The last Sunday of the year lands on James 1 and its instruction to consider trials joy. Pastor Adam works it through endurance, notes how little in modern life teaches it, and sends the congregation into the new year on three words: exist, perceive, endure.

Dr. James Smith III preaches the angel’s announcement as the answer to why Jesus came. The shepherds are not told to feel better; they are told something has happened, in a named town, with a verifiable sign attached, and the joy follows the fact.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Pastor Adam preaches joy at the point in December when many can least manufacture it, describing hope as the long road joy travels before arriving, and refusing either to diminish pain or to let go of hope.

A Christmas series on joy opens in Hebrews 12, with a race run under a cloud of witnesses. Pastor Adam treats joy as something produced rather than waited for, in three moves, and puts losing heart forward as the actual risk being guarded against.

Dr. James Smith III brings the early church into the room, letting the first Christian voices interpret John 3 alongside modern readers, and reads the passage from the end of chapter two so the famous verse sits where it actually belongs.

Harry Wilson preaches the verse everyone can recite and the three that follow, which fewer can. The judgment John names is preference rather than ignorance, and belief, after C.S. Lewis, is less one item among others than the light by which the rest is seen.

A series on John 3 opens with the man rather than the verse. Elliott Stearns reads Nicodemus closely, down to a conjunction in verse one most readers miss, and traces an exchange that never returns to the terms Nicodemus arrived with.

Abram gives a tenth of everything to a priest-king centuries before any law requires it, then refuses to take a thread or a sandal strap from the king of Sodom. Pastor Adam uses both halves to make the case for the corporate tithe and the local church.

Pastor Adam puts the weight on the first verb: honour the Lord with your wealth. Generosity is an overflow of honour, not a formula, and Isaiah 61 widens what “favour” even means, since almost none of what it promises is financial.