Little Hills Church

When things go badly, it’s easy to assume God’s favor has lifted—and that assumption runs deep enough that entire churches have been built on promising the opposite. Yet in Acts 13, the disciples who have just heard the gospel find themselves filled with joy and the Holy Spirit at precisely the moment Paul and Barnabas are driven out of the district, which raises a question worth sitti...

Why are we so fascinated with angels and the spiritual world as a culture but often pause when it comes to fully embracing who Jesus is? It isn’t necessarily a new problem.

Being in the right group, studying the right things, living a decent life—it feels like that ought to be enough. But in Acts 13, Paul announces to a synagogue full of people who had done exactly that: there are things the Law of Moses simply could not free you from, and being part of the in-group won’t close that gap.

Sin is really sticky — far more persistent than those obnoxious tags stuck on things that we struggle to get off. But, Jesus’s mission in this world was to do what we can’t: remove that sin from us.

We easily draw safe boundaries around God’s grace, welcoming those who seem familiar while overlooking those who feel foreign or difficult. Yet the distant wise men of Matthew 2 and the rejoicing Gentiles of Acts 13 confront those boundaries: Jesus came to reach the world. Who might God be placing beyond our comfort, yet within the reach of his good news?

God takes us as those who are lost in the dim darkness and offers us a light so overpowering that nothing can stop it — or His mission He sends us on.

Once the Christmas packages are cleared away, the dark sections of life can become painfully visible again—and we may have no idea how to fix them. Revelation 22 meets that helplessness with a river of life, a tree for the healing of the nations, and a coming day when night will be no more.

Christmas has a way of feeling like a destination—the carols, the decorations, the nativity—as though the manger is where everything finally arrives. John 1 won’t let it stay there: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the question John presses is what exactly that birth was launching toward and what it means for us now.

Jesus shows us both His nature and a recognizable “name” so that we can understand Him — and understand what we really need to know.

We all reach for something we can actually recognize and hold on to—some concrete person or presence we can truly know, not just a philosophy about. That hunger is exactly what John 1 puts its finger on: the Word who was with God in the beginning became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.

We need something that lasts, not just a temporary banner of God’s love. Fortunately, that’s exactly what God provides for us.

We tend to skip the genealogy at the start of Matthew—all those names, so many of them people we know nothing about. In doing so we miss something that matters deeply to ordinary people like us who wonder whether God actually works through lives like theirs.

Are we looking for the right thing and do we understand the right “time” for it? As we get everything synchronized for Christmas, the author of Hebrews encourages us to be synchronized with Christ.

When a winter forecast keeps bouncing around, most of us know better than to cancel everything over what might never arrive. Luke opens his Gospel with the opposite claim: this is no chance of grace next week, but the report of what has already been fulfilled among us—Jesus actually coming in history.

We don’t want to simply know about a miracle that happened long ago and was forgotten thereafter. We need to know that there is a consistency in God’s care, too.

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?

We tend to assume God works through the right people, in the right places, with the right credentials. Isaiah 44–45 is genuinely jarring to our assumptions: the Lord names a pagan, idol-worshiping foreign king as the one who will restore His people to their land.

As we continue in Ephesians 2, Paul helps us to think about the difference between being called to do “good works” and earning God’s favor through our works.

Comfort, institutional preservation, and tribal identity can crowd out obedience to God’s call in our lives. Do we hear His call to reach those in need of His Grace and to live in the “risky repentance” that involves?

The wonder of what God does for us is so much greater when we don’t forget the story behind it.

Solomon, Rehoboam, and Jeroboam all treated God’s promises like something they could improve on or control on their own terms only to encounter the pavement courtesy of the black ice of sin. Our efforts end like that, but God’s faithfulness outlasts our failures.

As we continue in Ephesians 2, we’re reminded of how God loves us even when we are of no value at all.

Jim Wolfe traces God’s redemptive plan through four Old Testament “roadside attractions” that foreshadow Christ — skins, boxes, baskets, and snakes. Along that scenic route, we arrive at the true meaning of Christmas, an attraction we actually need.

We return to Ephesians in a new series in the second chapter and to start us off Pastor Tim reflects on our state without God.

A folding map only works if you already know where you are. Enough wrong turns, and you’re stuck staring at it with no idea how to find yourself—let alone get back on course. Psalm 89 asks what God’s promises do for those of us who aren’t the Hannahs and Davids, who look at the map and go the wrong way.