By rights, every Christmas ever celebrated should have begun with a worship service. It’s literally hard to imagine something more appropriate. With Christmas now long buried under commercialism, this year we have the opportunity to vote with our feet against the trivializing of the One who is genuinely glorious, high, and noble. Life in Christ requires intentionality: join us for Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning worship. Christmas Eve at 6:00p, Christmas Morning at 10:00a.
• I grew up with the heaviness and occasional darkness of a home in which there was an unhappy marriage and not so much the presence of anything like hatred, but more the absence of love as it was intended to be (which I’m not sure either of my parents experienced in their own childhoods). So life for me has been a process of coming to understand the transforming nature of the grace and love of God, and that not only for myself, of course, but for the people of God, the nation, and the world: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away… that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:17ff).
• Most of us know this from the inside out: life is a journey of growing out from under a certain heaviness, a slow process of coming to believe a new life in Christ can be real and permanent. Christ is able to “make all things new” (Rev. 21) so that “without money” you can “come, buy and eat” (Isa 55). Isaiah uses the language of something ordinarily impossible because what Christ works in us, and offers us, is ordinarily impossible.
• I say all this by way of thanksgiving for you as a congregation and as friends: your sincere pursuit of Christ, your growth in him, your willingness to worship and serve him in all things — most ministers can only hope for what Lisa and I have in you. You have been, and continue to be, a significant part of our believing that God makes all things new. This Christmas we pray in thanks for you, for your increasing faith in the Lord Jesus, your love toward all the saints, that God would continue to give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him. May your new year be filled with the knowledge of the hope to which he has called you, and of the riches of his glorious inheritance. We love you and praise God for you.
Eric & Lisa