Christmas marks the moment where we celebrate more than the birth of Jesus; we celebrate the way home. God's desire for every person on the planet is for them to see home, to experience what He intended from the very beginning, a relationship through faith, where you are at home with Him in the place where He is, made possible through the person and work of Jesus.

The purification and guilt offerings were primarily about addressing the violation of boundaries we don’t use anymore, so what are we supposed to do with that? We may not have their boundaries, but many of us have boundaries when it comes to life with God. As followers of Jesus, we are called to be holy in all of life, at all times, because all of life is connected and it all counts.

At first glance, we may be tempted to think that the ‘peace’ offering refers to a sacrifice one makes in order to make peace. But the peace offering isn’t a sacrifice designed to make peace. It is actually an offering to celebrate peace and is meant to be shared and enjoyed by the community.

One of the great ironies of living in the most advanced civilization in human history is that we have so much to be grateful for, yet we often struggle with entitlement and privilege. Fortunately, this is not a problem unique to us 21st Century westerners. This is a human problem. And it’s a problem the grain offering, the second major offering of Leviticus, is intended to address.

On our own, we are not able to ascend the mountain. We are unable to live in the presence of God. The ascension offering was a daily ritual that symbolized the worshipers' self-sacrifice as the path to transformation, enabling them to come near to God.

Leviticus is foreign. It’s a 19,000-word document written in ancient Hebrew about events that took place 3500 years ago. Over the next few weeks, we will get familiar with Leviticus, specifically the sacrificial system outlined in the first seven chapters. We hope that by shedding fresh light on parts of the Bible that generally confuse or scandalize us, we can gain the wisdom we need to be better followers of Jesus now and in the future.

Shame and guilt are two of the most powerful emotions a human being can experience. These emotions are normally the result of something bad we have done, are doing, or even the result of bad things that have been done to us. They make us feel unworthy, unlovable, and unredeemable. The gospel, however, says that your guilt and shame are the prerequisites for receiving God's love, grace, and forgiveness.

Contempt can be defined as an emotion, often stemming from pride, that leads us to disrespect another image bearer of God. It can be a problem for all of us daily. In Psalm 123, when the Psalmist fixes His eyes on God, he discovers a fresh perspective. He finds that the respect he feels toward God, His King, becomes the antidote for the disrespect he has felt for others.

Despair is the word we use to describe our feelings around hopelessness. As we’ve seen in each week of this series, the Psalms meet us where we need it most regarding negative emotions. The various writers of the Psalms were well acquainted with despair. A prayer like Psalm 88 provides us with the necessary guardrails to despair well before God–to appropriately take our worst moments and thoughts to Him in prayer.

Envy is wanting what you think other people have because you think it will make you happy. Our constant striving–for more, for bigger, for better–betrays the fact that there is a deep longing in the soul of every human being that we do not know how to satisfy. In Psalm 73, the story of Asaph’s struggle with envy was finally resolved when He got his heart and his eyes focused back on the God of the universe.