God’s first and only covenant nation is Israel, and He called them His “firstborn son.” [i] And Israel is the only nation He sovereignly chose to reveal Himself to, not a giant and mighty nation, but so insignificant they appeared to be nothing more than a small, powerless family. It says, “You on
The first century Church "turned their world upside down" for Christ. We should too. We should be living like first century believers.
Eliezer Gonzalez
Jesus entered Jerusalem, where he spent his final week teaching in the courts of the temple. But first there’s something he had to do something. The Gospel of John records that the first public act of Jesus’ ministry was his cleansing of the temple at Passover. The Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus ended his ministry in the same way. After having ridden into Jerusalem on a colt the previous day, Jesus cleansed the temple courts and it was exactly what the Jewish people would have expected the Messiah to do. They considered that the temple was defiled and that when the Messiah came, one of the key things that he would do would be to cleanse and restore the temple. Jesus did this as a very clear sign of his absolute authority as the Messiah whom they had been expecting.
And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: “The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. I know yo…