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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/30/missio-dei-wk3-thu#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK3 - WED https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/29/missio-dei-wk3-wed Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/29/missio-dei-wk3-wed

THE GOD WHO GOES LOOKING
Luke 15:4-6 (NLT) “If a man has a hundred sheep and one of them gets lost, what will he do? Won’t he leave the ninety-nine others in the wilderness and go to search for the lost one until he finds it? And when he has found it, he will joyfully carry it home on his shoulders. When he arrives, he will call together his friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’”

The thing that triggers this parable is not a theological question. It is a social complaint. Jesus is eating with the wrong people again, tax collectors and sinners, and the Pharisees are offended by it. Jesus responds by telling three stories about lost things being found.
In the first story, the shepherd does not wait for the sheep to become wise enough to return on its own. He leaves and goes searching into the wilderness, the exposed and uncertain place where vulnerable things disappear. And when he finally finds the sheep, he rejoices. There is no irritated lecture about inconvenience or wasted time. The recovery itself becomes cause for celebration.

I once heard about the president of a small college who noticed that a student had disappeared for several days without explanation. Instead of handing the situation off to an administrator, she drove to the student’s apartment herself and knocked on the door. The student eventually opened it emotionally exhausted and embarrassed by how much of life had begun unraveling privately. The president brought her home for dinner, let her do laundry there, and spent the evening talking with her around the kitchen table.

The shepherd in Jesus’s parable would have understood exactly what she was doing.
Because the sheep in Luke 15 does not know it is being searched for. It has no strategy for finding its way home and no sudden moment of clarity out in the wilderness. The shepherd’s movement toward the sheep begins long before the sheep understands anything at all.

That is Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees. Of course he eats with sinners. The table itself is part of the search.

Who in your life might feel far from God right now?
How does knowing God searches for people before they search for him change your perspective?
What would it look like for you to “go looking” in love and compassion?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/29/missio-dei-wk3-wed#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK3 - TUE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/28/missio-dei-wk3-tue Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/28/missio-dei-wk3-tue

THE DIRECTION OF THE MISSION
Philippians 2:5-8 (NLT) “You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.”

Most of us spend our lives trying to move upward in relation to other people. Upward into influence, upward into recognition, upward into positions where we are less vulnerable and more difficult to ignore. Even when our motives are sincere, there is usually some part of us still reaching for altitude, because altitude feels safer. If I can just get high enough, respected enough, successful enough, perhaps I can finally stop feeling exposed.
Then Jesus arrives and moves in the opposite direction.

From the highest conceivable place, equality with God, down into the fragility of ordinary human life. Paul’s point in Philippians 2 is not simply that Jesus was humble in a general moral sense. He is describing a movement downward, a voluntary descent into limitation, dependence, obscurity, suffering, even humiliation. “Have this mind among yourselves,” Paul says. In other words, let this become your orientation too.
That is the part we tend to resist.

Because nearly every culture, including ours, trains people to associate upwardness with success. We optimize for visibility. We want access to rooms where our names matter. We instinctively build identities around distinction and importance. Even ministry can quietly become another strategy for staying above others, another way of becoming the competent one, the needed one, the admired one who always has something to offer but rarely needs anything in return.

What makes Jesus’s movement so arresting is that it was chosen. Nothing was taken from him. He relinquished position willingly. The one through whom Christians claim the world itself was made entered history through the exhaustion and vulnerability of childbirth, depended on parents to feed him, learned carpentry with human hands that could splinter and bleed, wept openly at the grave of a friend.

The movement of Jesus was always toward. Toward the sick, the ashamed, the socially unwanted, the grieving, the guilty, the frightened. Toward suffering rather than away from it. Toward death itself.

And when Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you,” he is not removing that downward direction from the equation. He is inviting his followers into the same movement.

In what ways are you tempted to pursue status, recognition, or control?
What would it look like to follow Jesus in downward movement and service?
Who around you needs someone willing to move toward them rather than away from them?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/28/missio-dei-wk3-tue#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK3 - MON https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/27/missio-dei-wk3-mon Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/27/missio-dei-wk3-mon

THE WORD THAT MOVED IN
John 1:1, 14 (NLT) “In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God... So the Word became human and made his home among us. He was full of unfailing love and faithfulness. And we have seen his glory, the glory of the Father’s one and only Son.”

John doesn’t ease you into the incarnation. He drops you in at the beginning of everything and then, in fourteen verses, brings you all the way to a baby in a feeding trough. The same Word that was with God before creation, through whom everything was made, that Word became flesh. Took on a body. Moved into the neighborhood.

The Greek word John uses for “make his home among us” is eskenosen, literally, “he pitched his tent.” The image is of someone setting up camp in your midst. Not visiting. Not passing through. Not holding office hours for people who make appointments. Moving in. Becoming present in the ongoing, ordinary, inconvenient way that neighbors are present.

This is the shape of the incarnation. And because the incarnation is the shape of Jesus’s mission, it must also be the shape of ours.

The incarnation tells us that God does not believe in ministry from a safe distance. He did not address the world’s brokenness through a strongly worded letter from heaven. He came down and ate. got tired, and attended weddings and funerals and dinner parties at the homes of people polite society had written off. Jesus wept at a friend’s grave and touched lepers who hadn’t been touched in years. He was near.

I’ll be honest, this is deeply inconvenient for any model of mission that prioritizes our own comfort. But, it is also deeply hopeful, because it means that when we move toward people, not with a program or an agenda, but with genuine presence, we are doing something that looks like God. We are imaging the one who, when the world needed saving, did not stay where it was comfortable. He moved in down the street.

Who has been genuinely present with you during a difficult season of life?
What keeps you from moving toward people instead of managing them from a distance?
How can you practice incarnational presence this week?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/27/missio-dei-wk3-mon#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK 2 - GROUP GUIDE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/25/missio-dei-wk-2-group-guide Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/25/missio-dei-wk-2-group-guide

MISSIO DEI | WEEK 2 - The Broken World God Loves

INTRODUCTION: The following is a guide to help facilitate discussion between you and the person you’re studying with or with your Connect Group. Feel free to add, subtract, or change questions to fit the conversation, and pray for the Spirit to lead in all things.

OPEN: If you had just moments left to live, what is a piece or two of wisdom that you would want to make sure were passed down to those you care about? Something you’ve learned in your journey that you wish you knew earlier, or that someone had told you?

SCRIPTURE READING
Read together: Genesis 1:31, 3:6-7, Romans 8:19-22, Micah 6:8, Luke 4:18-19, Isaiah 65:17-19

Pay attention to how God continues to chase after us, even when we run the other way.

