The Christian New Year
Advent Experience
It's not too late to join us for The Christian New Year Advent Experience this month! Meet with J.D. Walt and hundreds of others each morning of the Advent season for a time of reading, reflection, and prayer.
New Room Conference 2022
New Room Conference is Sept. 21-23, 2022 and we hope you'll join us for this meeting with Jesus. Register before Dec. 10 with the code NWNR20 and get $20 off your conference registration.
A Night with New Room (Lent)
Lent, the season of the descent of the Son of God to the Cross. Gather with us for an evening of preparation for the 40 days—to get in step with the Holy Spirit together, to prepare for a season of fasting and repentance and joyful realignment with the mind of Jesus Christ.
LENT 2022
What if we could . . . Break free from self-destructive sins? See and value people like Jesus does? Reflect Jesus’ love, joy, and peace to others?
We are constantly being influenced by outside forces—our families, the media, and even our cell phones. Yet God promises to shape us into the image of Jesus. A Jesus-Shaped Life invites you to invest forty days into learning how to cooperate with the Holy Spirit as he transforms you from the inside out. Throughout the course of six weeks, readers will explore selected aspects of Jesus’ character and learn how God’s grace can be reproduced in his followers. Spiritual exercises and discussion questions combine with daily meditations to create a valuable tool for becoming the person God created us to be.
Join the Seedbed community in the upcoming season of Lent in a journey through A Jesus-Shaped Life.
P.S. Calling all pastors! If you want to join others from the Seedbed/New Room community in preaching through this series this upcoming Lenten season, we'd like to invite you to a free preaching workshop led by Jessica LaGrone, Steve Cordle, J.D. Walt, and Dan Wilt on January 13. Register free here.
Isaiah 11:1-3 (NIV)
A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.
CONSIDER THIS
We all come from someone, somewhere, and something—a people, a place, and a story. We come from someone in our family line—parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so many others form extensions of the root system from which we each descend. We come from somewhere, in that people are always physically located—we live in times and places unique to us, and even as we move from place to place we carry bits of our previous location with us in our hearts and memories. We come from something, in that we come from a story that is uniquely, remarkably, our own—while that story is also uniquely tied to our family line throughout history, and is ultimately tied to God’s great love Story with humanity.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that you are not only made up of the breath of God in you and your own genetic configuration, but you are also truly “from the root” of your family line that has gone before you. You are special, a “branch” from that root if you will, and have been delivered to all of us as a gift of God’s orchestration, the God who brings our paths to cross.
Entering into Advent, the season that inaugurates the Christian New Year, we open our spirits once again to the whole story of faith that Jesus came to reveal. Each Advent, we enter that story once again with deepened reverence, brimming worship, and expectant reflection on the person of Jesus. It is Jesus toward which the entirety of the biblical narrative points, from the Hebrew covenant to the new covenant, and in which we find the purposes of God acted out for our sake and for the sake of the world.
To understand Jesus, we would do well to discover the root of faith from which he springs. It is a spiritual root system, in fact, that both Isaiah 11:1-3 and Matthew 1:1-17 are eager to convey. The Son of God, it seems, the Lord’s Messiah and our Ascended Master, did not come to us in a vacuum. He didn’t descend from a strange, ethereal heaven in a mysterious cloud of divinity shimmering with an otherworldly glow. He came as a child, born naturally of a mother from a family line herself, and nurtured by a father who knew the names of his own kin many generations into the past. In Isaiah 11:1-3, that great prophetic passage that hails Christ’s birth, we see that Jesus, the Branch, comes from the family line of the great King David, the son of Jesse, and from a long line of the faithful to which we point today saying, “Lord, as they said yes to you, so may we.”
And it is here that we begin our Advent journey this year. The idea that has been traditionally known as a “Jesse Tree” will be our map. A Jesse Tree is an approach to the preparation season of Advent, leading us toward Christmas, that encourages us to revisit stories from the Hebrew Bible to help us to understand the family line of Jesus and the spiritual mandate of the child born to save the world. We will draw from both Jesus’ genealogical ancestry and his faith heritage, as we walk together on a journey through the stories of saints and sinners woven into the family line of the Son of God.
From a root, comes a branch. In that Branch, Jesus, you and I learn to abide in and draw from his unending resources (John 15:1-5), and in so doing, we are born again to eternal life. Let’s begin.