

What if the secret to facing anything in your life wasn't found in how strong you are, but in how weak? The path to victory starts with need. There is no other way.

In the midst of an anxious and weary week, we have some special things happening at Restore this morning. Join us for our "Ask Me Anything Sunday!" as we answer your questions about the Bible.