HEAD: Explore the Text

Share any wisdom, insights, or thoughts you received just from listening to the text, allowing the Holy Spirit to lead.
How, in a perfect world, do you think Adam and Eve could have sinned? They had everything, what made them want more?
Why didn’t God just start over after Adam and Eve sinned, as opposed to letting sin take over this world?
Why do you think creation groans? Do you think, somehow, creation knows what it was originally meant to be before sin and brokenness?
Put Micah 6:8 into your own words, what it means to do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. What does this look like in our world today? Why is it important to do all three of these things together, instead of just separating them out?
Do you think Jesus knew exactly where to unroll the scroll so he could read that specific verse? What does a mission statement like Luke 4:18-19, do for someone when they face challenges and hard times?
From the moment we broke our world, God’s plan was set in motion to restore it. How does knowing this help you live in this broken world, right now, with more hope?

HEART: Personal Reflection

In this broken world, do you see yourself as more broken, whole, or in process? If in process, what does that mean to you and what joy and/or peace do you find in that knowledge?
In what ways do you, or we, groan inwardly as we long for things to be made right?
Can you think of some things like grief and loneliness that we were never meant to experience, sharing why you think they are so hard for us to navigate?
Because it’s always good to spend time thinking about the day when all things are restored and created new, what do you look forward to about heaven? The new earth? Who are you anxious to see? What are you anxious to do? What questions do you have for God?

HANDS: Practice This Week
Spiritual Practice: Reflecting on Your Journey

In your life with God, where have you seen growth? What are things you used to struggle with, that are not a struggle for you now? Where have you experience his healing?
What areas are still hard for you; places in your heart and your life where you know you still need God’s healing presence?
Over the next week, take time both to share your gratitude with God for the things he has done in your life, as well as to surrender the things you want him to heal.
Also reflect, each day, on one thing you look forward to about the new heavens and new earth.

Invite the group to check in next week about what they discovered.

FINISH WELL: Bring It Home

Knowing that God came to a broken world, even took on our brokenness, how do you and I practice growing in empathy for the brokenness in the world around yes?
It can be easy to get overwhelmed by how much brokenness there is. What is area, place, or person’s life that we can be a blessing to this week to help bring more of God’s love into the world around us?

WORDS OF WISDOM to Memorize
3 I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, “Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” (Revelation 21:3-4, NLT)

Pastor Paddy McCoy

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/25/missio-dei-wk-2-group-guide#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK2 - FRI https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/24/missio-dei-wk2-fri Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/24/missio-dei-wk2-fri

GOD’S ANSWER TO THE BROKEN WORLD
Isaiah 65:17-19 (NLT) “Look! I am creating new heavens and a new earth, and no one will even think about the old ones anymore. Be glad; rejoice forever in my creation! And look! I will create Jerusalem as a place of happiness. Her people will be a source of joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem and delight in my people. And the sound of weeping and crying will be heard in it no more.”

In 1994, Rwanda collapsed. In about 100 days, around 800,000 people were killed, often by neighbors, coworkers, even friends. The country was shattered. And then, years later, Rwanda tried something extraordinary. They turned to an old traditional system called Gacaca courts. Community gatherings where perpetrators confessed, where victims spoke, where communities worked through what had happened together. It was not perfect. Nothing could be. But in village after village, people who had done terrible things and people who had suffered them found a way to keep living in the same place. Not forgetting or pretending, but going forward. It is one of the most haunting pictures of restoration I know.

Isaiah 65 is God’s version of this, on a cosmic scale. Not evacuation from the broken world but renewal of it. A world where weeping is gone, and there is no more crying. A city of happiness and God himself rejoicing over his people. It’s not a metaphor dressed up as comfort, it’s the actual destination of history.

The theological word for this is shalom. Shalom is not simply peace, in the thin sense of an absence of conflict. Shalom means everything is as it should be, it is a world that is complete, whole, and rightly ordered. It is a return to what original creation looked like on the sixth day. It is what Isaiah 65 describes at the end of the story. And the mission of God is the slow, patient work of shalom breaking into the present, partially and imperfectly, until the day it arrives completely.

Rwanda’s Gacaca courts did not fix what happened. They could not, however they were signs. Small, costly, partial signs that something better was possible. Every act of justice, every genuine reconciliation, every person freed from something that held them, these are signs of the same kind. The future arriving in the present. God’s answer to the world’s groaning, and we get to be part of the announcement.

What picture of restoration or reconciliation gives you hope?
Where do you see glimpses of God’s future kingdom breaking into the present?
How can you become an active participant in bringing shalom to your community?

Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/24/missio-dei-wk2-fri#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK2 - THU https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/23/missio-dei-wk2-thu Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/23/missio-dei-wk2-thu

JESUS READS THE ROOM
Luke 4:18-19 (NLT) “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.”

Early on in my ministry, right around the time I got my first job, I went through a very formative experience. I had been to the post office for something routine and was walking back to my car when a man approached me. He was unhoused and desperate, and he asked me for a little money for food. Something in me closed off. I shook my head, got in the car, and drove away. Then, about half a block down the street, I pulled over. I sat there for a moment feeling something I can only describe as conviction and shame. So, I turned around and went back. I pulled up beside him and said: “let’s go”. He hesitated, after all I had just rejected him a few minutes before. He told me he smelled bad and had soiled himself, and I think he was giving me an exit. I told him its fine and I put down some newspaper on the seats. He got in the car anyway. We went to a Goodwill store. He picked out new clothes. Then we drove to a Denny’s and I told him to order whatever he wanted. He got a steak, fries, and a large Coke. Over that meal, slowly, he told me his story and a little of where he had come from. Before we left I told him I was a pastor. He thanked me. He thanked God. I drove home knowing that the half block I had driven before turning around was one of the most important half blocks of my ministry, because I had almost blown it.

Luke 4 is Jesus doing something similar, but of course so much better and larger. He stands up in a synagogue, with a scroll, finds the place in Isaiah, reads it aloud, sits down, and says: today this is fulfilled. It’s the announcement of good news aimed at specific people: the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed, people with no hope.

And Crosswalk, these are not rare people. They are everywhere and they tend to be invisible to us, not because there are few of them but because the systems around them are designed to render them so. But, Jesus names them. He purposely does not address the powerful first with the gospel and hope the news filters down, instead He goes to where the need is, and aims the whole weight of the kingdom at it.

The man in the car park did not ask me into his life. I had already driven past him once. What changed was a turn of the car. A small reversal. Mission that looks like Jesus will require the same: being present to the specific, particular, uncomfortable need that is actually in front of us, rather than the abstract need we feel comfortable caring about from a distance.

When have you sensed conviction to stop and truly notice someone in need?
What “small reversal” might God be asking you to make in your daily life?
How can you become more attentive to the people society tends to overlook?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/23/missio-dei-wk2-thu#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK2 - WED https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/22/missio-dei-wk2-wed Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/22/missio-dei-wk2-wed

JUSTICE IS NOT OPTIONAL
Micah 6:8 (NLT) “No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Micah 6:8 gets quoted so often it has started to feel like a bumper sticker. That is a tragedy, because it is actually one of the most demanding verses in the entire Bible. God is speaking to a people going through the religious motions while exploiting the poor and ignoring injustice around them. His response is not to call for more religious performance. It is to say: I was never asking for that. Justice. Mercy. Humility. These three are held together as one thing. You cannot pursue justice without mercy or it becomes cruel. You can’t practice mercy without humility or it becomes condescending. And you cannot walk humbly with God and remain indifferent to what breaks his heart.

