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Anxiety. It can be physiological, it can be emotional, it can be situational, it can even be spiritual. And when we feel anxious, we ask questions like: Am I failing God? Have I let God down? Is it a sin to be anxious? We do know that hours before He was crucified, Jesus felt overwhelming anxiety. His response may help us find relief from what we are feeling in our troubled heart.

Jesus was God in the flesh and yet He was a human being and He expressed and felt very real emotions. He felt anxiety, anger, compassion, and profound sadness. One writer has said that in the four Gospels Jesus expressed 39 emotions. God has given us those same emotions and by looking at Jesus and how He faced them can help us in how we respond and react when we are hurt.

Everybody worships. No one taught us how to worship. We just know how to worship. We’re passionate about something. That’s worship. God wants us to understand the depth of worship. True worship is not just what happens in here, it’s what happens out there.

Many grew up with the idea that worship was an event. It consisted of singing a few songs, taking an offering, listening to a message and going home. But it has to be more than that. Perhaps our definition of worship is out of whack. When we learn what it really is, there is so much we can benefit from it.

The direction of our lives is determined by the way we answer some very important and heavy questions. The book of John provides us with a beautiful backdrop to consider the answers and implications to those questions.

Surprisingly, Jesus said very little about heaven. He spoke more about eternal life and how one can enter heaven than He did about the place of heaven. Although the details are incomplete, it is probably because a full understanding of heaven would make it difficult to concentrate on the responsibilities God has given us on earth. Yet the Bible reveals some realities about heaven to whet our appetites for this future destination.