I faced one of these difficult choices in my late 20s: to continue enjoying a comfortable life and ignore my soon-to-expire visa or to return to a distressing reality. After a lifetime of living abroad, I chose the latter because I knew it honored God. What followed was even harder than I dreaded. I felt abandoned, disappointed, and hurt while I tried to navigate the outcome of my obedience.

Looking back, the experience matured my faith deeply. But I only saw the fruit decades later. At the time, I could not understand why my act of obedience seemed to earn me God’s scorn. I spent many tears and months asking God why He allowed my circumstances to be so harsh. Even in my every day, outcomes are always lurking in the back of my mind. There have also been times when I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid engaging in certain conversations for fear of being misrepresented or rejected because of my faith.

This is how today’s text confronts me: What if there’s a better question to ask than “why?” What if the real question is not about outcomes at all (at least none we can understand in the moment), but about the position of our heart and what God is accomplishing in and through us?

It was Stephen’s wisdom that prompted others to oppose and malign him. Yet the position of Stephen’s heart was aligned with God’s plan. He was part of God’s provision for that community, chosen for this task because of his good standing (1Timothy 3:13). A gift meant to meet a need in the Church became the reason for Stephen’s hardship.

God’s favor didn’t spare Stephen the sufferings of a fallen world. But God’s favor didn’t leave him either, evidenced by the fact “they were unable to stand up against his wisdom and the Spirit by whom he was speaking” (Acts 6:10).

The purpose was never Stephen’s safety or comfort. He was an integral part of a bigger situation unfolding—the building of God’s Church. The result was right on schedule: the work of the Holy Spirit on display. Stephen’s undeniable wisdom and his otherworldly physical countenance in front of his opponents revealed God’s power for all to hear and see.

Oh, that we might have eyes to see the deep work of your Spirit, Lord! Holy Spirit, align our hearts to your purposes, that we, too, may boldly display your wisdom, even and especially in the face of opposition. Help us face opposition knowing that we are your Church, and we are held and sustained by the very power that resurrected Christ.

There is something about kneeling that involves the whole person; we feel it in our joints and in our shoulders as our physical frame carries the weight that causes our knees to fold. That’s how I imagine the magi’s response. The wording in today’s passage sounds almost instinctive. There’s a physical reaction that expressed what was happening within their hearts: “Entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and falling to their knees, they worshiped him” (Matthew 2:11).

That day on my knees with my face to the ground, with my great need as my only offering, I looked for hope. Entering God’s presence, all I could do was surrender. The answer to our prayer took time, but God met us in the waiting. The wise men entered that house looking for the Savior of the world and true King, and beholding Him, utter devotion is all they could express with bent knees and with their gifts brought from afar. Something profound happens when we seek Jesus, long for Him, and find our longing finally ends as we enter His presence.

We see the story of Advent riddled with wonder, danger, promise, and worldly powers with evil in mind. Jesus was born right in the midst of it all! His birth declares, “Lord, Your kingdom come.” Advent is when heaven and earth meet, and in that thin space we find Immanuel with us.

I’m personally deeply moved by today’s passages. Paul wrote to the Philippians that God exalted Jesus, “so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow–in heaven and on earth and under the earth–and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.” We see this statement affirmed in these wise men, foreigners from afar, who followed the signs they saw to find the Messiah. When they did, they fell to their knees in adoration. 

The Bible says that “fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Unlike dread or panic, this fear is awe and reverence. The kind that drew the wise men to their knees, making themselves small before a child who was God incarnate. The immensity of that moment was also a thin space. And when they entered His presence, worship was the only response. Oh, to enter this Advent season small and close to the ground, on our knees, where we can find Immanuel with us.

These occasional habits made a dent when they happened. But without a personal investment, the dent was only so deep. The choices that shaped my life were largely based on self-sufficiency. Scripture was not something I thought I needed, at least not regularly. When my self-reliance proved insufficient to navigate pivotal changes in my life, I became desperate to know God and His character—more than just about Him. This changed my relationship with His Word, which, in turn, changed me as I tried to obey what I was learning. A seemingly small change on the outside—the reordering of my schedule to make time to read the Bible intentionally over time—changed my life from the inside. The narratives I read in the Bible began to challenge the ones in my head. The more I read Scripture with the intent to know God, the more it read me. One book and story at a time, I found a God bigger than us and yet closer than our breath. Such understanding informs and changes how we pattern our lives. 

In today’s readings, we see this in Josiah. His response revealed his heart. Upon learning what God said in Scripture, he mourned. His grief showed sorrow for things that should have been right but weren’t and lament for the terrible consequences of being apart from God. 

This informed Josiah’s resolve “to follow the LORD and to keep his commands, his decrees, and his statutes with all his heart and with all his soul” (2Kings 23:3)—a promise he made publicly and followed with a series of drastic reforms. 

King Josiah destroyed the places where people engaged in practices that had become commonplace, despite them being an affront to God and the people themselves—including human sacrifice! The elimination of these places and other sources of disobedience made way for life-giving practices, including observing the Passover of the Lord (v.21). 

Josiah did not come from the best lineage, nor was he full of life experience. Yet despite the troubled legacy he inherited, Josiah chose to honor God instead. He patterned his decisions according to what he learned was God’s desire for His people. His reforms reconfigured a way of life that agreed with God’s heart. 