I remember it like it was yesterday. We were having lunch, a few of us, and the conversation turned to housing. A friend started telling me about when his parents first moved to a small town in a midwestern state in America. They had worked double shifts for years to save enough for a down payment. One day they found a house they loved and could afford, but the realtor turned them away. They later found out that the house had a deed that contained a restrictive covenant, preventing the sale to people who looked like them. I asked, with what I now recognize was naive innocence: why? It was the first time I had encountered the phrase. The law had technically abolished such covenants, but in that neighborhood, realtors and the homeowners’ association still enforced the spirit of them quietly and effectively. The law said one thing. The neighbors said another and his parents never did buy in that part of town.

That is structural injustice. It is not bad luck or individual failure. It is systems that could be different, and are not, because people with power have chosen to preserve them. The Hebrew word in Micah 6:8 for “right” is mishpat: civic justice, advocacy for those who cannot advocate for themselves. The widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor. Not soft suggestions. Requirements.

For followers of Jesus, justice is not a political preference or an optional add-on for particularly activist types. It is woven into the character of the God we follow. He is consistently, unmistakably drawn toward those the world’s systems have failed. To follow him is to be drawn in the same direction.

Where do you see injustice woven into the systems around you?
Why is humility necessary in the pursuit of justice?
How might God be inviting you to advocate for someone with less power or visibility?

Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/22/missio-dei-wk2-wed#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK2 - TUE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/21/missio-dei-wk2-tue Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/21/missio-dei-wk2-tue

THE WHOLE CREATION IS GROANING
Romans 8:19-22 (NLT) “For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

One afternoon during a trip to Australia, a group of us piled into a coach and drove down to the docks, where we boarded a boat and sailed out to a small island. It was one of those days that feels like a gift. We swam, we snorkeled, we ate well, we sat in the sun. Later in the afternoon, one of the chaperons told me that if we had gone just a little further out, we would have been at the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. I hadn't been close enough to see it clearly, but the remark stayed with me.

On the way back a marine biologist who had spent the better part of his career diving the reef pulled me aside. He talked about what he had watched happen to it over the decades, he told me David Attenborough had once described it as a forest after a fire. But for him it was like watching someone you love receive a terminal diagnosis. The grief in his voice was dry and belonged to someone who had given years to something and was watching it disappear.

Paul says in Romans 8 that the whole creation is groaning. Not metaphorically. He means it. The fall of humanity sent shockwaves through the created order. The world was subjected to futility, he says, not by its own choice. It is suffering consequences it did not cause, waiting for a restoration it cannot produce on its own.

What that diver felt is closer to what Paul is describing than most of our Saturday morning responses to environmental news. It is participation in creation’s groaning. It is the feeling of something being wrong that should be right.

The ecological crisis is a theological issue, not primarily a political one. We were given creation to steward, not exploit. The mandate in Genesis 1 was to rule, in the sense of protect and cultivate, not dominate. Mission that takes all of Scripture seriously cannot be indifferent to what God made and declared good. Caring for the creation is not a distraction from the gospel. It comes from the same love that drives the whole mission.

What part of creation’s “groaning” feels most visible or personal to you?
How does caring for creation connect to your understanding of God’s mission?
What is one practical way you can steward the world around you more faithfully?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/21/missio-dei-wk2-tue#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK2 - MON https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/20/missio-dei-wk2-mon Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/20/missio-dei-wk2-mon

WHAT GOODNESS LOOKED LIKE BEFORE WE BROKE IT
Genesis 1:31, 3:6-7 (NLT) “Then God looked over all he had made, and he saw that it was very good!... The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom it would give her. So she took some of the fruit and ate it... At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness.”

To understand why the mission matters, you need to hold two images at once. The first is God at the end of the sixth day, looking over everything he has made and calling it very good. The Hebrew word carries the sense of beautiful, right, exactly as it should be. The world in its original design was a place of unbroken relationship: humans with God, with each other, with the creation they were given to tend.

One day in university, my roommates decided to throw a small party, and another friend of ours who lived nearby was there when we were planning it. We were working through what we needed: food, drinks, music. He volunteered to handle the food order, said he knew a good place, took down what everyone wanted. We gave him the money. The night of the party, we waited. And waited. Someone eventually asked where he was. He shrugged off the question. That was when the penny dropped. He had been nursing a grievance about something, and he had decided, quietly and deliberately, never to place the order at all. He had taken the money and the responsibility and had simply chosen not to use either. There was no food. The party dissolved. What made it so difficult to shake was not the inconvenience but the intentionality of it: someone had taken something that was supposed to be for others and turned it into an instrument of harm.

That is the second image. It’s not a catastrophe from outside but it’s a choice from within. We see a hand extended toward a fruit, and a decision to trust their own judgment over God’s. As soon as that happened everything that was whole slowly became fractured, and the first pair hid naked and ashamed behind some leaves. The whole architecture of relationship shifted into something complicated and painful.

Both images are required for mission. The goodness of creation keeps us from abandoning the world but the reality of the fall keeps us from being naive about it. God doesn’t love a theoretical humanity, he loves this one, with its scar tissue and its grief and its persistent, irrational capacity for both cruelty and kindness.

Where do you still see traces of God’s original goodness in the world?
How have you personally experienced the fractures caused by sin and brokenness?
How can holding both beauty and brokenness together deepen your compassion for others?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/20/missio-dei-wk2-mon#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK 1 - GROUP GUIDE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/18/missio-dei-wk-1-group-guide Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/18/missio-dei-wk-1-group-guide

MISSIO DEI | WEEK 1 - God is a sending God

INTRODUCTION: The following is a guide to help facilitate discussion between you and the person you’re studying with or with your Connect Group. Feel free to add, subtract, or change questions to fit the conversation, and pray for the Spirit to lead in all things.

OPEN: Either share with the group one of the best gifts you’ve ever received, or the one of the best trips you’ve ever taken. What was it that made it one of the best?

SCRIPTURE READING
Read together: John 3:16-17, John 17:20-23, Genesis 12:1-3, Isaiah 6:1-8, John 20:21-22

Notice the why behind God’s sending.

HEAD: Explore the Text

Share any wisdom, insights, or thoughts you received just from listening to the text, allowing the Holy Spirit to lead.
Many of us grew up memorizing John 3:16, but why might John 3:17 be just as important to commit to memory? What does God do in these verses and why does he do it?
What does John 17:20-23 say is a sign that God is the one who sent the Son?
When God sent Abram, did he tell him where he was going? And what was it that Abram was to do when he got to this other place?
What did Isaiah come to realize in the presence of God? Once he’s been cleansed, forgiven, then he’s open and ready to God’s call. Why must one come before the other? Do you think Isaiah was scared at all, or simply confident in God’s presence and call?
What two gifts did Jesus give before sending the disciples? Considering all the verses above, what were they/us sent to do?

