• A New Beginning

    Lesson 3: How God Creates a New Thing

    In lesson 2 we learned that at the end of the Festival of Shelters, the Torah scroll is rolled back to the beginning, to Genesis 1. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In the story of creation, we see the pattern for how God creates. When God made a nation for himself, Israel, he followed the same pattern. When Christ comes again, he will establish his kingdom from Israel and restore the world to God’s original plan. God is always creating something new. The Bible not only tells us about the earth’s beginning and Israel’s beginning, but our new beginning in Christ. God is Light and…

  • A New Beginning

    Lesson 2: God is Our Shelter and Provider

    In lesson one we learned about how Jesus fulfilled Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, as a sacrifice for our sin so that our sins could be removed from us. We all have turned away from God to go our own way, so God sent his Son, born of a virgin, to redeem us and give us a new beginning with him. Because God’s only Son voluntarily paid the penalty for our sin on the cross, our sin is nailed to the cross and our old self dies as we repent of sin and receive God’s forgiveness through the shed blood of Jesus. We are then reborn by the Holy…

  • A New Beginning

    Lesson 1: How God Gives Us A New Beginning

    The Bible makes an astounding promise: “Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18). Contrary to the American dream, we don’t work hard to get this new life through our own effort. It is a gift from God. Why would he give us a new life as a new person? Because he loves us so much that he’s willing to do for us what we could never do for ourselves, which is to make ourselves righteous in his sight.…