Receive Your King: The Kingdom at Christmas

Every year, we celebrate Holy Week—Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter—months prior to Christmas. It’s just how the calendar works out, but it is kind of backwards. We observe the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry before we ever commemorate his birth! But this hindsight view of Christmas-after-Easter gives us an interesting and illuminating perspective on the coming of Jesus Christ into our world. It allows us to notice signposts in the Christmas account; events pointing ahead to the new reality that Jesus would usher into the world through his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. We start to feel the first ripples of coming revolution that would change the world forever. When we filter the events of Christmas through the lens of Jesus’ inauguration of the Kingdom of God at Easter, the story of Christmas becomes more wonderful than we could ever imagine.

Part 1

November 26 & 27

Impressed, Stressed & Blessed

The old way of thinking? Impress God. Keep His codes, commands, and regulations so that you don’t get struck down by the Almighty—and if you’re good enough, He might just bless you. But then came Christmas. And now, in the full-God revelation of Jesus Christ, we see the true reality—there’s no need to stress to impress God. He spoke it—we’re already blessed.

Part 2

December 3 & 4

Every Knee Will Bow

Our world has systems of power—religious and secular—that have been in place for millenia. They’ve lulled humanity into the belief that their way of doing things is the way of doing things. But ideas like prestige by birth and rule by might are now nothing more than vestiges of an old world. Jesus has ushered in a new Kingdom that turns the world’s systems upside down.