HEART: Personal Reflection

In what ways have you experienced God sending Himself to you (His Word, His Church, His people)?
When God comes to you, is it in love or with condemnation and a pointing finger? Explain your answer.
Oftentimes, when God calls, we look at ourselves and why we can’t possibly do whatever it is he asks us to do. Example: Isaiah was a man of unclean lips. Why are we so quick to look at our own faults and weaknesses, instead of trusting in God’s call?
God is sending you, us, into this world right now. What are some of the ways we go into His world to be a blessing, to show his love, to reveal more of who He is?

HANDS: Practice This Week
Spiritual Practice: Personalizing God’s Why

Re-write John 3:16-17 and use your name in the place where it says “world.”
Then, re-write it using the name of an enemy, or someone who is challenging you.
Journal your insights through this experience as you meditate on these truths this week.

Invite the group to check in next week about their experience.

FINISH WELL: Bring It Home

God sent Himself to us, and sent us to others. Do you sense an area in your life where God is sending you to be a blessing, share his love, carry his peace, etc…?
Is there something holding you back from answering that call and if so, what, and what would it take for you to let go and say along with Isaiah, “Here I am, send me!”

CLOSING PRAYER (Leader or Participant Reads), from the hymn, “Here I Am, Lord”
GOD: I, the Lord of sea and sky,
I have heard my people cry.
All who dwell in dark and sin,
My hand will save.
I, who made the stars of night,
I will make their darkness bright.
Who will bear my light to them?
Whom shall I send?
US: Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling in the night.
I will go, Lord, if you lead me.
I will hold your people in my heart.

Pastor Paddy McCoy

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/18/missio-dei-wk-1-group-guide#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK1 - FRI https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/17/missio-dei-wk1-fri Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/17/missio-dei-wk1-fri

SENT THE SAME WAY
John 20:21 (NLT) “Again he said, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.’”

About ten years ago, a close friend of mine lost her husband very suddenly. He left behind two young children and as you can imagine, his wife was in pieces. Her sister, who lived on the other side of the world, got on a plane as quickly as she could. She came for the funeral with suitcases of clothes and grief for the loss her sister and nephews had suffered. Somewhere in the tumult of loss, she made a decision to do whatever she needed to do to help her nephews and her sister. So she stayed after the funeral, and a few weeks turned into months and then two years. She put her own life on hold, found remote work, moved into a spare room, and helped hold the family together through the worst of it. She didn’t try, and manage the situation from a distance instead she moved in.

That is the shape of John 20:21. Jesus does not just say go, no! He says go the same way I came. And the way he came was an incarnation. When we needed it the most, God did not address the our brokenness with an email, or text from a safe distance. He entered our world in very specific ways. At a specific time, in specific place, wearing a specific body. Jesus played, prayed, and ate. He got tired, he wept at a grave, he moved into the neighborhood. He was near.

And God sent Jesus among the poor and the sick and the disreputable. Jesus could have chosen to be in a position of authority but instead he chose a posture of service. He rejected the allure to demonstrate power over the world and instead demonstrated love for it. He ate at the wrong tables and touched people who had not been touched in years. That is the pattern he left for us in his life, and it is now ours to follow.

Crosswalk as you follow Jesus remember, we are not sent to manage people toward faith from a safe remove. We are sent to be present in people’s lives, to be close enough to be changed by them and not just helpful. The sister who stayed two years was changed by those two years. That is what incarnational presence costs. It is also what it looks like when the sending of God takes human form.

Who in your life needs presence more than advice right now?
What does it look like for you to “move in” relationally rather than remain at a safe distance?
How might serving others change you personally?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/17/missio-dei-wk1-fri#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK1 - THU https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/16/missio-dei-wk1-thu Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/16/missio-dei-wk1-thu

THE MOMENT BEFORE THE SENDING
Isaiah 6:1, 8 (NLT) “It was in the year King Uzziah died that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple... Then I heard the Lord asking, ‘Whom should I send as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send me.’”

Isaiah’s commissioning is one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Scripture. A throne room. Seraphim calling out in voices that shake the foundations. Smoke. A man undone by the sight of holiness, certain he is finished. Then a coal, a touch, forgiveness declared. And a question: Whom shall I send? Isaiah says: here I am. Send me. Not because he feels ready. Because he has been met by something so much larger than his inadequacy that his objections have nowhere left to stand.

Rosa Parks is usually told as a story about a single courageous act: a woman on a bus who refused to move. But that framing flattens something important. She was a seamstress who spent years doing quiet, unglamorous civil rights work long before that December evening in 1955. She had attended the Highlander Folk School, where she had been trained and had sat in rooms with other organizers thinking seriously about how change happens. She had watched others resist and had carried those moments inside her. By the time she took that seat and kept it, she was not acting on impulse. She was acting out of everything she had accumulated over years of slow, patient formation. What changed on that bus was not that her courage suddenly appeared. It was that the weight of everything she believed finally tipped past the weight of what she feared. That is a different thing entirely from boldness. It is something more durable.

That is what the throne room does to a person. It does not remove the fear. It just makes something else more important. Isaiah does not volunteer from confidence. He volunteers from encounter. The sequence matters: holiness, then undoing, then forgiveness, then commissioning.

Unfortunately most of us approach mission the wrong way around. We ask whether we are qualified. We wait for a feeling of readiness that never quite solidifies. But Isaiah does not volunteer from confidence. He volunteers from encounter. The coal that touched his lips was God’s grace. God is not asking you if you are ready. He is asking whom he should send. The question is already echoing in the room where you are sitting.

What fears or feelings of inadequacy keep you from saying “Here I am, send me”?
How has grace shaped your willingness to serve others?
What might God be asking you to step toward, even before you feel ready?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/16/missio-dei-wk1-thu#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK1 - WED https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/15/missio-dei-wk1-wed Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/15/missio-dei-wk1-wed

THE FIRST GREAT COMMISSION
Genesis 12:1-3 (NLT) “The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you. I will make you into a great nation. I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others... All the families on earth will be blessed through you.’”

Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser argues that Genesis 12 is not just the beginning of Israel’s story. It is the first Great Commission, issued four thousand years before Jesus stood on a hillside in Galilee. The mission did not begin at the end of Matthew. It began here, in Mesopotamia, with a man named Abram who had no idea where he was going.

I was in Seattle for a pastoral matter, sitting outside the courthouse waiting on a hearing involving one of our church members. His family was there with him, and during the introductions it came out that I was about to become the senior pastor of the church that one of them attended. He looked me up and down slowly, raised an eyebrow, and said: you? I said: yes. Just as surprised as you are, honestly. God had called. I had said no at first. I spoke with mentors. I entered the process. And found myself, almost without quite knowing how, somewhere I never imagined I would belong.

