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.

Peter says he is going fishing, and six others follow him back to what they know best. Pastor Adam reads John 21 as a resurrection appearance that opens with breakfast rather than rebuke, on a fire already lit and a meal that never depended on the catch.

Two young readers open Youth Sunday with the hardest sentences in the Gospels. Harry Wilson watches the smiles turn to frowns, preaches it with his own mother and grandparents in the room, and argues Jesus is insisting on an order of loves, not the abolition of the lesser ones.

“My peace I give you, not as the world gives.” Pastor Adam works the message around that qualifier, on a Father and Son who make a home rather than pay a visit, and on obedience as a symptom of love rather than its price.

“Ask me for anything in my name.” Pastor Adam takes it at full strength, then asks why so few pray as if it were true, naming guilt, unbelief and competing passions as three routes to the same silence, and refusing to dodge whether God has ever disappointed you in prayer.

Jesus says the words he speaks are not his own. Pastor Adam argues that is not modesty but a claim to deity, that everything Jesus said was a translation of the Father’s heart, and that the same pattern is what makes “greater works than these” a description of delegation.

Thomas admits he does not know where Jesus is going. Pastor Adam refuses to soften the answer that follows, redirects it from gatekeeping a destination to the destination being a person, and notes how much of Scripture is people standing in God’s presence without recognising it.

Pastor Adam presses a question congregations are rarely asked directly: what are you actually asking God for? James 4 supplies the uncomfortable answer, and C.S. Lewis supplies the frame, that heaven is the land of substance and earth the land of shadow.

The first two words of the Lord’s Prayer do most of the work. Pastor Adam argues God as Father is among the most radical religious ideas ever proposed, builds it from Romans 8, Galatians 4 and Hebrews 4, and asks what prayer is for if the Father already knows.