Walking the road of revelation results in overwhelming joy. The waiting is over. Jesus has come! We rejoice in the incarnation—God in the flesh—God with us!

On the road to revelation, if we have faith and a willing spirit, God will show us the way. God’s word to us is “I am with you; do not be afraid.”

Guest Speaker Ray Nelson is a Minister to the youth of Washington, DC and recently served as the Ministry Director for Youth for Christ Greater Washington DC and The Porch ministry.

The gift offered to the repentant is restoration. The road to restoration is a journey toward wholeness in body, soul, and spirit.

When the heart is moving in readiness, there is an open-ness to the “new”—perhaps the fresh thing God wants to do. To embrace the new requires a letting go of the past. Repentance means we are letting go and making space for God’s new work in us.

This is the first Sunday in the season of Advent.

Paul contrasts the gift of tongues with the gift of prophecy. Both are valuable, but where tongues is valuable for building oneself up, prophesy is valuable for building up others. The focus of exercising our gifts as a gathered worship community is to build up the community in faith. A modern parallel might be how some spiritual practices, prayers and worship songs are appropriate and meaningful and necessary for personal nurture, they are not always most relevant for building up the church community. Paul advocates demonstrating love for seeker (14:16) and other people gathering by ensuring that what is spoken is understood and relevant to where people are at.

Although the infamous “love” chapter is most often heard at weddings, this chapter comes at the center of Paul’s teaching on order in public worship gatherings in the Corinthian church. Their pride in ethnic backgrounds and in certain spiritual gifts was leading to division and strife, rather than unity. In this chapter, we look at what it means to really walk the way of love in our relationships and in the exercise of our spiritual gifts. This love is more than a feeling. Instead the kind of unifying, world-changing love Paul describes is grounded in the objective truth of God’s character and points towards the age to come.

Paul continues to address issues of public worship in the Corinthian church speaking to the variety of spiritual gifts that God dispenses amongst the body to build up the common good. Paul advocates for the many important parts of the body that are uniquely gifted by God to unite and build up the church for the work of ministry. This message will highlight how the spiritual gifts may be demonstrated in our WCF context to unite us as a faith community for faithful witness. So let us value the diversity of spiritual gifts amongst, encourage their use and trust the uniting work of God's spirit in our midst.