Scripture: John 11:1–16 Runtime: 11 min

There's a particular kind of pain that comes not from a stranger's silence, but from someone you trusted — someone who knew and didn't come. That's exactly where Martha and Mary find themselves when Jesus stays put after hearing that their brother Lazarus is dying. This episode opens the week in John 11 with a question that still hits hard: What do you do when God's timing doesn't match your crisis?

Key Talking Points:

• Why John places Jesus's love and his delay side by side — and what he's asking us to hold
• What "God's glory" actually means (hint: it's not spectacle — it's the visible manifestation of God's character)
• The connection between kavod (Hebrew for glory) and God's declaration to Moses in Exodus 34
• Why the sisters didn't ask Jesus to come — and what that tells us about how much they trusted him
• The double perspective John builds into the story: we know the ending, but Mary and Martha are walking through the dark

Reflection Question: Have you ever been in a season where God felt silent — where you prayed, you trusted, and the wait stretched on? What would it mean to hold the delay and the love as both being true at the same time?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Matthew 5:17–20; Luke 4:14–30 (Week in Review) Series: Big Story, Part 3 — Week 4 Estimated Runtime: 8 minutes

It's Friday — time to step back and take in the full arc of what this week revealed.

We started on a mountainside where Jesus told His followers He came not to throw out the story but to fulfill it. We moved to a synagogue in Nazareth where He read Isaiah's words of jubilee and declared them fulfilled — today. We watched the crowd shift from wonder to rage. And we saw Jesus walk right through them, unhurried, unmoved, on His way to a cross where He would fulfill the law and the prophets in the costliest way possible.

This wrap-up episode calls us to celebrate the God who made a promise to Abraham and never broke it across 42 generations — and to find our place in the story He's still telling.

Live It Out This Week:

• Re-read Matthew 5:17–20 or Luke 4:14–30 and ask the Spirit what it means for your life right now
• Identify one tangible way to participate in the kingdom Jesus declared — good news, freedom, sight, release
• Consider someone in your life you've been treating as an outsider, and let this week's study challenge that

Tell the Story: The God of the Bible made promises, kept them across thousands of years, and fulfilled them in a person — in Himself. And the grace that person announced is for everyone. Who in your life needs to hear that? You don't have to have all the answers. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is: "I've been studying this story, and it's changing how I see everything."

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Luke 4:24–30 Series: Big Story, Part 3 — Week 4 Estimated Runtime: 8 minutes

Jesus could have performed a miracle. He could have healed someone in the synagogue, silenced the doubters, won Nazareth over. Instead, He told two stories from Israel's own history — and the room went from amazed to furious.

Why? Because the stories He told made the same uncomfortable point: God's grace has never been limited to the people who expected it. In Elijah's day, God sent help to a Gentile widow. In Elisha's day, God healed an enemy commander. And Jesus was saying the same pattern still holds.

In this episode, Lisa traces the scandal of grace throughout the Big Story — from Rahab to Ruth to Malachi — and names the hard question every one of us has to answer: Have we been drawing lines around God's mercy that He never drew?

Key Takeaways:

• Jesus intentionally chose stories He knew would provoke His hometown crowd — He wasn't trying to win them over, He was revealing their hearts
• God's wider grace is not a new development in the New Testament — it runs all the way through the Old Testament
• The rejection at Nazareth (and the dramatic escape) foreshadows the cross and resurrection
• Every person who hears Jesus' claims faces the same choice Nazareth did

Reflection Questions:

1. Is there someone in your life you've quietly assumed doesn't belong at God's table?
2. How does it feel to remember that you are the outsider God welcomed in?
3. Where have you been placing limits on God's grace that He never placed there Himself?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Luke 4:20–23 Series: Big Story, Part 3 — Week 4 Estimated Runtime: 7 minutes

The scroll is rolled up. Every eye in the synagogue is fixed on Him. And Jesus says one sentence: "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

Not someday. Not when the Messiah eventually arrives. Today.

In this episode, Lisa slows down to sit with one of the most extraordinary sentences in the Bible — and what it reveals about the nature of faith. The crowd in Nazareth heard Jesus' words and were initially amazed. But amazement isn't faith. Almost immediately, doubt crept in. Isn't this Joseph's son? They wanted proof before they would believe. And Jesus recognized exactly what that was.

Key Takeaways:

• In first-century synagogue practice, you stood to read and sat to teach — the room knew something significant was coming
• Jesus said "in your hearing" — not your seeing. Fulfillment begins with a word that must be received by faith
• The crowd's amazement and their doubt weren't opposites — they were steps in the same direction away from trust
• Faith trusts the Word before the evidence is fully in

Reflection Questions:

1. Where are you waiting for proof before you'll trust God with something?
2. What would it look like to take Jesus at His word today — not when things make sense, but now?
3. What's the difference between being amazed by Jesus and actually trusting Him?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Luke 4:14–19 Series: Big Story, Part 3 — Week 4 Estimated Runtime: 8 minutes

Jesus walks into a synagogue in His hometown. The scroll handed to Him is Isaiah. And the passage He reads — Isaiah 61 — wasn't just a scripture. It was the passage. The one that carried centuries of exile, longing, and hope. Every phrase was loaded: good news for the poor, freedom for captives, sight for the blind, the year of the Lord's favor.

In this episode, Lisa explores what the Isaiah 61 passage would have meant to a first-century Jewish audience — and why the moment Jesus chose to read it was itself a declaration. This wasn't a prophet pointing to someone coming. This was the Messiah announcing He had arrived. And the gospel He came to bring isn't just spiritual — it's total deliverance: personal and cosmic, physical and spiritual.

