Jesus said this to people who had just been shown the Temple — one of the most permanent-looking structures in the ancient world — and told it would be completely destroyed. They asked the natural question: when? His answer is remarkable. There will be wars, He says. There will be rumors of wars. Nation will rise against nation. Famines and earthquakes. He does not deny any of it. He says: these things will happen. And then He says four words that are almost impossible to absorb in the middle of a breaking news cycle: do not be alarmed.

The Kingdom of God does not operate on breaking news. There is no moment when the news cycle outpaces what God already knew. There is no headline He is reading for the first time. The events that send our hearts into freefall — the political upheaval, the economic uncertainty, the cultural unraveling — were all in the manuscript before the first chapter was written. Jesus was not naive about the world’s capacity for chaos. He was explicit about it. And after cataloguing its worst moments, He looked His disciples in the eye and said: do not be alarmed. 

Tomorrow you will hear a message that speaks directly into this. And the invitation is not to pretend the news is fine or to suppress the real weight of what’s happening in the world. The invitation is to become people so rooted in the Kingdom of God that when the world is alarmed, we are not — not because we are callous, but because we are anchored. An anchor does not  panic. It holds. Tomorrow, come ready to learn how to hold. Come ready to receive a perspective only the Kingdom can give.