The TakeAway

Send us Fan Mail Most of us say we want God to make himself known, but what we often mean is: “Do it on my terms, in a way I can’t question.” Pastor Harry Behrens opens John 13:31–35 with a startling moment in the upper room. Judas walks out into the night, and Jesus immediately says, “Now is the Son of Man glorified.” Not later. Not after the resurrection. Now. That single word reframes the whole...

Send us Fan Mail Something about the hardest seasons of faith is how disorienting they feel: you’re genuinely sure God led you here, but you can’t see what he’s doing with it. We pick up in John 13 at the table where Jesus drops a sentence that stuns everyone in the room, “One of you will betray me,” and then follows it with a line that explains so much of the Christian life: “What I am doing you...

Send us Fan Mail A towel and a basin don’t look like power until you watch Jesus pick them up. Pastor Harry Behrens walks through John 13 on the night before the crucifixion, where Jesus shocks His disciples by taking the lowest role in the room and washing their feet. That single act exposes a struggle we all know too well: even when we fall short of God’s glory, we still want glory, so we quietl...

Send us Fan Mail You can spend your whole life telling yourself, “If God would just give me one undeniable sign, I’d believe.” John 12 tells a harder story: people who had Scripture, public teaching, and even a man raised from the dead still refused Jesus. So we slow down at John 12:44-50, the final public words Jesus speaks in this Gospel before the cross, and we ask the question that sits beneat...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever read “God hardened their hearts” and felt your stomach drop, you’re not alone. We sit in the tension of John 12:37–43 where the crowd watches extraordinary signs from Jesus, yet John says they not only do not believe, they cannot believe. That single line forces a deeper question: if God is the one who gives new birth and draws people to Christ, how can God be love...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, “If God already chose who He will save, then my choice doesn’t really matter,” you’re not alone and you’re not the first. We take that pressure point head-on and open John 12:34–36, where a confused crowd presses Jesus with sharp questions about the Messiah, the meaning of “lifted up,” and the identity of the Son of Man. What’s striking is...

Send us Fan Mail “I will draw all people to myself” sounds simple until you try to define “all.” That’s where we start, with John 12:32 and the question many of us either avoid or fight over: does Jesus draw everyone to salvation, draw some, or only make salvation possible if we choose it?  I keep this anchored in the Gospel of John instead of letting a theological label hand us the answer in adva...

Send us Fan Mail You can be standing in the middle of God’s work and still have no idea what He is doing. That’s not a character flaw, and John 12 proves it. As we walk through John 12:12-19, we watch Palm Sunday unfold with palm branches, Scripture-soaked shouts, and a King who chooses a donkey instead of a warhorse, and we ask the question most of us are afraid to say out loud: why does God’s pl...

Send us Fan Mail Why do you come to Jesus? Not the church answer. Not the answer you were taught to say. The real one that shows up in your life once the sermon ends and the week begins. We open John 11:55 through John 12:11 and watch a room fill with very different motives around the same Savior. As Passover nears, Jerusalem buzzes with speculation about whether Jesus will show up, while an arres...

Send us Fan Mail A dead man walks out of a tomb, and the most startling detail is that Jesus is still visibly grieving while he does it. We sit in John 11:38–54 at the exact moment this three-part series has been moving toward, and we face the question behind the question: if God is love, what does his love look like when suffering is real, irreversible, and personal? We trace the scene step by st...

Send us Fan Mail Grief doesn’t wait for a convenient time, and neither do the questions it brings. When tragedy hits, we instinctively ask: If God is love, why does He allow suffering, and if God is sovereign, how can evil exist without making Him its author? Pastor Harry Behrens keeps those questions on the table and then tightens the focus to what the Bible actually says about justice, mercy, hu...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever prayed for God to step in and felt the silence stretch on, John 11 can feel almost unbearable. Jesus hears that Lazarus, His dear friend, is dying. He loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. He has the power to heal. And He still waits. That one detail forces a question many of us carry quietly: if God is able and God is love, why does He sometimes choose delay instead of...

