Have you ever thought about what it would be like to meet baby Jesus? What would your reaction be? Would you ooh and aah over the smallness and the preciousness of Him? Would you weep as you held the incarnate Lord? Would you speechlessly observe and take weeks to process what you witnessed? Would you marvel at the sheer wonder and beauty of the moment, as you met the God of heaven and earth, finally come to be with His people?

In Numbers 21, we find the nation of Israel wandering the wilderness and waiting to get into the land God promised them. While traveling a road called Hor that ran along the Red Sea, the people began to do what people do best: complain. The Bible says they spoke against God and Moses, saying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? There is no bread! There is no water! And we detest this miserable food!” (Numbers 21: 5, NIV)

During my time in college, I joined a sorority. It was a good way to make friends, stay busy, and make the most of my time in university. I ended up pledging a sorority called Delta Phi Epsilon, and mainly because my friend was already a sister and encouraged me to rush.

It felt like a long process– meeting the sisters, finding a connection with them, going through rounds of meet and greets– all leading up to receiving my bid and joining the sisterhood. After a semester, I got to see the process from the inside: the long hours of discussing every girl that walked through the doors to meet us. And after each conversation, we decided as a group whether we wanted to see that girl again. Each round of meet and greets led up to that ultimate moment where you choose the girls you invite into the sorority.

This might be a hymn you’ve never heard before, but a story that’s really familiar to you: the parable of the ninety nine sheep.

In this parable, Jesus explains that a shepherd has one hundred sheep and one gets lost. This shepherd then leaves his flock to find the missing sheep. If the shepherd finds that lost sheep, he rejoices over having found it more than the ninety-nine that stayed where they were supposed to be. In the same way, heaven rejoices with God the Father over one lost soul coming to salvation.

Have you ever had a moment when you are really going through something that seems needless or meaningless? When we’re actually going through those moments, we wonder why God is doing something a particular way, or why it’s happening to us at all. It’s often that when we gain the perspective that only time and persevering with the Lord can bring that we actually see what He was doing. We look back and see that our struggles and our suffering was refining us and working something out within us. We were learning lessons in those moments that we couldn’t have learned if everything was at an even keel.

If you were to read the Gospels in the Bible side by side, you’d find lots of similarities throughout. Matthew, Mark, and Luke especially tend to report the same events of Christ’s ministry on earth. This especially helps us to cross-reference and gain lots of perspective on the same lessons and miracles that Jesus gave to us. And each Gospel in kind shows its own emphasis on Jesus.

But each Gospel is uniquely different, each one offering us completely new insights into the life of Jesus and offering some stories not found in the other accounts. This particular day recorded in John 2 sounds familiar, and yet is not. Here, we find Jesus in the temple during Passover and upon finding merchants and money-changers in the outer courts, He passionately cleanses the temple. In other words, He kicks the opportunistic businessmen out of the temple, clears out their animals being sold for sacrifice, and breaks up their tables and stalls to clear space for worshipers to offer sacrifices and pray.

In John 2, Jesus attends a wedding in which the wine runs out. In those days, it was a party foul to host a wedding and not have enough wine for the whole party. When the wine runs out, Jesus’ mother, Mary, asks Him to intervene and sends a few servants to help Him rectify the situation. Jesus tells the servants to fill up the waterpots that were being used for the purification ritual for the wedding ceremony. The servants fill up these six stone jars that each hold about twenty to thirty gallons.

I think as Christians, we all have at least one person that we pray would come to know Jesus. A few years ago, when my dad and I were running a youth group, there was one kid that came week in and week out, but he was adamantly rebellious against anything to do with God. He only came because his parents made him and it was one of the only times he got out of the house. For years, I watched my dad and other men in the church try to reach and witness to this kid. There was a lot of prayer, energy, and attention that went into him, and one night the Holy Spirit finally intervened and he admitted to believing in God. He prayed a prayer, and that night there was a lot of rejoicing among the youth leaders. It felt like God finally gave an answer to something long prayed for.