That is something of how Abram’s call reads. No explanation for why him specifically. No credentials listed. Just a command, a promise, and a horizon he could not yet see. And the heart of the promise is this: the blessing was never for Abram alone. Election is never for privilege. It is always for service. God chose one family to reach every other family. The particular thread was always meant to hold the whole cloth together.

Paul calls Genesis 12:3 the gospel announced in advance. Not a preview. The gospel itself, preached ahead of time. What Jesus commissioned at the end of Matthew was the fulfillment of something ancient, the same mission, the same God, the same desire to bless every family on earth. Abram departed before he saw the destination. That is still the shape of the call.

What “unknown territory” might God be asking you to trust him with right now?
In what ways have you treated blessing as personal comfort instead of something meant to overflow to others?
What helps you keep moving when you cannot yet see the destination clearly?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/15/missio-dei-wk1-wed#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK1 - TUE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/14/missio-dei-wk1-tue Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/14/missio-dei-wk1-tue

THE GOD WHO TALKS TO HIMSELF
John 17:20-23 (NLT) “I am praying not only for these disciples but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message. I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one, as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.”

Before there was a world, there was a conversation. This is one of the strangest and most beautiful ideas in all of Christian theology. The God of Scripture is not a solitary being sitting alone in eternity. He is, from before the beginning, a community: Father, Son, and Spirit in a relationship of such complete self-giving love that creation itself was an overflow of it, not a necessity.

There is a story in one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, and yes, it is a little cheesy, and it may not even be true, but it points at something real. A young boy’s sister is gravely ill. The doctors determine that a blood transfusion from her brother, who has survived the same disease, offers her best chance of recovery. They explain the situation to him and ask if he is willing. He agrees without much hesitation. As the transfusion proceeds, the boy lies quietly beside his sister, watching the color return to her face. Then his own face goes pale. He looks up at the doctor and asks, in a small voice: will I start to die right away? He had misunderstood. He thought giving his blood meant giving all of it. He had said yes anyway.

That is the shape of the love inside the Trinity. Total. Not calculating. The Father loves the Son. The Son loves the Father. The Spirit flows from and toward both. Mission, the reaching outward, the going, the sending, flows directly from that interior life. It does not originate in a plan. It originates in a nature.

When Jesus prays in John 17 in his final hours before the cross, what he asks for is unity among his followers. He doesn’t ask for strategy or numbers, rather he desires uity. A community that loves the way the Trinity loves confronts the watching world with something it cannot explain or replicate on its own terms. The mission that flows outward from the church has its source in the life that flows between the persons of God. We don’t manufacture it, we receive it, and let it overflow.

How does understanding God as a community of love reshape the way you think about mission?
Where are you tempted to make mission more about activity than relationship?
What would unity in your church or relationships communicate to the watching world?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/14/missio-dei-wk1-tue#comments 0 Missio Dei: WK1 - MON https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/13/missio-dei-wk1-mon Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/13/missio-dei-wk1-mon

GOD IS A SENDING GOD
DAY 1 - THE MISSION THAT STARTED BEFORE YOU
John 3:16-17 (NLT) “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.”

We had been visiting the Crosswalk community in Jakarta and were heading home via Singapore when we got a call from the airline on the way to the airport. Our flight was delayed. We were not going to make the connection. They had tried to get us on an earlier departure but we were too far out. There was nothing to be done. By the time we landed in Singapore, the LAX flight had already left, and we stepped off the plane already running through the calculations in our heads: the queue at the transfer desk, the wait, the negotiation, the overnight hotel arranged on someone else’s timeline in a city we hadn’t planned to sleep in.

Two airline employees were standing at the gate as we walked off the jet bridge, holding a packet with our names on it. Inside was everything: a new routing, a hotel voucher for the night, a meal voucher, a taxi card, a printed card with instructions for every step from that moment until we boarded the next morning. The driver at the rank already had our destination. The hotel was expecting us. The room was ready. Every detail of the situation we had been dreading had already been worked through by people we had never met, before we had even landed. We walked off that plane steeling ourselves for a problem that had, without our knowledge, already been solved.

That is what you find when you actually step into mission. You arrive with your plans and your contingencies, ready to bring God somewhere, and you discover he was already there, already working, already further into the situation than you had imagined. You sit with someone far from faith and realize, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, that he has been pursuing them for years. The work was in progress before you showed up.

This is what John 3:16 is actually saying beneath its familiarity. Before any church existed, before any of us decided to follow Jesus, God was already sending. The mission originates in his nature and flows from his love. Missio Dei, the Mission of God, is the theological name for this reality: the mission belongs to God before it belongs to us. We do not launch it. We join something already underway, invited into a story that was moving long before we arrived, by a God who, for reasons that ought to stagger us, wanted us in it.

Where have you experienced God already at work before you arrived?
What would change if you truly believed the mission belongs to God before it belongs to you?
Who in your life might God already be pursuing right now?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/13/missio-dei-wk1-mon#comments 0 Missio Dei: INTRO https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/12/missio-dei-intro Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/12/missio-dei-intro

Most of us have heard the word “mission” and felt one of two things: a quiet guilt that we’re not doing enough of it, or a vague sense that it’s something other people do. The particularly bold, the cross-culturally gifted, the ones who pack up and move overseas. Either way, mission tends to feel like something outside our ordinary lives rather than something woven into the fabric of them. If that’s where you’re starting, you’re in good company. And you’re in the right place.

Missio Dei is a Latin phrase that simply means “the Mission of God.” It’s a theological term with a deceptively simple idea at its center: the mission doesn’t belong to us first. It belongs to God. It has been moving through history since before any of us arrived, since before the church existed, before the Great Commission was spoken, before Pentecost, before Bethlehem. God is a sending God. He sent his Son. He sent his Spirit. And in his extraordinary grace, he invites us into the story he has been telling since the beginning of everything.

These five weeks are not designed to make you feel more obligated. They are designed to make you feel more found. To show you that the God who has been pursuing this broken, beautiful world for thousands of years has also been pursuing you, and that your ordinary life is not outside his mission but right in the middle of it. We will look at why God sends at all, at the world he is sending us into, at Jesus as the shape and pattern of the whole mission, at the church as a community formed by sending rather than gathering, and finally at what it means to live with faithfulness while we wait for the King to return.

You don’t need a passport for this. You don’t need a particular personality type, a platform, or a theology degree. What you need is what you already have: a life that is somewhere, a neighborhood that is somewhere, relationships that are somewhere. The mission of God is not looking for specialists. It is looking for people willing to be present, to show up, stay near, cross the occasional uncomfortable line, and trust that the God who has been doing this work since long before you arrived is still, faithfully, going ahead of you.

