“Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, God with us — Matthew 1:23. As we enter into our last series of 2019 and the Christmas season — the celebration and remembrance of God wrapping His only begotten Son in human flesh and sending Him to be with and ultimately to give Himself for us — we are asking God to help us see and more deeply understand what it means for God to be with us. How would our lives, our hopes, our thoughts, our concerns, our perspectives change if we really believed God is with us?

We live in a world full of exhausted people. Social media is taking its toll. Sleeplessness, anxiety, stress and depression are on the rise. While the age of connectivity grants us access to everything, we fend for ourselves, denying the One who can deliver us from anything what He most wants and we most need—connection with Him.

We live in a world and time where the popular solution to every difficult experience is cheer up and get over it. Too often our tendency, with even the most excruciating experiences and crippling emotions, is to shake it off with happy. Many of us are exhausted because we’re going through life with so many unresolved issues. It’s foolish at best and ungodly at worst to think we can simply put a bandaid on everything. Some things in this world are difficult beyond explanation. We must learn how to mourn and find the supernatural comfort of God or we are going to die trying to be happy.

There’s an exhaustion that comes from remembering and rehearsing the negative events and experiences we have. The words and events we remember and rehearse, build memorials within us; and tragically our tendency is to build memorials around negative experiences and carry them for the rest of our lives. When God establishes memorials He does it to remind us of Him and the significant ways He has moved, demonstrating His power and love for us. God’s memorials are established to anchor us in the confidence and power that comes from knowing He is with us and for the plans and purposes attached to our lives. The way we remember a thing not only shapes the event; the way we remember a thing shapes us.

There are things in our lives and this world that can only be overcome by fasting and prayer. We’ve all experienced it at one time or another. We give the right effort and commitment to progress or overcome, we just lack the right know how and tools. God has given us a gift in fasting and prayer. Fasting and prayer give us access to a dimension of faith that can’t be entered any other way. Fasting and prayer delivers us from the exhaustion that comes from trying to do the right thing with the wrong tool.

There's a unique and devastating exhaustion we can experience in this life. It's an exhaustion of the heart that comes when we start looking for another god. If you give your life to Jesus and follow Him long enough, you will experience times when you see Him moving in the lives of others, but feel as if He’s abandoned you. There will be times when people around you are being healed of their conditions, promoted and progressed in life, but you will remain stuck in your trouble, hardships and pain. The drift that can happen in our hearts when we experience this, brings an exhaustion that leaves us going through the same motions, but inside our affections and heart commitment have gone looking for another god. We become exhausted by wandering and searching for someone or something to give us what we want.

We live in a globally connected, 24/7 world, that’s been sped up to warp speed and tied together in a world-wide web. They say that New York City is the City that never sleeps, but we’ve become a nation of sleepless cities and people. Our never stop, always connected world is destroying our souls. We’re losing ourselves to exhaustion. Technology has taken the limits off of everything in this world except us. We were created with limits. We were made for God. We were created to be human beings, not human doings and we must learn to do the one thing in a do it all world.

Exhausted. There’s an epidemic of tired in this world. Chronic fatigue, anxiety, sleeplessness, depression are at epidemic levels all around us and in many cases it’s simply because we’re tired or more accurately stated — exhausted. This series is going to reset and restore us by taking us to answers that medicine alone can not provide. It’s time to get delivered from exhausted.

If you’ve been in a relationship of any kind — family, friendship, marital you have experienced offense. Offense can turn even the most fruitful relationship on its axis. If it is not acknowledged and unaddressed, offense can tear at the very fabric of a relationship and destroy it. Offense is a divisive weapon, creating a narrative that attempts to override the truth of God’s word.

The Greater Philadelphia region is comprised of Philadelphia, the four suburban counties of Bucks, Montgomery, Chester, Delaware and the Southern New Jersey counties of Burlington, Gloucester, Camden, and Salem. This region is shaped by Philadelphia, the 6th largest city in the United States and Camden the county seat of Camden County — the largest county in Southern New Jersey. Philadelphia is affectionately known as the City of Brotherly Love and Camden’s motto is, In A Dream I Saw a City Invincible — an excerpt from a Walt Whitman’s poem where he dreamt of a utopian city where love triumphed and flourished. It is here that God has called us, The Perfecting Church, not just to live and worship, but to be a part of His eternal plan to impact and transform this region by extending the Kingdom of God.