🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

When the curtains close on 2025, my oldest son will be 18 and finished with high school. We walked through much together in his earliest years, but the stories are his to share now. I can confess, however, the sleep I've lost pleading with God that my first son wouldn't have to learn things the hard way. I have contended with the same Father who let His Son die for mine (who's actually His!) to spare my boy from wandering in the wilderness. But now I pray that he, along with our other sons, would know who they are in Christ above anything else... whatever it takes. Gulp.

The Israelites who walked through the Red Sea depended on God's provision for forty years. Joshua led the next generation into the Promised Land. Judges 2 describes the generation born in the Promised Land, "After them another generation rose up who did not know the LORD or the works he had done for Israel." (v10) God had done great things for their parents, but they never hungered for Him with all that milk and honey flowing.

God knew the pages of Scripture would play out like a dizzying tennis match of humanity seeking God and betraying Him. Modern history and my own life tell the same story. It's the story I wanted to save my son from. But the despair, droughts, depravity and injustices in my life have been the very places I've met Love Himself. His name is Jesus.

There's something to those cold valley floors and the insufferable spaces between life's rocks and hard places. The Lord will stop at nothing to give us - and the generations to come - an opportunity to truly know Jesus. That is what I pray for.

Listen to "Home" by The Heritage.