The first service after everything moved online, recorded in what Adam jokingly calls the LJCF Studios. The stated aim is to stabilise and simplify rather than add to the noise — and the teaching is Christ’s self-emptying, preached in week one of a pandemic.

Jesus commends the widow not for the size of her gift but for what was left afterwards — a considerably more uncomfortable standard than the one most giving is measured by.

Two brothers bring offerings and one is received. The text is precise where it matters: some of the fruits of the soil, against fat portions from the firstborn. Pastor Adam reads the difference as being about what was held back.

The serpent’s first move is a question, not a temptation. Pastor Adam tracks how the exchange escalates, and argues sin rarely follows a straight line: what she finally sees are three separate, individually reasonable goods.

Adam names the animals and the process establishes something: no suitable helper was found. Pastor Adam treats the naming as a survey returning a negative result, and the absence as something God intended him to notice first.

Four sentences that have carried an enormous amount of argument. Pastor Adam lands on a deliberately balanced formulation — equal but not the same, equal but not interchangeable — and distinguishes the structural calling of Genesis 1 from the relational one in Genesis 2.

God spoke creation into being, then made humanity from the earth and breathed it to life — the act that sets us apart from everything else he made. We were charged to care for creation and to worship alongside it.

A series through Genesis begins with the subject of the first sentence rather than the mechanics of creation: God existed before time and created the beginning itself. Creation is thought brought into action, and light arrives first because it reveals truth.

The bush burns for some time before anyone speaks — God calls only when he sees Moses has gone over to look. Pastor Adam builds on an invitation that was conditional on curiosity, and asks what we walk past because investigating would cost us time.