Key Takeaways:

• Isaiah 61 carried the full weight of Israel's messianic hope — it wasn't a random scripture passage
• The imagery of Jubilee (Leviticus 25) is embedded in the passage: debts cancelled, captives freed, everything lost restored
• "Anointed" in Hebrew = Messiah; in Greek = Christ. Jesus is claiming that title by reading this passage
• The good news was always for those who know they need it — the poor, the captive, the crushed

Reflection Questions:

1. Which phrase from the Isaiah passage lands most personally for you right now — good news, freedom, sight, or release?
2. Where in your life do you need to stop pretending you can save yourself and bring that need to Jesus?
3. What does it mean that Jesus doesn't just announce these things — He is the one who makes them real?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Matthew 5:17–20 Series: Big Story, Part 3 — Week 4 Estimated Runtime: 11 minutes

When Jesus says He didn't come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, most of us nod along without feeling the weight of what that actually means. But to the people standing on that mountainside, it was a staggering claim — because the law wasn't just a rulebook. It was a story. A centuries-long narrative about a God who made a world, watched it break, and chose a people to carry His purposes forward.

In this episode, Lisa unpacks what Jesus meant when He called himself the fulfillment of the Torah — not as someone who checked every legal box, but as the destination the whole story had been moving toward. From the genealogy in Matthew 1 to the 40 days in the wilderness, Jesus lived out what Israel was always called to be but couldn't sustain. He is the faithful Israel, the obedient Son — and His righteousness is the kind that goes all the way to the heart.

Key Takeaways:

• The Torah is not primarily a legal code — it's a narrative of rescue, covenant, and promise
• When Jesus says "fulfill," He means He is the destination of the entire story, not just the completer of a checklist
• Matthew intentionally echoes Israel's history in Jesus' life: Egypt, the water, the wilderness, the 12
• The "surpassing righteousness" Jesus calls for isn't more rule-keeping — it's a deeper heart transformation He makes possible

Reflection Questions:

1. How does understanding the Torah as story rather than law change how you read the Old Testament?
2. Where in your life are you still approaching God through external compliance rather than heart-level trust?
3. What does it mean to you personally that Jesus lived the faithfulness you and I couldn't sustain?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Mark 5 (Week Recap) Est. Runtime: ~8 minutes

This is the wrap-up episode for one of the most layered weeks in the Big Story series.

In Day 5, Lisa brings the full arc of Mark 5 into focus — from Jairus's desperate fall at Jesus's feet to the hemorrhaging woman's hidden reach to the quiet Aramaic words spoken in a dead girl's room — and draws out the bigger picture these stories are painting about who Jesus is and what his kingdom actually does.

This isn't just a collection of miracles. It's a portrait of a God whose holiness doesn't recoil from what's broken, who refuses to triage between the important and the invisible, and who calls the forgotten daughter and empowers the dead to rise. All of it pointing forward to the cross, where death would have the last word — until the resurrection proved it didn't.

Day 5 also connects the week's theme to CF Home's Shop and Serve Day and offers practical ways to carry the posture of Jesus — stop, see, move toward — into everyday life.

Live It Out:

• This Sunday is Shop and Serve Day at CF Home. The posture we bring — stop, see, move toward the person in front of you — is exactly the posture we've seen in Jesus all week.
• This week: Think about who in your life is carrying the weight of chronic illness, grief, financial hardship, or a situation that just won't resolve. You may not be able to heal them, but you can refuse to let them be invisible. Ask how are you really doing — and stay to hear the answer.

Tell the Story: This week's story gives you something real to share — not a platitude, but a picture of a Jesus who stops in the middle of an urgent crowd and says, I see you. You belong to me. Go in peace. Who in your life needs to hear that?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.

Scripture: Mark 5:35–43 Est. Runtime: ~11 minutes

While Jesus was still speaking to the woman he had just restored, the message came: Your daughter is dead. Why bother the teacher anymore?

Day 4 brings us to the conclusion of Jairus's story — and to the most dramatic moment of the week. A little girl is gone. The mourners are already wailing. And Jesus walks into the house, takes her by the hand, and says two words in Aramaic: Talitha koum. Little girl, get up.

Lisa walks us through what makes this moment so remarkable — not just as a miracle, but as a theological statement. Jesus touching a corpse should have made him ritually unclean for seven days. Instead, the same pattern we saw with the hemorrhaging woman plays out again: holiness doesn't get contaminated by death. It overwhelms it. The current reverses. Life flows in.

And the way Jesus speaks to her? It's not a dramatic incantation. It's what a parent might say on a quiet morning, sitting on the edge of a bed, taking a child's hand.

Key Takeaways:

• Jesus's instruction to Jairus — "don't be afraid, just believe" — is a present-tense command: keep on believing, not a one-time decision
• Touching a corpse was the most powerful source of ritual impurity in the ancient world; Jesus touches the girl anyway, and death yields to him
• Talitha koum is ordinary, tender language — the contrast between what Jesus is doing (defeating death) and how he does it (gently, quietly) reveals the nature of his power
• Both encounters this week follow the same pattern: Jesus speaks a word of family (daughter) to the forgotten woman, and a word of life (get up) to the lost girl
• These are not isolated miracles — they are skirmishes with the forces of death that have been ravaging God's world since Genesis 3, and they point forward to the cross and resurrection

Reflection Questions:

1. Where in your life do you need to "keep on believing" in the face of news that feels final?
2. What would it mean to trust that the Jesus who raised a little girl with two words is at work in your most hopeless situation?
3. How does the connection between these healings and the resurrection change the way you understand what Jesus was doing — and what he's still doing?

Hear the message for this week's devotional on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ChristFellowshipMcKinney

Get the written devotional at: https://cfhome.org/EGD

If you are in the North Dallas area and would like to join us for services each week, you can find all the information at https://cfhome.org.