Our hope for you over the next five weeks is simple: that you would begin to see your life as God sees it. Not as a private story running parallel to his purposes, but as a thread he has woven deliberately into the largest story ever told. The mission of God is already underway. Welcome to the journey.

Pastor Pastor Andreas Beccai.

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/12/missio-dei-intro#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK 5 - GROUP GUIDE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/04/broken-kingdoms-wk-5-group-guide Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/04/broken-kingdoms-wk-5-group-guide

INTRODUCTION: The following is a guide to help facilitate discussion between you and the person you’re studying with or with your Connect Group. Feel free to add, subtract, or change questions to fit the conversation, and pray for the Spirit to lead in all things.

OPEN: Think of a time when you were absolutely certain something was true — and later discovered you were wrong. How did that realization feel? What did it teach you about knowing, certainty, or humility?

SCRIPTURE READING
Read together: 2 Kings 22:8-11, 18-19, 23:1-3, 25-27

Josiah became king at 8 years old and led one of the biggest reforms in their history.

HEAD: Explore the Text

Share any wisdom, insights, or thoughts you received just from listening to the text, allowing the Holy Spirit to lead.
What were some of the signs that the people had not just lost the Word of the Lord, but had drifted from the heart of God and what He wanted for them?
Josiah immediately repents when he hears the Word of the Lord. What were some of the other potential responses he could have had? What do you think kept him open to be so quick to repent at this moment?
What do you think it might have been like to be in the crowd that day, and hear the word of the Lord spoken, maybe for the first time in your life?
Certainly in Josiah’s time, the reform was sweeping, but it didn’t take them long to drift back to their hold habits after Josiah was gone. How does reform become a matter of the heart, instead of just a checklist of external things done to appease someone?

HEART: Personal Reflection

In the course of your life, what is one or two specific versus that have really impacted you? Maybe they gave you a new understanding of yourself or God.
Have you ever experienced a real change of heart over an issue or situation in your life. What happened and did the change last?
Have you witnessed a dramatic change in another person’s life? Share with the group.
What do you think are the characteristics of real, lasting, change versus change that is easily susceptible to fall back to old patterns and habits?

HANDS: Practice This Week
Spiritual Practice: Listening to God’s Word

Did you know that God’s Word was meant to be heard before it was meant to be read? For this week, take time to simply listen to God’s Word being read. Choose some Psalms, or the gospels, or even a short letter like Philippians or Colossians.
After your experience, what was it like to listen to God’s Word, as opposed to reading it? Different? Similar? Any challenges? Any benefits?

Invite the group to check in next week about their experience.

FINISH WELL: Bring It Home

What is an area in your life where you see the need for reform? How can you commit to seeking reform in that area in the coming year?
What is an area you see in your church or community or workplace that could benefit from a heart full of love and grace? What would it look like to commit to praying over that need for a few months?

CLOSING PRAYER (Leader or Participant Reads) or Scripture to Memorize
Creator God,
You who formed the heart and designed the mind,
Who knows us more than we know ourselves,
Please, point out the areas in me that need more of you
Your Word, Your Spirit, Your Power.
Soften my heart and open my mind to what you need to do in me,
That my life may have you as the center and circumference of my faith.
Amen.

Pastor Paddy McCoy

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/04/broken-kingdoms-wk-5-group-guide#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - FRI https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/03/broken-kingdoms-wk5-fri Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/03/broken-kingdoms-wk5-fri

2 Kings 23:26–27 (NLT)
"Even so, the Lord was very angry with Judah because of all the wicked things Manasseh had done… The Lord said, 'I will also banish Judah from my presence just as I have banished Israel.'"

I’m hopeless when it comes to cars. A few years ago, I tried to replace a broken taillight. I watched the YouTube video, it looked straightforward enough, so I went out to the car feeling confident. I got the housing off fine and then there was a connector that simply would not budge. I tried everything, different angles, more force, less force, a screwdriver, watching three more videos to make sure I was doing it right. An hour later I was standing in the driveway having made things slightly worse than when I started. I ended up taking it to a mechanic who sorted it in about four minutes. Some things look fixable from the outside until you get in there and discover the problem is further down than you can reach.

That's where Josiah's story ends because after everything, the rediscovery of the scroll, the tears, the covenant renewal, the sweeping reforms, scripture lands with a heavy conclusion. We realize that the damage done by generations before him runs too deep to reverse. The exile to another country is still going to happen. One faithful king, however wholehearted, cannot carry the weight of that much accumulated and broken history.

This isn't a critique of Josiah. It's just honest about how far leadership can reach and where it runs out. America spent decades declaring a war on drugs, changing laws, increasing sentences, funding enforcement, cycling through administrations that each promised to finally fix it. And the overdose numbers kept climbing. Because the legislation was addressing the supply while the despair that created the demand went largely untouched. You can change a law without changing what people love. You can reshape behaviour without touching the thing underneath that keeps driving it.

Most of us have felt this somewhere, perhaps for you its a family pattern that keeps reasserting itself across generations no matter how much therapy or good intention gets applied. A wound in a community that keeps reopening despite everyone's genuine desire to move on and bury it. You do the right things, make real progress, and yet underneath it all there's something that doesn't shift because it’s further down than you can reach.

So Josiah's story doesn’t end with the satisfactory resolution of a 30min soap opera, but with longing. If even the best king, the most wholehearted, the most sincere, the most courageous cannot ultimately heal a broken kingdom, then something more is needed than better leadership or more sincere reform. Something that doesn't just change what people do but reaches whatever it is inside them that keeps pulling them back.

Josiah, like all stories in scripture, points forward without knowing it, toward a different kind of king, one who doesn't just rediscover the law but fulfills it from the inside out, one who doesn't just remove idols but slowly, painstakingly reshapes what people actually desire. The whole long arc of this story is leaning toward something Josiah couldn't provide but couldn't stop needing. Broken things need more than good leadership. They need resurrection. And that's a different kind of work entirely.

Where in your life have you been working at the surface level of a problem that might have deeper roots than you've been willing to look at?
Is there something you've been waiting for a person, a leader, or an institution to fix, that might actually need a different kind of healing altogether?
What would it mean for you personally to stop trying to manage the broken thing and instead bring it to the one who can reach further down than you can?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/03/broken-kingdoms-wk5-fri#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - THU https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/02/broken-kingdoms-wk5-thu Thu, 02 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/02/broken-kingdoms-wk5-thu

2 Kings 23:25 (NLT)
"Never before had there been a king like Josiah, who turned to the Lord with all his heart and soul and strength… and there has never been a king like him since."

A friend told me about her grandmother, someone she didn't particularly like growing up. She seemed cold, a bit harsh, not the warm grandmother type. It was only later, as an adult, that she found out her grandmother had raised seventeen children. Seventeen. And suddenly everything she'd written off as meanness started to look completely different. The sharpness was efficiency. The distance was someone who'd learned to ration her emotional energy across an almost unimaginable load. My friend said it changed how she saw her entirely, like she'd been reading the same person in a completely different translation.

