What sets God apart — more than anything else! — is His love. Love is what compelled Him to create us in the first place. Love is what drove Him to the cross to redeem us. And Love is what He longs to see flow through us from Him into the rest of the world.

Because we have nothing to offer God, nothing to give or say that would impress Him, we realize that we are entirely dependent on His mercy and grace. The Good News is that He delights in showing us mercy, and His deepest desire is to see us dwell in His grace, because this enables us to live forever with Him.

The more we come to understand who God is, the more we realize how different He is…and how frightening that can be! He is perfect and powerful, and, like looking into a mirror, that reveals our own inadequacies and failures. Yet, even in this, God is not seeking to frighten us or drive us away from Him; instead, He desperately wants to draw us close and make us more like Him!

Today we have access to more information at our fingertips than any human ever before, and yet there’s still so much we don’t know! God, however, knows everything. His memory of the past is flawless and complete, and He even knows everything about the future, too.

At times it seems like the only sure thing in life … is that nothing is sure! The world seems to be constantly changing around us, and it’s hard for us to keep up. In the midst of all this chaos, God promises us that He never changes, and He invites us to build our lives on that solid foundation, so that we are not overwhelmed.

As created beings, we exist within the boundaries of time. We can look back to the day we were born, and we know that someday our lives will come to an end. While it is hard for us to fully grasp, God exists outside those boundaries - He always was, always is, and always will be.

God is nothing like us. As a Spirit, He is not limited by the human features that we so often use to define us (our bodies, our birthdays, our jobs), and yet He reveals Himself to us in ways we can understand. He does this so that we can know Him and have a relationship with Him, which is something no other “god” can do!

God’s people lost God’s Word, leading them to fail to celebrate their most joyful festival — the Passover. Under King Josiah, that Word was found, bringing the people back to where God wanted them to be. As we study His Word, we will come to “ah-ha” moments where we are touched by the presence of God in our lives.

You probably know the story of King David pretty well. He was, after all, a man after God’s own heart and did some amazing things in his life. You may also know about some of his failures and weaknesses. But there’s still something to learn from how, through it all, God worked in his heart…and can work in yours, too!

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness and encounters the devil. Jesus was tempted, as Israel, and we are. However, Jesus did not sin; He was God. He was confronted by the tempter with real opportunities to sin; but He was able to meet all temptations with Scriptural truth. God’s Word is powerful to defeat evil in our lives. Jesus is the way into the wilderness.