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God's love for us isn't a feeling He has but the very definition of love itself — a willed, sacrificial commitment shown fully in Jesus dying for our sin. When we truly receive that love instead of living in fear of punishment, it naturally overflows into how we love, give to, and sacrifice for one another.

God still speaks to us today, not through a mountaintop encounter but through His word, which carries His very breath and life. As we read Scripture, let it search us, and respond in trust, God corrects, teaches, and equips us for the life He made us for.

Through the Holy Spirit, God Himself now lives inside every believer, not just watching from a distance. That means we are never alone, and we have the same power that raised Jesus from the dead working in us to shape our character, send us on mission, and unite us to His people.

Jesus of Nazareth has shaped human history more than anyone else, and the record of what He said about Himself leaves no room for neutrality. Examined in His own cultural context, Jesus repeatedly claimed to be fully God, He lived as the perfect human who alone gets to define what it means to be human, and He is the only Savior and only way to the Father. Because these are His own claims, not just later church teaching, every person must decide what to do with them — reject Him, dismiss Him as crazy, or fall at His feet as Lord and God.

Kicking off the Essentials series, Pastor Hunter Jones preaches from Exodus 34, where God reveals His own name and character to Moses after Israel had distorted Him into a golden calf. The sermon argues that the smallest distortion in our view of God leads to major distortions in how we live, so we must let God define Himself rather than shaping Him into a comfortable idol. God reveals Himself as the self-existent "I Am," triune, overflowing in chesed (loyal, covenant) love, and perfectly just. Rightly seeing God produces the same response Moses had: falling down in humble, overwhelmed worship.

Drawing from Second Corinthians 4:16-18, Pastor Bill argues that Christians tend to either deny their wounds (performing a put-together faith while white-knuckling through pain) or despair over them (giving up because life is hard and faith seems not to work). Paul teaches instead that our outer selves are wasting away while our inner selves are being renewed every day, in the present tense, simultaneously. Because believers have already won in Christ, present troubles, however heavy and real, are light in comparison to the eternal glory being produced. The call is to hold both realities together at once, like a coin's two sides seen only in a mirror, the mirror being the cross, and to keep living as faithful "weekday warriors" rather than quitting.