December 1-5
[M] Esther 7-10; Revelation 3
[T] Ezra 7-10; Psalm 97; Revelation 4
[W] Nehemiah 1-3; Revelation 5
[T] Neh 4-6; Psalm 98; Revelation 6
[F] Neh 7-9; Psalm 140; Revelation 7
Dwell Plan Day 241-245 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Esther 8–9 | God was working through all the twists and turns of this story—through decrees, reversals, danger, and deliverance—to make sure His people were still there when the fullness of time came. If Israel had been wiped out in Esther’s day, there’s no Mary, no Joseph, no Bethlehem, no cross, no empty tomb. So even when it looks chaotic, God is quietly holding the line, keeping His promises alive, making sure the family line of the Messiah is protected. The whole rescue in Esther isn’t just about that generation, it goes further. It was about God guarding the story that would one day bring Jesus into the world for all of us.
Revelation 3 | These seven letters have this ideal quality to them—not that these churches are ideal in any sense—they aren’t. What is “ideal” is the sort of example these seven churches are of all churches and all believers in all ages; that’s the point of the seven imagery. But what really hits hard are the anchors in each letter, the parts that are the same every time. Every time, Jesus says these three things, as if God is saying, this is the universal core message to all My people:
1. I know you. He says it every time, as if the reminder was essential itself! I know your circumstances. Your suffering, obedience, and disobedience are all personally known to Me. I’m paying attention and I care what you do, how you live, and how you worship. Wow. This is and always has been a personal God.
2. “To the one who conquers” is the next phrase repeated each time. To the folks that last until the end, who have the victory of perseverance, repentance, and faithfulness, all the winners in Him will have a series of rewards. All sorts of rewards, some mysterious like hidden manna, and some more clear like clean clothes. There’s so much at stake for us and so much promised to incentivize and encourage us. This is our victory in His great triumph over sin, death, and judgment.
3. The action commanded in every instance, repeated as a kind of mantra, so pithy and short you’ll always remember it: “he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” What’s the baseline command? Listen up, listen carefully, listen fully. Pay attention! Because in reading and knowing and practicing His words is victory and life and hope. His words will never be empty of power. Praise Him!
Revelation 3:15 | In our culture, we hear “hot or cold” and think in terms of good or bad because of that kids’ game where you get someone to guess by saying, “you’re getting warmer… colder…” But in the first century, Jesus is talking about something very different. Laodicea had terrible water. Nearby Hierapolis had hot, healing mineral water. Colossae had cold, refreshing mountain water. Both hot and cold were useful. But Laodicea piped in lukewarm, mineral-filled water through long aqueducts, and it often made people sick. So when Jesus says he wishes they were hot or cold, he’s not telling them to be “on fire” or “totally far from him.” He’s saying, “Be spiritually useful. Be life-giving. Don’t be a church that leaves people worse off.”
And that’s a word for churches in San Francisco. With so much need, pressure, confusion, loneliness, and spiritual hunger around us, Jesus wants his people to offer something real—something that heals, refreshes, strengthens. Something that actually helps. He’s warning us not to drift into a comfortable, lukewarm middle where our faith is polite but powerless, present but not impactful. He wants our communities to bring the kind of warmth that comforts the hurting and the kind of cold refreshment that wakes up the weary. In a city like ours, that kind of church is a gift. A lukewarm church just blends in. A hot-or-cold church points people to Jesus.
Tuesday
Psalm 97 | These praise poems that describe God in His majesty and glory all find their purpose and visualization in the images of Jesus in the book of Revelation. The pictures of the poet are all of fire and the earth melting like wax before a holy God. Who could this be describing? Who had ever seen the things that John saw in his vision? But here they are, vivid and electric with light, sound, and drama. Michael Bay is a hack at creating visual wonder next to our God. This consistency of visual drama about God does several things: The Jewish readers, who knew their scriptures, would have tracked the grand imagery of Revelation right away. This is the transcendent and holy God, the very same one from poems like this, imagined and prophesied with supernatural clarity centuries before John saw his revelation. They would have caught on to the parallels and similarities quickly and all that they reveal. This reveals the character of God, the great unchanging Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. This reveals the plan of God, a plan to judge and reveal His glory to all humanity. This reveals the splendor of God, who lives in unapproachable light. This reveals, for those who have the Spirit, that this same LORD of the Old Testament poems is truly our Lord Jesus Christ. Praise Him.
Revelation 4 | Revelation 4–5 is probably my (Jon’s) favorite section in the whole Bible. John pulls back the curtain and lets us see ultimate reality—not the chaos on earth, but the throne of God in heaven, steady and glorious. It’s the reminder that all of history sits under a throne that never shakes, and a God who never panics. This is where the story is really headed, and where it’s already anchored right now. When everything on earth feels unstable, this vision tells us what’s actually true.
