This week, Dennis Allan discusses the way prayer is meant to be done in community and how it's supposed to expand outward. Jesus invites His people to come to God and ask for the things they want, to be vulnerable and honest as they express their wills and desires to Him. But prayer that stays privatized and individualistic misses the expansive and communal nature of prayer, where we bear one another into God's presence as a first act of caring love. We might think praying is a passive activity, yet Jesus saw it as integral to a well-lived, faithful live. And, we might think prayer can replace action, but the reality is that prayer actually informs and drives our actions. We are to be a people who pray with and for one another, and in so doing be people who are shaped and formed into people of selfless love.

This week, Pastor Dennis talks through Jesus's prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He asked God if there was a way to fulfill His mission without dying on the Cross. It's here that we see Jesus practice a radical form of vulnerability and honesty in praying with God. He sweats and begs, telling His Father what He actually wants. Yet, we're trained to perform, even in our conversations with God. We bring our best selves, our most faithful selves, our edited selves to God instead of our raw, honest, broken, doubting, and disoriented selves to God. Psalm 88 is an example of this kind of prayer, a prayer of disorientation. It's a prayer spoken when we're surrounded by darkness, when we're experiencing despair, when everything seems to be falling apart, and it's a prayer that refuses to resolve well or easily. If God is going to transform us, then we need to stop pretending and we need to start being honest.

This week, Pastor Dennis begins our new series, "Being With God" by focusing on the way prayer is not about getting God to align with our agenda, but instead prayer is about building a deep, intimate, trusting relationship with God. We can make prayer into something where we ask God for what we want and expect Him to give it to us, or we can think that prayer is what draws God's attention to us. But, God is always paying attention to us, He's always attentive and attuned to us, and He's always desiring deeper relationship with us. Drawing on Howard Thurman's writings about prayer in his book Disciplines of the Spirit, and Jesus's words in John 15 about Him being the vine and us being the branches, we can see that we're already connected to Jesus and prayer is about bringing our desires and will into alignment with God's eschatological vision for our lives, as well as our neighbors, neighborhoods, and cities.

This Christmas Eve, Julia Allan leads Garden City's kids and families through an interactive and conversational lesson about Jesus's arrival and how, through Jesus's birth, the work of inaugurating the Kingdom begins. Christmas isn't just about the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah, it's also about the arrival of a King who will show His people how they're meant to live. This God, who comes in the form of a vulnerable, dependent child will transform everything! Jesus's birth is good news, indeed!

When the prophets envisioned God's coming redemption, they sang of a world transformed. A world where deserts bloom, the lame leap like deer, and the ransomed return home with everlasting joy. The prophet, Isaiah, paints a picture of creation itself rejoicing at God’s restorative justice, where physical healing and spiritual liberation function as opposite sides of the same coin. Centuries later, Mary echoes this prophetic song when she learns she’ll bear a son who will be the Messiah. She proclaims that God has lifted up the humble, filled the hungry, and scattered the proud from their thrones. Jesus’ arrival isn’t just a spiritual reality. It’s the first move in the inauguration of God’s justice breaking into a broken world where the last become first, the marginalized are brought to the center, and all creation joins in a song of wholeness. The Incarnation is God’s justice song, inviting us to learn its melody and join into its chorus as we await the full restoration of all things that Isaiah prophesied and Mary proclaimed.

Micah promises that from Bethlehem, a small, forgotten, overlooked village on the edge of the Roman empire, will come a ruler whose greatness is marked not by power but by peace. When Gabriel appears to Mary, Micah’s prophecy begins to unfold: God chooses the humble, not the mighty, to bring His peace to earth. The peace that Jesus embodies, the Prince of Peace that He is, is a divine peace with a subversive nature. The peace of Jesus doesn’t come through conquest or control but through surrender and faith. In Mary’s, “Yes,” the world’s truest peace begins to take shape. Pastor Shaq Hager walks through how we can be people who embody this kind of peace today, even when the place Jesus is leading us is one of uncertainty.

How can we hold onto hope amidst darkness? When the angel appears to Joseph and tells him that the child Mary is carrying, who he is supposed to name Jesus, has been conceived by the Holy Spirit and will forgive people their sins, the world is already being turned upside down. The long-promised Messiah is coming for his people, and in his arrival all the prophetic visions of the Kingdom of God start coming into focus. For example, the prophet Isaiah sees a world where swords are beaten into plowshares and nations no longer train for war. It’s a vision so far beyond human reach that it can only be sustained by a divine hope. Whether we want it to or not, this is where Advent begins: an ache and a longing. We yearn for the world to be made new. Yet, even when things seem dark, God invites His people to live as if the dawn is already breaking in. And then, in Jesus, these prophetic visions of peace and justice become incarnate and dwell alongside us. How can we begin to reorder our lives toward the coming Kingdom and cultivate a courageous hope that shines in the darkness?

This week, Dennis Allan concluded our 12-week series on The Sermon on the Mount, focusing on on two verses that describe the crowd's reaction to Jesus' teaching. Matthew reports the crowds were "amazed" because of the "authority" of Jesus' teaching. But, who is Jesus that He can teach such a radical, counter-cultural, and demanding sermon with the expectation that His followers will listen and do what He said? If we don't think rightly about who Jesus is, then we might think His words in the Sermon are little more than some best practices for a good life that we can choose to apply at our discretion. So, who is Jesus? He's God incarnate.