We are very familiar with death, but sometimes we are caught off guard by life, if we notice it at all. And that is exactly where the story of Easter begins. It begins in the shadow of Good Friday, still in the dark hours, in a garden before dawn, with a woman carrying burial spices toward a grave, doing the thing grief usually prompts us to do: stay busy. But she is in store for a miraculous surprise.

For seventeen centuries, the church has celebrated Easter with arms flung wide, calling everyone in, and the story we gather to tell is one we continue to admit we have not fully absorbed.

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The post Dawn in the Garden appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Re-living the final hours of Jesus’ life is important. It helps bring into focus the miraculous victory the Father, the Son, and the Spirit enacted through overcoming the cruel cross and defeating the powers of sin and death once and for all. 

It’s also important to realize that the victory enacted in these events are part of Jesus’s life and ministry. In other words, Jesus’ death on the cross is not disconnected from His life.

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The post Good Friday Tenebrae Service appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

The kingdoms of this earth arrive in spectacular fashion, but Jesus arrives in a much more humble way, and that choice was the most important thing that happened in the world in a very long time.

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The post The Humble King appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Death is an intruder, an enemy, a force that has no place in the world God intended. But the gift of free will, the very capacity that makes love and goodness possible, also means that the collective weight of human choice sometimes comes with a dark shadowside, and so sin and death entered into God’s creation.

Bad things happen to beautiful people. Even death. Even to people God loves. Even to a man named Lazarus in a small town called Bethany. But Christ meets us at every threshold where death is waiting, and in his hands, even the darkest doorway opens into life.

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The post On The Threshold of Life appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

This Lent, we have been learning to set aside our disordered desires: our self-sufficiency in the wilderness, our need to control new birth, our thirst for satisfaction in all the wrong wells. And now Jesus invites us to set down perhaps the heaviest thing we carry: the belief that if we can correctly assign blame to injustice and suffering, we just might be able to endure a little longer.

What if the question was never “whose fault is this?” What if the question was always “what is God doing here and how can I join him in that work?”

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The post Seeing Through the Blame Game appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Every spring when the ground begins to thaw and the first green shoots appear in garden beds that have appeared lifeless for months we are reminded of the cycles of life — and this is how most of us experience the life of faith.

Our moments of breakthrough feel sudden, but if we are honest, we know that God has been cultivating something in us long before it ever broke the surface. 

Today we are going to hear the story of a man named Nicodemus who came to Jesus carrying a lifetime of religious formation, a mind saturated with scripture and tradition, a reputation built on knowing the right answers; and yet, the Holy Spirit had been nurturing new life deep within and Jesus breathes it into bloom.

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The post Root & Stem appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Today we step into the wilderness and the temptation of Jesus.

The place where our appetites are met with the often untended parts of our lives and of the many voices attempting to define us, the only voice that matters is the one we are often too busy to hear.

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The post I Shall Not Want appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

Together in these moments together we will worship and reflect and be blessed by our loving God.

DOWNLOAD: Prayer Stones Guide

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The post Ash Wednesday appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

We love mountaintop experiences, but you have to come off the mountain at some point and the process of descent is hard, both physically and emotionally. You have to learn how to let that mountaintop experience integrate into your daily life, where it will be truly put to use for the good of others. 

The most important moment in the story for us this week is not the blinding light, the voice from the cloud, or the vision of the witnesses, it is the touch of Jesus and the comforting words, “Get up. Do not be afraid.”

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The post The Mountain and the Valley appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.

We live in an over saturated age that somehow provides little actual clarity; screens, notifications, feeds, tags, breaking news. We are surrounded by many artificial lights and yet so many of us feel like we are stumbling in the dark. And we just might be tempted to think that the darkness feels deeper than any flicker we might be able to muster, but Jesus believes otherwise. 

This week, Jesus looks at ordinary people and tells them they carry the light the world actually needs.

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The post You Are Light appeared first on Emmaus Road Church.