During this holiday season, as we catch up with friends and loved ones, we are likely to wish them well, and that they have good health, as John does in verse 2. And we rejoice when we hear good news about those we love. But notice what brings John the…

Yesterday, John told us about the importance of love in the Christian life. Today, we find another equally important emphasis – the need to cling to the truth about Christ. And this makes perfect sense. After all, how can you love anyone without knowing him or her? So, how can…

How is the commandment to love our brothers and sisters an old one? Back on November 27, we learned that we were first told to love our neighbors as ourselves in the Law of Moses, specifically in Leviticus 19:18. John’s Jewish readers would thus have learned this commandment from childhood,…

We know the Great Commandment tells us to love God with all we are and all we have, and that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves. In this passage, Jesus explains that our love for others must be modeled on His love for us. So, how has Jesus…

In the first part of this chapter, we learned that we should always be on the alert, ready for the coming of Christ. In today’s parable, Jesus tells us that in addition to longing for His coming, we should also be busy about the work of the Kingdom. Specifically, we…

Jesus is coming again – that’s the central lesson of this entire chapter. And Jesus Himself makes the application point of this parable in verse 13. Unlike some who comb through the Revelation trying to discover clues about exactly when Jesus will show up, Jesus simply says that we should…

Grief can hit especially hard during the holiday season – all those memories of loved ones crowd in as we celebrate traditions of which they were once an integral part. Worse yet, as we focus so much on giving and receiving gifts, it’s easy to slide into a belief that…

It’s easy to understand the disciples’ ambitions. After all, it was just in the previous chapter that they had finally realized Who Jesus is – the Messiah. They therefore expected that He would soon set up His kingdom, and that, as His most loyal followers, they would serve as his…

Merry Christmas! On this day of exchanging gifts, in these few verses Jesus tells us a lot about how we should give and how we should receive. Jesus says we should receive prophets. This means we should recognize that their messages come from God and thus that we should obey…

It’s not hard to relate to Habakkuk’s lament, is it? Our world is still filled with injustice, with destruction and violence. We still long for God to keep His promises to make all things right. But this book teaches us the sobering lesson that God’s solutions are seldom easy. When…