I am so grateful for John and Susan Yates: they and their church launched Restoration 9 years ago. They believed in God’s power to birth a new community in Arlington, they believed in how God might use me to lead it, and they believed in us- that we would creatively and strategically build something that […]
You are here because you have questions. Perhaps someone invited you to consider something new. Perhaps you have wanted to settle what you think and feel about ‘God’. Perhaps something has happened in your life that surprised you. Perhaps a situation has emerged for which you aren’t prepared. All of us have something that keeps […]
Comfort comes with responsibility. …the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, SO THAT we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 2 Corinthians 1:4 Comfort is the experience of future hope in the present. At […]
We are coming to the conclusion of our summer sermon series on the Fruit of the Spirit. These are 9 characteristics that St. Paul listed out in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Outside of a relationship with God, they are character traits that we admire in people […]
How’s it going? Feeling congested in your soul? This post is a little longer than most, but I want to bring you up to speed with what God has been doing in my heart and the hearts of the people at Restoration. Thanks for reading. We just finished our 4th week in a sermon […]
As we run, jump, shuffle, walk, tiptoe, hop, skip or leap into this series on justice we are already starting to encounter some great big ideas; certainly I’ve realized there are quite a few ways I need to face up to my patterns of behavior and some perhaps pretty deeply-held previous convictions. Processing these things in small group is […]
Jesus was never afraid to ask the hard question. In fact, sometimes that seems like the sum of his entire work… a ministry of hard questions. On Tuesday night, our Tri2 Small Group Leaders got together for a bit of training as we head in to this trimester. We spent our time talking about the […]
In the Old Testament the vine is a common symbol for Israel. Most remarkable is the fact that whenever historic Israel is referred to under this figure it is the vine’s failure to produce good fruit that is emphasized, along with the corresponding threat of God’s judgment on the nation. -Don Carson from his commentary […]
On Sunday, we talked about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. The timing of the story unearths some of our deep tension between the goodness of God and the reality of suffering. What do we do when it seems like God is absent or not paying attention or not fixing what is broken? What do […]
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. 1 Timothy 6:10 It was Tim Keller who said, “It is really hard for us to see our greed. No one thinks they […]