John’s description of God’s throne reaches back to Ezekiel’s vision in Ezekiel 1—full of light, color, movement, and overwhelming holiness. Ezekiel saw living creatures, flashes of lightning, and a throne that seemed too glorious to describe. John sees that same God, the same blazing beauty, the same worship echoing around the throne. It’s as if both prophets are trying to put into human words the sheer majesty of a God who cannot be contained or simplified, only adored.
And this is the God who loves us, who listens to our prayers, who sent His Son for us. The One who sits on that throne is the same God who carries you through your ordinary days, hears your worries, and holds your future. Revelation 4 isn’t meant to intimidate us, it’s meant to lift our eyes and steady our hearts. The world can feel loud and unsettling, but above it all is a throne, and on that throne is the God of Ezekiel and John, ruling with perfect wisdom, power, and kindness.
Revelation 4:8 | This is going on right now. Right. Now. It was going on before you were born. It was going on before trilobites scampered across the oceans. It was going on before our sun, moon, and planets were shaped. Isaiah saw it. Ezekiel saw it. Both of them fell down. Notice that the whole falling down thing keeps happening—even in heaven. No one seems to need to be told to do it. God wonderfully picks folks back up again with tender words. There’s over a century between Isaiah and Ezekiel, and then another 600 or so years before John sees it here. It’s consistent and it’s trinitarian and it’s worship. There’s consistently four angels; we don’t know why. Angels are not the odd and ephemeral human bird-winged-creatures from Hollywood, they’re bizarre, and even more bizarrely different each time they’re seen by humans. But their message is all the same: nothing is more holy than our God. These messengers aren’t robots either, they’re persons too, which means this constant praising gig is a choice. This is what they want to do, or rather, there is nothing better or more wonderful than this to do. And all of these other folks are joining them. Which means this is not just a preview or merely for information. This is an invitation. This is going on right now. Right. Now. Will you join in?
Wednesday
Nehemiah 1:6 | Confession matters because it brings us back into honesty with God. Nehemiah’s whole story begins with one man dropping his guard and naming the truth about himself and his people, and God moves in power through that. Confession isn’t about beating ourselves up; it’s about agreeing with God about what’s broken and inviting Him to heal it. When the people of God confess, we stop pretending, we stop hiding, and we open the door for real change. It’s the place where grace gets in.
Nehemiah 2:4 | It’s life-giving to note the prayer habits and attitudes of the men and women of God. Nehemiah describes for us a crisis moment that he’s having. The pressure is on. Unintentionally Nehemiah had been wearing his heart on his sleeve, and the king notices his sadness. As the cupbearer to the king, he’s right in the king’s personal space all of the time. As cupbearer he’s also deeply trusted. He’s the king’s last line of defense against poison. So Nehemiah panics when the king notices his grief. What’s going on here?
Ancient kings were true tyrants, often born into their position and often believed to be a god or descended from one. If you so much as irritated or annoyed them, they were known to just get rid of you. Permanently. Nehemiah also had seen what sort of man Artaxerxes was first hand. Which is probably why he actually tells us he was “multiplied with fear” in the Hebrew. He’s in full panic mode. Pulse is quickening, respiratory rate beginning to increase, adrenaline is pulsing through his body. We’ve all experienced what that flush of terror feels like, making it hard to think.
And Nehemiah tells us “I prayed to the God of heaven.” What follows is not that prayer: what follows is what he says to the king. Which means he was praying in his head to God right before he started talking out loud, right in the middle of a back and forth conversation with someone who could destroy his life. Praying in real time. Battle prayer. Pleading on the go. Desperately crying out in one’s heart right after being put on the spot in front of everyone. God loves that sort of prayer. We must practice this sort of prayer. We need more of this kind of prayer. Catching these heroes of faith in the act of having faith, and seeing the circumstances and even results of God’s immediate action, should make us so bold.
Revelation 5:5–6 | I (Jon—obviously—Chris is too chicken) have a tattoo on my left forearm of the lion and the lamb. Of all the images I could have chosen, I landed here because this picture of Jesus has shaped me so deeply.
Look at how this works in the flow of the text: in verse 5, when one of the elders tells John the Lion of Judah is coming, we all brace for fierce strength and overwhelming power. Lions are scary. And we wait in suspense to see the Lion come forward in all of its power. But when John looks, in verse 6, the one who steps forward isn’t a roaring lion—it’s a bloody Lamb who has been slain. That surprise is the whole point. The Lion wins not by force but by sacrifice. The greatest power in the universe is revealed in self-giving love.
This image shows us the true heart of Christ and the true nature of His kingdom. He won by losing. He brought life by dying. He conquered not by crushing His enemies but by giving Himself for them. The Lion and the Lamb are not two different sides of Jesus—they’re one reality. Real strength looks like humility. Real glory looks like a cross. Real kingship looks like service. And when we see Him that way, we start to understand what kind of Savior we’re actually following.