Is there an area of your life where obedience would bring it in agreement with God? What has God shown you that you can start obeying today?

I used to speed-read through the mandate to love my enemy because the word enemy felt too jarring to define any of my relationships. While I had experienced conflict with some people—along with the heated emotions that came with those conflicts—I didn’t think of them as enemies. That term evoked images of warfare and international conflict. Surely it was meant to describe an adversary threatening our well-being and safety, I reasoned. 

That changed when my grandmother pointedly asked me why all the verses I quoted about loving others and doing good were applicable to everyone but a specific family member. She mentioned our relative by name, and the question pierced my freshly converted heart. This person had wounded me numerous times with careless comments and harsh words, and I harbored resentment. My granny’s question propelled me to wrestle with God and these verses because I had not understood the mandate to love any more than I had understood the definition of enemy. Begrudgingly, I recognized that Jesus welcomed all parts of us—including the thoughtless words of my family member and my failing to see my relative as a person still in need of Jesus’s love. 

We hurt others in many ways, and our ability to hurt one another can make an enemy out of any of us. Our next-door neighbors, our own child, the cashier at the supermarket, a best friend, a parent, a spouse, or even you can become your own antagonist. There is nothing foreign about this reality, the ability to hurt one another; it wages war within ourselves and with others. The wounds we inflict complicate our ability to connect with others, ourselves, and God. And while we detest what hurts us, Jesus receives the whole person—all our complexities, insecurities, shame, struggles, tempers, and complicated histories. 

When we endeavor to welcome others in the same way—that’s where my emotional brakes screeched as my granny challenged me to walk the talk—the good we are called to do mirrors what Jesus did for you and me. It’s to receive others despite their lack of merit. It’s not sweeping under the rug the wrong done to us. But it’s believing He finds them worthy even when we find them hard to love. 

“But I say to you who listen: do what is good to those who hate you…” 
—Luke 6:27

There is something about bringing Jesus to the battlefield of our emotions, as He makes us whole and receives us in whatever state we’re in. To love our enemy is a call to hope. Jesus makes room for possibility where, without Him, nothing but hatred might grow. 

Written by Paola Barrera

These moments, far bigger than my small human frame, disrupted my attention and left a mark. I felt small, overwhelmed even, and yet safe as I took in what kept altering me. This same feeling is found in our reading today. All the priests were doing came to a halt as God’s otherworldly presence filled and shrouded every corner of a man-made space, a space that could not contain Him. Arms raised, King Solomon prayed to God, and His glory was made palpable in the temple at that moment. God was present in heaven and on earth, and the people present could only worship the glory they encountered.

God’s character is too splendid to process in merely human terms. When I grasp a glimpse, I am left undone. His glory is His essence, that is, His never-changing, ever-present majesty interacting with us, welcoming us to Himself. His intent to reside with us is too lofty a reality for human comprehension, His splendor is too great for words. While we go through highs and lows or shifts in the ground we stand on, God always is. Sometimes we stumble as we try to face life’s twists and turns, but His presence is ongoing and unchanging. 

We are removed from Solomon’s prayer by a few millennia, but we’re only a breath away from the God whose presence filled that temple. I feel small but also safe with the God who is present and unchanging with a glory that is so overwhelming. How do we remain the same in light of such a reality? We can’t. And what a relief it is that as we are also called to be a temple where He chooses to dwell.

The relationship between worth and effort is so deeply rooted in our culture it’s easy to believe that we can justify our existence through our output. It’s hard not to earn our keep. Yet harder still is to face what we deserve when we are found wanting. This narrative often colors my emotions and informs my choices in other areas beyond work. It trickles into my faith. Stealthy, it hides in plain sight. Maybe you’ve been there too? 

Since my early twenties, it’s been bumping heads with my faith. I’m grateful for the Word. It won’t let me cut corners about the salvation promised in Jesus. 

The promise is through His work and the faith I place in it. It’s counterintuitive. My Western upbringing rebels against it, looking instead for the assurance of effort I can decipher, steps I can check off a list and mark as accomplished.

Though I’ve been a follower of Jesus for over two decades, I’m still learning to live out in practice what my head can quote and my eyes have read many times over. I’m found wanting when it comes to my ability to live rightly without transgressing. The natural outcome of my sin is death. No amount of hard work can remedy my natural bent toward sin or earn me a better outcome. 

Jesus faced that outcome in our place (Romans 4:25). His resurrection earns our keep because we can’t. He provided justification for my status as a daughter of God. Our right to be God’s has nothing to do with our efforts to be good or be enough. It is the direct result of Jesus’s willingness to face death and be raised to life on the third day. His effort was enough.

Sometimes it’s puzzling, even irritating, to see flawed people praised in Scripture for being right with God. We reason: they weren’t always exemplars, so how can they be called righteous?

The dissonance stems from what makes them right before the Lord. It’s easy to skip over. When God promised land and descendants to Abraham, he was a childless nomad with a wife well past the age to bear children. The promise wasn’t contingent on his efforts. But it did require him to bank the remaining years of his life on it, living like he believed what he could not see because it was promised by God. It was a promise granted through faith (Romans 4:1–25). 

The response faith requires of us is to live our lives like the promise that He was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification (v.25) is real. What does it look like to live our everyday lives like this is true?