It took Israel three months from their exodus of Egypt until they took up residence around Mount Sinai. In those three months, they saw the end of their slavery, deliverance from Egypt, they walked across the Red Sea, witnessed God’s miraculous provision of food and water, and won a war in God’s name. They saw evidence upon evidence of God’s love and care for them; His strength and power over their enemies and yet His protection over this chosen nation. Israel would go on to spend a long time in the wilderness of Sinai and a lot of their societal structure would be established there. Nevertheless, God wanted to meet His people at Mount Sinai the way He met Moses from within the burning bush.

It seriously boggles my mind how quickly Israel could forget God’s goodness, mercy, and provision towards them. The Jews left Egypt and began their journey in the wilderness in Exodus 15, and here we are in chapter 17 and already we’ve seen 3 different iterations of them having a need, shaking their fists and Moses and God about it, not trusting in God to fill it, and God supernaturally proving Himself by fulfilling their need with a miracle. And what’s worse is that those are just a couple of chapters at the beginning of a 40 year-long journey! We know that there are still many, many more times that Israel repeated that same pattern.

But we are the same way. And just think: If Israel found it hard to rely on God and constantly fell into habits of questioning Him despite the miracles and wonders they witnessed, how much more so is it for us?

When Sam and I were dating or newly married, whenever we went somewhere– be it a park, a concert, or an amusement park– Sam would without fail ask me to put his car keys in my purse. And then he’d ask me to hold his phone… and his wallet. It would always annoy me, because my bag would be brimming with someone else’s stuff. And Sam wasn’t the only person to do it. I’d have friends who would do it too. I guess it’s prone to happen when you’re the one in the group that always carries a bag. That bag was a safe place to keep those items people didn’t want to lose. And they would have been correct, because nothing was ever misplaced when it was in my bag.

Imagine you have a huge debt. I’m talking six figures. Whatever it is– medical, educational, a mortgage– it is crushing and the interest rate on it means that you will be paying it off for the rest of your life. The payments on that debt are so high that you will have to work and work and work around the clock to try and make it. Forget about vacations, luxury items, and eating meals out. You’re just lucky to have food on your table. Everything you think about, do, and work towards seems to have that debt looming over it, shadowing everything. No hope, no relief, no peace.

If you think about it, 1 Peter had to be a very revolutionary letter to the church. Peter, a jew and disciple of Jesus, repeatedly asserts how Christ’s work on the cross put Jews and Gentiles on the same playing field. Until the cross, there was a clear line between the two groups because the Jews were God’s chosen people under His covenant with Abraham. But Jesus’ spilt blood on the cross meant that not only Jews but Gentiles as well could be brought into the family of God and enjoy the same inheritance, grace, and spirituality that was reserved for Jews only up to that point.

I remember being 20 years old at a Friday night worship service. It was an all-are-welcome event, so we brought the youth up from the church basement to be a part of it. In the middle of a song, I felt a little tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see my Pastor, David Knapp, standing next to me. With a little smile on his face, he leaned down so I could hear him and said, “Do you think the youth band has a song they’d like to share?” At this point, we had a small youth band comprised of a handful of teens who were mostly self-taught in their instruments. Still, I nodded and he said, “I’ll let the team on the altar know that the youth are going to lead after the next song.”

Christians get a bad wrap. Why? Because most of the time, we preach a message that comes off “holier than thou” to a world that is comfortable in their sin. I can’t count how many times unsaved people have said something along the lines of, “It’s okay, I’m gonna live it up with my friends at the big party going on in hell when I get there.” And I know it’s meant to be a joke, albeit not a very funny one, but it just goes to show how tightly people will cling to their sin and their comfortable pleasures, despite the fact that those things will never add up to eternal salvation.

Peter denied Jesus just before His death. If Jesus were anyone else and not the Son of God, I’m sure it would have been the end of a relationship, a revocation of his calling, and two hurt people. That’s what Peter deserved: to lose Jesus’ love, lose the purpose Jesus instilled in him, and to live with his failure. It’s what you and I deserve for sure. Because we’ve all done what Peter did. Maybe not under the same circumstances, but we’ve all fallen short. We’ve all messed up. We’ve all had moments of weak faith that caused us to be less confident in our belief.