Pray can be hard, mainly because we do not know God. As we start off our series on prayer, we see that praying and asking God for help becomes natural when we know who God is.

On All Saints Day, we celebrate the unity and diversity of Christian faith, spread out across space and time. As Paul reminds us in Ephesians 4, there is one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.

John closes his letter with a tone of urgency: the message of Jesus is for now, the message of Jesus is for all, and the message of Jesus is the purpose of the church.

Babylon is what happens when good things become evil things, because they were treated like ultimate things. Revelation 17-18 proclaims how and why Babylon must be destroyed, and how and why we must "come out" of her.

The story of Revelation ends with God's promise to make all things new. The end is not demolition and evacuation, but a redemption and restoration project; it's the consummation and celebration of all the world was meant to be.

Lydia was the first convert to Christianity in Europe. She was a founding member of the church in Philippi. She is only mentioned in a few verses in Acts, but her life teaches us how to live with open hearts, open homes, and open hands. She is a beautiful picture of a life of obedience, hospitality, and generosity.

Although he neither agrees with God's plan nor apologizes for failing to agree, Habakkuk does come to a place of acceptance. How? And how can we find a faith rooted in acceptance instead of phoniness or grumbling?

Habakkuk is frustrated and angry that God is going to use the Chaldeans of all people to judge Israel. So he brings his frustration and anger to God and God gives him a response. God's response is to tell Habakkuk that the Chaldeans will be judged as well. God also reminds Habakkuk to patiently wait on the Lord to act and have faith in his promises. This text reminds us that frustration and anger are normal human emotions that we all experience, so as believers we must figure out what it looks like to live with these emotions in a faithful way.

Questioning the wisdom of God's plans, Habakkuk the prophet shows us how to navigate the tension between protest and trust.

After unpacking how we are justified (declared righteous) before God by faith alone, Paul unpacks some of the benefits that we receive based on our justification. He reminds us that God's peace, grace, and hope are available to us and that he has given us his Holy Spirit to help us in life.