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December 1, 2024
When The King Comes | Is Life Supposed To Be Like This?
Advent 2024
Genesis 1:31-2:3
This is the beginning of the Beginning! The Creation story lays out many bedrock truths, including our purpose and God's purpose. The 7th day of Creation reveals that God is the rightful King and we are part of a good Kingdom. These two truths alone are the foundation for life-giving hope.
Songs for this week: Spotify
- How would you define ‘hope’? Recall a time when you had hope (confidence!) for something that had yet to arrive.
- In what ways could you use or draw upon the truths of the Creation Story to encourage a friend who was feeling hopeless?
- Does the picture of Creation (Earth and the far-flung stars) as God’s Temple resonate for you? In what ways does the visible creation move you to worship?
- God is the King of the Universe. With your small group, track through the Scriptures and remind each other how ‘kingship’ plays out through Israel’s history, through Jesus’ birth and death and into the promise of the life to come.
- Pray together for the person you named on the Christmas ornament you hung this past Sunday.
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Recent Sermons
Luke 15:11-32 - Jesus tells a story about a father with two lost sons. The rule-breaking younger son was lost in self-indulgence, and the rule-keeping older son was lost in self-righteousness. The father loved both generously and even recklessly. Both needed to be found. Were they?
John 4:4-26 - Jesus announced that the Kingdom of God had arrived and everyone wondered what that would look like. Would it mean swords and fighting or a political takeover? John records a couple of one-on-one conversations that Jesus had. What an interesting Kingdom! It turns out that each person matters in the Kingdom of God, each woman and each man matter eternally.
John 1:1-14A - The story of the Bible is the Story of Jesus, God’s plan all along was to come as one of us to rescue us from sin and death and to reset us to live radically different lives. Today’s passage offers a different (still true!) beginning to the story of Jesus' life on earth.
Esther 4:10-17 -The story of Esther is surprising—not once is God mentioned. Yet God’s silence is not the same as his absence. He works for good, even through ordinary events and with flawed people.
Ezra 3:10-13 - The book of Ezra tells the story of the return of God’s people from exile. The account details the extra care that was taken by the returnees in doing their best to reproduce what they once had. Very quickly, they got the old altar operational and began to rebuild the temple. Our story is about what they chose to do on the day the foundation of the new temple was in place. There was a party that didn’t feel like a party for everyone, and that’s just honest!
Daniel 6:1-24-The book of Daniel is all about the Sovereignty of God. The God of Israel proves himself sovereign even in faraway Babylon: boys receive foreign favour and are released from having to eat rich and potentially unkosher food. Young men are saved from a fiery furnace, and old man Daniel doesn’t get eaten by a den of hungry lions. God proves he’s not limited by international borders, arrogant kings or wild beasts. All of this points forward to Jesus, who demonstrated his sovereignty (he is God, after all!) in different ways.
