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Heaven is not just one amorphous place. It consists of countless communities of various sizes, each with its own character. These communities are arranged into three basic levels, a highest, middle, and lowest. This general division is perhaps an interesting bit of trivia about the afterlife; but when we realize that each level of heaven can help us understand a level of our own mind, it becomes more relevant to the here and now. This Sunday we'll reflect on how understanding these levels helps us progress spiritually.

When Jesus’ disciples asked Him about prayer, He gave them the words that are now known as “The Lord’s Prayer.” This prayer is almost universally known in the Christian world. But it’s very popularity means we sometimes lose sight of its rich meaning. This Sunday we will slow down and appreciate the words of this prayer. It is not just universal because it is widespread, but because it contains the full breadth of heaven and the Lord.

How can something true also be false? It seems like a contradiction but it is actually something we do all the time. A truth does not exist in isolation: it gets its quality from its connection with other truths and its application to a given situation. When a truth is removed from its proper context and used to justify evil, it is no longer true, no matter how much we'd like to defend our behaviour by appealing to the "truth" of what we are saying or doing.

No one likes to fail. We actively try to avoid failure (as we should!). But failure is also unavoidable: it is part and parcel of trying to live a better life. Our own failures are reflected in the Lord's apparent failure. On the first Easter morning, before anyone knew He had risen, it seemed obvious that Jesus had failed. And yet through that apparent failure the Lord had the opportunity to overcome death, and hell, and sin, and so achieve true and lasting success. The path through failure leads to a better future.

The Old Testament prophets proclaimed that the Messiah would come to engage in fierce warfare against His enemies. And yet in the life of Jesus we see virtually no warfare! Even when He was arrested and crucified He did not resist. This is not because He was helpless; rather it was because the warfare that matter was a spiritual one: He resisted and conquered every hell, in His human life, and so became the One who can, for us and in our lives, conquer every hell once again.

In the Gospel of John, Palm Sunday is described in the context of the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead. There were those who knew of this miracle and hated the Lord for it; there were those who knew of it but kept quiet from fear; and there were those who knew of it and so joyfully confessed the Lord as their king. It was this last group that welcomed Jesus with palm branches. This Sunday we will explore how we too can bear witness to the Lord and rejoice in His coming.

Shortly before His death, a woman poured a flask of precious oil over Jesus's head. This would have been a clear sign of love and esteem for Jesus. But the disciples felt the oil could have better been sold and the proceeds given to the poor. We might even imagine that Jesus would agree with them! Yet Jesus approved of the woman's actions. We see in this a lesson that while the Lord does require us to serve others, we cannot neglect a loving relationship with Him as central to our spiritual lives.

In the midst of everyday life, it can be difficult to feel like things are truly getting “better.” But perhaps we can shift our perspective. Perhaps we can begin to see life the way God does—life not necessarily better in every moment, but always moving toward something better when viewed through the lens of eternity.

Many of Jesus's miracles consisted in healing the sick. But in the grand scheme of things He was only able to heal a tiny fraction of the people who have suffered, constrained to a relatively small geographic area of the world. So why did Jesus spend so much time healing people? As with all His miracles, it represents something about who God is: He is always able and willing to heal, but in our case to heal us spiritually. We'll look at how three of Jesus's healing miracles show us that God can heal us when nothing else has worked, when we think we are beyond help, and when we don't think we even deserve to be healed.

Often when we hear stories from the Word about the powerful enemies that conquered the Children of Israel and we read in the Heavenly Doctrine about the hatred of the devils in hell, we can think that our enemies and hell are formidable foes. But the reality is that hell has NO power at all. Come and learn why we do not need to fear the hells.

At the Last Supper, having shared bread and wine with His disciples, the Lord commanded, “Do this in remembrance of Me.” Holy Supper is an opportunity to remember the Lord: to remember what He did for us in giving His life; to remember the Divine Love that He shares with us; to remember the Divine Wisdom that inspires us. But remembering the Lord is not just a matter of thought; it is a matter of doing what He commands us. The best way to “remember” the Lord is to actively follow His teachings.

The Word is written in such a way that every word and concept has a deeper spiritual meaning. These meanings are threaded through the entirety of the Word, tying together disparate and varied stories into one story with one message. This Sunday we will follow one of these threads by exploring sleep and wakefulness. In this theme we learn about the need to be vigilant and awake spiritually, as well as the need to rest and sleep in the Lord.

Psalm 121 speaks of the Lord protecting your going out and your coming in. This speaks to times of transition, times in which it is especially crucial that we remain in the Lord’s care. A prominent example is the Children of Israel coming out of slavery in Egypt and going in to possess the Promised Land. But this story also illustrates the struggle of times of transition: between coming out of Egypt and going into the Land there was forty years of wandering the wilderness. As much as we would like to directly leave hardship and enter good times, more often than not there is an intermediate stage of trial and growth that the Lord must lead us through.

There are moments when something so unlikely and unexpected, and yet so wonderful, occurs, that we cannot help but see is as the hand of God at work in the world. But if God intervenes so forcefully in the world sometimes, it serves to highlight the many times when He does not (apparently) intervene. Why is one person miraculously spared from cancer, while thousands of others are condemned to die? The truth is that God’s Providence is not just at work in the unlikely and the obvious ways we see. His Providence extends to each and every moment of our lives, even down to the most mundane. He is never absent.

The central element of the baptism service is water. Water in general represents truth, and that is what it represents in baptism: just as water quenches thirst, the truth that is learned from the Lord and His Word quenches our desire for guidance; just as water washes away dirt, truth is the tool by which we wash away sin and evil. Conversely water represents falsity: just as a person needs to be lifted up and saved from drowning, the Lord leads us away from what is false and guides us to live based on His truth.