And that’s the whole invitation of Revelation. This book isn’t here to scare us or entertain us with symbols; it’s here to strengthen the army of the Lamb—ordinary believers—so we learn to fight the way He did. Not with violence, not with dominance, but with sacrifice and love. We follow a Lamb who suffered and died and then walked out of the grave, and we trust that our path will look similar: suffering now, glory later. The Lamb leads us through the hard places and into eternal joy, and He teaches us to overcome the world by walking the same road He walked.
Thursday
Nehemiah 4:1 | This rage and anger against God’s people and God’s purposes is a recurring theme in the scripture, something we see most clearly in Jesus. They hated Him for no reason. There’s a running pressure across the Bible about this, a sort of constant conflict between those who know God and those who don’t. Cain kills Abel, and for what really? Jealousy about his sacrifice to God? What an irrational response, but how consistent. Here Sanballat plays the part, raving and troubling the Jews over and over again.
What do we learn from this? We should expect it, and not be caught off guard or dismayed by it. There will be resistance to God’s love and God’s purposes, and it won’t make much sense. It can come from other religious folks or from the world. It leaves you scratching your head. There really isn’t room enough in this town/ office/ family/ neighborhood/ club/ team for both of us? We see these conflicts in the world too, but there’s usually something at stake, something everyone wants and will compete for. It will make some sort of sense. But when you see that same sort of conflict with God’s kingdom, it doesn’t make any sense. What Nehemiah experienced is something we’ve experienced, and it’s just like He told us (which is why you can trust Him so deeply) “if they hated Me, they will also hate you.”
Revelation 6 | A lot of people read the seven seals and the trumpets and bowls that follow as a strict, literal timeline of events that will happen in a tight seven-year window right before the end of the age. That approach treats these visions like a newspaper from the future, mapping everything out in order. But that’s probably not what John is doing. Revelation is full of symbolic imagery, and the seals are meant to be seen, not charted. They show us patterns of how the world has always worked under human rebellion and spiritual darkness.
A better way to understand these visions is to see them as repeating cycles. Each set (the seals, the trumpets, the bowls) covers the same ground from a different angle. They describe the way Babylon, the world system opposed to God, keeps showing up across history: violence, economic injustice, oppression, idolatry, war, famine, plague—real things the world experiences again and again. And they show how God’s people, the army of the Lamb, respond with endurance, faithfulness, and sacrificial love. These cycles aren’t locked into one short period at the end; they’re describing the whole age between Jesus’s resurrection and His return.
This makes Revelation deeply relevant for the whole church in every generation. Instead of a book that only makes sense for a future seven-year crisis, it becomes a book that speaks into every moment of history. Believers in the first century, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and modern-day Christians in persecuted countries all recognize these patterns. They’ve lived through war, plague, corrupt empires, and spiritual deception—and they’ve clung to the Lamb in the middle of it. Revelation wasn’t written to satisfy our curiosity about the end; it was written to help the church stay faithful in the present.
The overly literal/chronological approach struggles because it flattens these visions into a rigid timeline and removes the poetry, symbolism, and prophetic imagination that John is using. It leaves the global church with a book that feels distant instead of urgently helpful. But when we read Revelation as a set of repeating, symbolic cycles, we see exactly what John wants us to see: Babylon is always rising, and the Lamb is always reigning. And in the middle of it, God’s people are called to endure—to hold fast, to love sacrificially, to stay loyal to Jesus even when the world feels dark. Faithfulness in the face of Babylon is how the Lamb wins, and it’s how His people conquer too.
Friday
Nehemiah 9 | This is a beautiful picture of how God’s people are meant to remember. The whole chapter is one long retelling of God’s faithfulness: from creation, to Abraham, to the Exodus, to the wilderness, to the promised land. Israel stands together and rehearses the story, not because God forgot it, but because they needed to remember it. This is how faith is strengthened: by looking back at what God has done and letting it shape how we live right now. And this is what we’re called to pass on to the next generation of believers, not just rules or traditions, but the story of a God who keeps rescuing, keeps forgiving, keeps leading His people home. Nehemiah 9 shows us that remembering isn’t optional for God’s people; it’s how we stay grounded, hopeful, and faithful in every season.
Revelation 7:9–17 | This scene of every tribe, nation, people, and language standing together before the Lamb is one of the most beautiful pictures in scripture. It shows us that the gospel doesn’t erase what makes us different, it flattens the things that divide us while celebrating the unique ways God has made us. John doesn’t see a colorless crowd; he sees a diverse family, shoulder to shoulder, worshiping the same Savior. What unites them isn’t culture or background or preference—it’s the Lamb who rescued them and made them his own.
And this is a glimpse of what God is building right here in our partnership between Petra, The Porch, and Cross & Crown. Our churches are all very different and filled with all kinds of people. We have no earthly reason to get along, but we have every heavenly reason to. That’s what makes this partnership so special. When we stand together, serve together, and worship together, we get to preview that Revelation 7 crowd. We get to show our city a unity that doesn’t make sense apart from Jesus. And one day, we’ll join that great multitude and lift our voices too—different stories, different cultures, one Savior.