Christmas can arrive wrapped in lights and joy while grief, loss, and the sense that this world is deeply broken remain close at hand. The Gospel of Mark opens with “the beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ,” echoing creation itself and pressing an Advent question beneath all the decorations: What kind of beginning can Jesus bring to lives that do not feel whole?

God’s glory is God’s glory — there is only one God. So if we want to share God’s glory and see it spread through the world, we share the hope of Jesus.

Pastor Tim talks about how we live and understand God’s control of the world in the time before Jesus returns.

We’ve all prayed about something so long that we start to wonder if God has put us on hold—and whether anyone is ever going to pick up. In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable about a powerless widow who keeps pleading before a judge who neither fears God nor respects people, and asks whether his people will keep crying out to him day and night or simply lose heart.

Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.

What do the days we live in indicate? What should we truly be anticipating? As life and the uncertainty of the world swirls around us, God calls us to focus in our anticipation.

As we wait in anticipation we are called to two kinds of peace: the peace of following God’s ways and the peace of knowing His plan will come to fruition.

Keeping in mind what is coming can cause us to focus even more on worldly matters, but it shouldn’t. It should help us care more about the world knowing Jesus.

As we look toward the future, there is an urgency mission even as we find ourselves waiting for God’s fulfillment of prophecy. But it requires us to keep our focus.

Our world moves us to ever increasing indifference, but as we pick up in 2 Peter 3, the Apostle calls us to be ready for Jesus’s return.