I think about that story when I read this verse. Because the commendation Josiah receives is the kind that usually only makes sense in retrospect, when you know the full weight of what someone was carrying. This is one of the most remarkable things Scripture says about anyone. And what's striking is what it doesn't say. It doesn't say he was the most successful king, or the most powerful, or the one who finally fixed everything. It says he turned to God with everything he had, it's an incredible commendation. That's what gets remembered.

And then, if you keep reading, you find something that takes a moment to sit with. Even Josiah's extraordinary faithfulness doesn't reverse the long-term consequences of generations of drift. The exile still comes and the kingdom still falls. He does everything right and the system is simply too broken, the damage too deep, the momentum of generations too strong.

I've sat with people who carry a version of this weight. Parents who were present and faithful and watched their kids walk away from faith. People who showed up with integrity for years inside institutions that were too compromised to be changed from the inside. There's a particular kind of grief in that, the grief of faithfulness without resolution.
But I think Scripture is doing something careful here. The writer doesn't record Josiah's story as a tragedy. He records it as a commendation as if the wholehearted devotion itself is the thing, not what it produced, not what it prevented, just the orientation of a life toward God in the middle of circumstances he couldn't ultimately control.

Friends, sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is keep showing up honestly in a situation that isn't going to resolve the way you hoped. Most people around you won't see it clearly until much later, if ever. Josiah didn't know how his story ended. He just kept turning toward God with what he had. And two and a half thousand years later, that's still what gets said about him.

How do you define success in your spiritual life, by results or by faithfulness?
Where might God be inviting you to stay wholehearted even without immediate outcomes?
What helps you keep a tender heart in a hard environment?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/02/broken-kingdoms-wk5-thu#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - WED https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/01/broken-kingdoms-wk5-wed Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/01/broken-kingdoms-wk5-wed

2 Kings 23:1–3 (NLT)
"The king took his place of authority beside the pillar and renewed the covenant in the Lord’s presence… The king and all the people pledged themselves to this covenant."

A member of my church told me once that the worst day of her life wasn't when she found out her son was an addict. It was the day she finally said no to him. He'd done well for a stretch, long enough that everyone had started exhaling. And then he slipped. She did what she'd always done, what any mother would do, caught him before he hit the ground. For years that's how it went, recovery, addiction, recovery on and on. Until someone who had gone through it themselves, finally said to her, with more gentleness than it probably sounds: he has to hit rock bottom before anything real can change. You keeping him from the bottom is keeping him from the bottom. So she said no with a broken heart, and he ended up on the streets.

She prayed every single day for years not knowing if he was alive. The not knowing had a particular quality to it she still couldn't quite describe. And then one day he came back he wasn’t fixed, or suddenly transformed, but he was ready in a way he'd never been before. And slowly, over a long time, with a lot of help something real changed in him and he pointed his life in the right direction. What she did was right and necessary. But the external act and the internal transformation happened years apart, with a lot of suffering in between.
I think about that story when I read this passage. Josiah does something extraordinary. He gathers the entire nation, reads the scroll publicly, renews the covenant, and launches one of the most comprehensive reform movements the kingdom has ever seen. Idols are removed pagan altars are torn down and corrupt practices are dismantled. It's sweeping and real and it matters in the history of Israel.

And Scripture just quietly lets it sit there without resolving it. Because a few chapters later, after Josiah is gone, the nation drifts back. Which raises the uncomfortable question of how deep the renewal actually went, not in Josiah, but in the people who stood there and pledged themselves to the covenant that day. He could tear down the altars, but he couldn't tear down the desire for them.

Reform can change structures faster than it changes hearts. Behavioural change without internal transformation tends not to hold, you can restructure the external system, but if the brokenness underneath hasn't shifted, the old patterns find their way back through different doors. The mother couldn't change her son by managing his circumstances any longer. The change had to come from somewhere inside him that she simply couldn't reach.

Josiah does what good leaders do, he addresses what he can see and creates conditions for renewal. But most of us have done our own version of this. You make the change, have the conversation, set the boundary, and something does shift. But sometimes there's a else, a thing underneath you haven't quite got to yet. You've changed the outside but the inside hasn't caught up, or maybe you haven't let it. I think most of us have a version of this somewhere in our lives. Something we keep coming back to. Something we still haven't been fully honest with ourselves about. The external change matters, it just sometimes lets us feel like we've done the work when there's still something harder waiting a little further down. Sitting with what's in that gap is genuinely uncomfortable. Most of us would rather fix the next visible thing and keep moving

Where in your life are you focusing on external change without addressing deeper roots?
What habits or patterns might God be inviting you to examine beneath the surface?
What would true renewal, not just reform, look like for you right now?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/07/01/broken-kingdoms-wk5-wed#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - TUE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/30/broken-kingdoms-wk5-tue Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/30/broken-kingdoms-wk5-tue

2 Kings 22:18–19 (NLT)
"You were sorry and humbled yourself before the Lord when you heard what I said against this city… You tore your clothing in despair and wept before me in repentance. And I have indeed heard you, says the Lord."

For years, Lance Armstrong, seven time Tour de France winner, didn't just deny the doping allegations, he went after people. Journalists, former teammates, anyone who got close to the truth. He sued them and publicly humiliated them. He called them liars with the kind of confidence that made you wonder if maybe he was telling the truth after all. The defensiveness was so total, so aggressive, that people started to wonder “maybe we’ve just got it wrong.”

And then in 2013 he sat down with Oprah and said yes to everything. What's interesting isn't the confession itself, it's the years before it. All that energy spent managing the story, redirecting scrutiny, attacking the question rather than answering it. It's exhausting just to think about, and the whole time, the truth was simply waiting.

Which is what makes Josiah so amazing. When the scroll is read aloud, when he hears how far the kingdom, his Kingdom, has drifted from what God intended, he doesn't redirect. He doesn't question who found it or why it's being read now or what the political implications might be. He tears his robes and weeps publicly, the text makes it obvious that something just breaks open in him.

God's response to Josiah is almost startling in its simplicity: He says "I have heard you." Not "you fixed it," not "you reversed the damage." Josiah’s tender heart was enough to change the trajectory that his Kingdom was on.

In my research on differentiation of self (a measure of emotional self leadership) one of the consistent patterns is how hard it is for leaders to stay open when truth pushes back against them. The instinct is to harden, to protect the self-image, manage the exposure, control the narrative. And that instinct isn't stupidity. It's actually pretty understandable. But it closes something down that becomes very difficult to reopen, and the longer it stays closed the more energy it takes to keep it that way.

Armstrong spent years in that place. Josiah spent maybe thirty seconds. He heard the words, felt the weight of them, and just let them do what they needed to do. I think that's what Scripture means by a tender heart, it’s someone who cries easily when watching Rom Com’s, but someone who remains permeable to truth even when truth is costly. Someone who can still be reached. And it turns out that's exactly what God was looking for.

