As one year closes, we must look back before we can look ahead. This week and next, we will use the story of Israel crossing the Jordan River to look behind and ahead to 2025.

The story of Christmas begins in a cradle, but it doesn’t end there. The promise of a King, wrapped in swaddling cloths and laid in a humble manger, leads to a tomb—where the greatest act of love and redemption would unfold.

On our third stop on our trip to Christmas Past, we found ourselves in a field with the sound of bleating sheep all around, BUT it's not the scene you think it is. Keep listening!

This week, we visited our second stop on our trip through Christmas Past. The sound of bells slowly gets louder in the distance. A caravan approaches, but are they the wise men or is it someone else? Listen and find out!

Sometimes, we can lose the meaning of Christmas too. Join us of this advent season as we take a trip to Christmas Past to rediscover the meaning of this season!

Have you wondered as you've read through the gospel: Does God Heal Today? The gospels are 20% to 30% stories about God's healing power. Does that still happen today?

That's the question that we wrestled with this Sunday!

Enigma was a tool that the Axis powers used to scramble their messages into codes. Only when the Allies discovered keywords in the message were they able to crack the code.

Sometimes, reading the Bible is like reading a scrambled message because we don't have all the cultural and historical nuances. This week, we used a code word to unpack 4 stories in Matthew's gospel!

Theologian William Barclay tells us that with Matthew there is always a reason he orders the stories in his account of the life of Jesus. So why is this story here?

Let's find out.

At the end of this message, we watched a clip from the show "The Chosen." Here is a link to that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL8DThllZAY