Send us Fan Mail What do you do when your faith feels real, but your track record makes you wonder if God will eventually let go? We sit with one of the most comforting promises Jesus ever gives and one of the most confronting claims He ever makes. As Pastor Harry Behrens finishes John 10:23–42, the big idea comes into focus: your assurance of salvation does not rest on the strength of your grip o...

Send us Fan Mail Silence can feel like the cruelest answer. You pray, you wait, you try to stay faithful, and heaven feels quiet while real life gets louder. So we slow down and sit with one “blink and you miss it” verse, John 10:22, where John tells us it’s winter and Jesus is at the Feast of Dedication. That detail is not trivia. It’s the key to seeing what God is doing when you can’t hear Him....

Send us Fan Mail The most dangerous assumptions are the ones we never name, and few are more common than this: God loves me because there is something in me worth loving. We open with a single question that exposes it: why does God love you? Then we walk straight into John 10:11-21, where Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd and defines his love by cost, not sentiment, laying down his life for sh...

Send us Fan Mail “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” John 10:9 might be the most familiar line many of us have heard used to prove that salvation begins with a human choice. But when we stop treating it like a standalone slogan and follow John’s argument from the beginning, the verse lands with a different kind of force, and a different kind of comfort.  I walk slowly throug...

Send us Fan Mail If you’ve ever felt quietly confident because you’re near Christian community or quietly anxious because you’re not sure you “measure up,” John 10 puts its finger on the real issue. We keep hearing a familiar question in church life: does being in the right place with the right people guarantee that I belong to Christ? The answer is both more sobering and far more hopeful than mos...

Send us Fan Mail Salvation is bigger than rescue from guilt. It has a destination. Walking through John 9:35-41, we watch the story of the man born blind reach its final outcome, and it answers a question most of us do not ask often enough: what is God ultimately accomplishing when He saves a sinner? We trace the movement of grace as Jesus hears the man has been cast out and goes looking for him....

Send us Fan Mail A man with no credentials walks into a room full of experts and refuses to edit a single line of his story. John 9:24–34 captures the moment the healed man born blind is called back for a second interrogation, and the stakes are no longer theoretical. The religious institution demands, “Give glory to God,” but what they really want is agreement, silence, and control. We slow down...

Send us Fan Mail The moment suffering hits, the human heart reaches for a courtroom: Who did this, and who’s to blame? I start in John 9 with that exact question, then show why Scripture so often refuses to play along. The disciples see a man born blind and assume there must be a moral cause. Jesus answers with a category-shifting sentence: the blindness isn’t punishment, it’s a canvas for “the wo...

Send us Fan Mail You can be given a clear direction and still feel lost when there’s no visible destination. That’s the pressure point we sit in as we open John chapter 9 with Pastor Harry Behrens: Jesus leaves the temple after rejection, “passes by,” and sees a man born blind. The religious leaders who claim to see are ready to stone Him, while the man who cannot see becomes the place where mercy...

Send us Fan Mail Holiness can sound like a church word until you feel what Scripture is actually asking: how can unclean people live near a God who is entirely other. That question sits underneath Leviticus, and Pastor Harry Behrens shows why it is also the weight-bearing beam that holds up John 7, John 8, and the road into John 9. We walk through the lived world of Leviticus: separation that mark...

Send us Fan Mail Stones in their hands. A single sentence on Jesus’ lips. And a question none of us can dodge: what do we do when the truth goes far enough that it demands surrender? We walk through John 8:48–59 where the conversation reaches its breaking point, not because the evidence is missing, but because the heart resists what it doesn’t want to lose.  We dig into a word Christians often use...

Send us Fan Mail “The truth will set you free” might be the most quoted line in John 8, but Jesus doesn’t leave freedom up to our imagination. I’m Pastor Harry Barons, and we slow down in John 8:31–47 to watch Jesus do something surprising: He turns to people who’ve just said they believe and immediately examines what that belief really is. Not to crush them, but to rescue them from a kind of fait...

Send us Fan Mail You can spend a lifetime around Jesus and still keep Him at arm’s length. That’s the unsettling tension in John 8:21-30, where Jesus moves from “I am the light of the world” to a warning with real finality: “You will seek me and die in your sins.” If you’ve ever wondered why some forms of “belief” feel sincere but never reshape a life, this teaching is for you. I walk through how...