When was the last time God’s truth genuinely moved your heart rather than just your mind?
Where are you tempted to stay guarded instead of tender?
What might it look like today to let God meet you in honest humility?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/30/broken-kingdoms-wk5-tue#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK5 - MON https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/29/broken-kingdoms-wk5-mon Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/29/broken-kingdoms-wk5-mon

2 Kings 22:8–11 (NLT)
"Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the court secretary, 'I have found the Book of the Law in the Lord’s Temple!' Then Shaphan read it to the king. When the king heard what was written in the Book of the Law, he tore his clothes in despair."

In 1947, a Bedouin teenager named Muhammad edh-Dhib was wandering the cliffs near the Dead Sea looking for a lost goat. Bored, he threw a rock into a cave and heard something shatter. So he climbed in to investigate, and found clay jars, and inside them, linen-wrapped scrolls that turned out to be the oldest surviving manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible. He wasn't on a spiritual quest, he was just a kid chasing a goat and throwing rocks and he stumbled on The Word of God, hiding in ordinary rocky ground.

That's sort of what's happening in 2 Kings 22. A bit of background helps here. By the time we reach this chapter, Israel has been through generations of kings — most of them bad, a few of them catastrophically bad. The people have drifted so far from the God who brought them out of Egypt that other gods have moved into the temple itself. Altars to foreign deities, pagan rituals, the whole thing. It hasn't happened overnight. It's been a slow, generational erosion, each king nudging things a little further in the wrong direction, until eventually nobody alive can quite remember what faithfulness was supposed to look like.
Into this mess is born Josiah. He becomes king at eight years old, and somewhere in his teenage years something shifts in him. He starts caring about God and one day he orders the grown ups to restore the temple.

It's during that restoration project, while workers are patching walls and clearing out decades of neglect, that the high priest finds something in the rubble.The Book of the Law, the actual words God gave Moses. The document that was supposed to be shaping everything. Just sitting there in the dust. It would be like finding the declaration of independence in a dumpster behind a Chipotle.

I rang my sister a while back, nothing significant, just one of those calls you keep meaning to make. Her first words were "Andreas, it's been ages!" I laughed, said something like "I know, I know," and we got talking. But after the call I sat there thinking, has it really been ages? I pulled up our messages. It had been months. Actual months. And the strange thing was I hadn't noticed. I hadn't decided not to call her, and hadn't been avoiding her. Life just kept moving and somehow she'd drifted from the foreground into somewhere further back without me registering it.

I think that's what Josiah is reckoning with when he hears the scroll read aloud. The tearing of his robes isn't a cringey performance, it's someone suddenly seeing the gap between where they are and where they thought they were. It’s not that the kingdom had collapsed, nobody had staged a coup against God. But it was the kind of drift that happens when you're busy keeping things running and you assume the things that matter will keep mattering without any particular attention.

The grace in this story is that the scroll was still there, waiting to be discovered. God's voice hadn't disappeared, it had just been waiting for someone to stumble across it again in the middle of ordinary work. And the fact that it could be found at all, that's the thing that keeps me. Broken things begin to heal the moment honesty arrives. Not perfectly, not instantly, but honestly.

What truths about God or yourself might have been quietly buried under the pace of life?
Where have you been going through the motions without reconnecting to what matters most?
What would it look like to rediscover God’s voice in your life this week?

Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands

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]]> https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/29/broken-kingdoms-wk5-mon#comments 0 Broken Kingdoms: WK 4 - GROUP GUIDE https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/27/broken-kingdoms-wk-4-group-guide Sat, 27 Jun 2026 01:00:00 +0000 https://crosswalkvillage.com/blog/2026/06/27/broken-kingdoms-wk-4-group-guide

INTRODUCTION: The following is a guide to help facilitate discussion between you and the person you’re studying with or with your Connect Group. Feel free to add, subtract, or change questions to fit the conversation, and pray for the Spirit to lead in all things.

OPEN: Share with the group something interesting about your family history, ancestors, etc…. Is there something from your family history that carries on to this day? Something that has changed?

SCRIPTURE READING
Read together: 2 Kings 18:1-7, 2 Chronicles 29:1-11, 2 Kings 19:10-19, 20:1-6, 16-19

Hezekiah was one of the good guys in a line of plenty of bad ones. Pay close attention to the decisions he made that kept him humble and seeking God, first.

HEAD: Explore the Text

Share any wisdom, insights, or thoughts you received just from listening to the text, allowing the Holy Spirit to lead.
Do you think it was easy for Hezekiah to reform Judah, or do you think he would have gotten pushback for making so many changes to “the way things were”?
What do you think your response would have been to the letter from the King of Assyria? Hezekiah prayed, but do you think the response from the prophet Isaiah, verse 20-28, came quickly? How do you practice waiting on the Lord when your circumstances are difficult?
What are some ways Hezekiah could have responded to the news of his impending death other than to turn to God in prayer?
What do you make of God seemingly changing his mind about what would happen to Hezekiah? What happens when we pray for healing and healing doesn’t come?
In 2 Kings 20:16-19, Hezekiah receives word that the future for Judah is not great, Babylon would conquer them and take them away from Jerusalem. But he seems to accept that news because at least there will be peace in his times. Do you think Hezekiah could have done something to help prepare for the future, or to make a way for future generations? Why not turn to prayer as in previous situations? Is considering future generations a responsibility of a good leader, or is it just about making sure the people you serve now are cared for?

HEART: Personal Reflection

Many churches in North America are on the decline, and much of that comes from an unwillingness to change. Why is change/reform so hard for us and how do we overcome that fear?
Why do you think many of us have a hard time turning to God FIRST in prayer? Why does it seem like we try everything we know to do first, THEN, we pray?
Hezekiah seemed to break some family cycles of bad behavior. How do you and I work to do some of those same things in our lives?
What are you doing in your church, in your life, to help care for future generations?

HANDS: Practice This Week
Spiritual Practice: Seeking Reformation

Spend the next seven days praying over areas in your life, and in your church, that God may want to bring about change/reform.
After those seven days, write down your thoughts/insights.
Begin sharing your experience with some close friends and confidants; see if any of them share or can confirm your same feelings.
Choose a path to at least address one change in your life or in your church.

Invite the group to check in next week about their experience.

FINISH WELL: Bring It Home

Hezekiah was a man of prayer. What is one practice you could begin this week to help you turn to prayer more often as a source of strength, guidance, and growth?
Who is someone in your circle of influence that could use prayer for healing (mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually)? Can you pray over them and trust in God for the outcome?

Scripture to Memorize
1 One day Jesus told his disciples a story to show that they should always pray and never give up.” (Luke 18:1, NLT)

16 Always be joyful. 17 Never stop praying. 18 Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus. (I Thessalonians 5:16-18, NLT)

Pastor Paddy McCoy

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