The Bible opens in a garden and closes in a garden. In between, Jesus is buried in a garden, raised in a garden, and mistaken for the gardener. That's not a coincidence.

In the first of a two-part finale to the PLACE series, Pastor Steven introduces the E: Ecosystem. The word itself comes from the Greek for "home" and the idea of an organized whole. National Geographic calls it a bubble of life. Steven traces garden imagery across the full arc of scripture, from Eden to Psalm 1 to John 15 to Revelation 22, and invites the church to see itself in these same terms: a living, interconnected community rooted in a particular place, where everything and everyone contributes to the flourishing of the whole. Part 2 next week will map that vision directly onto the life of First Baptist Church.

There's a moment on the edge of a diving board where everything in you wrestles; the part that wants to jump and the part that wants to stay put. A poet calls it less dive, more surrender.

In this fourth sermon of the PLACE series, the C is Catalyst. Pastor Steven asks what it takes to become the kind of person, and the kind of church, that provokes real change. It starts inside: listening to God, honesty before God, loving like God, participating in God. These are the practices that ripple outward from the heart into the city. But the deeper turn comes when suffering flips the whole story from "what can I achieve?" to "how can I give myself away?" Dante ended the Divine Comedy with a single image: the love that moves the sun and other stars. That love is what we dive into. And the ripples belong to God.

Before anything was made, there was already fullness. "In the beginning, God" — and to be God, Pastor Steven says, is to be eternally abundant in goodness, joy, and beauty. Everything that follows is overflow.

In this third sermon of the PLACE series, the A is Abundance. Steven traces the spillover of God's goodness from the eternal life of the Trinity into creation, through the covenant with Abraham, into a promised land flowing with milk and honey, and finally through Jesus — who blows open the doors so that all people can draw close to the source. The question for the church isn't whether God's abundance is real. It's what we do with it: stay in the pool, or let it overflow into the common good of our city.