Sermon Media

While Jesus walked this earth, He was the Light of the world. And in the Sermon on the Mount, He said to His disciples, “You are the light of the world” (Matt. 5:14). We are not the source of light; Christ is. But as believers, we have His presence dwelling within us through His Holy Spirit. We are merely the beacons through which He shines into this dark world. Join us the Sunday after Christmas for one service only at 11:00 AM, and listen as Discipleship Pastor Jesse Hicks challenges us to shine our light in 2020.

Part of what makes the Christmas season so meaningful for many of us is the familiarity. We are familiar with the story, the decorations, the music, and the atmosphere. However, the unfamiliar frightens us at times. Mary and Joseph found themselves in an unfamiliar location, surrounded by unfamiliar people, in an unfamiliar environment. We will see how their response proves that God is still at work – and Christ can be found - even in the unfamiliar.

For Mary and Joseph the entire Christmas scenario was unexpected. Let’s be honest. Many of us don’t deal well with the unexpected. In this opening message we will learn how to respond when God puts us in an unexpected situation. Believe it or not, we can find Christ there.

When we look in the mirror some things are easier to see than others. We can see anger, we can see jealousy, and we can see guilt. But it is very difficult to see greed. Jesus warns us in this message that greed is a subtle thing. We will learn His inversion principle that giving actually results in receiving - just not the way we think.

One of the things about God’s nature that you’ll see in Scripture is He loves to fill empty things. From empty jars to empty stomachs to empty hearts, Jesus was about filling what was empty. The way we deal with emptiness in our culture is by living in a constant state of consumption. We are constantly consuming. And we love to get online and shop and buy things. We love to think about what we don’t have but what we’re going to get. And once we get whatever we wanted, we need something more. In this message Jesus turns it all upside down by helping us realize He can only fill us when we are empty.

Brokenness is a word that we don’t use much these days. It is not something we aspire to. You don’t want to write “broken” on your resume. We live in a culture that’s been termed “a throwaway culture.” When things break we throw them away. We don’t value repairing and fixing, making things new. In this message Jesus gives us a new lens with which to see broken things. For when Jesus looks at something broken, He sees something valuable.