MESSAGE ARCHIVE

Our very first study in our new home is a short Christmas series about families and different ways we encounter the holidays. Today we talk about stressed out situations and families. We tend to look back at the birth of Jesus (and the first Christmas) as a completely serene and peaceful event, we even sing songs about Jesus’ birth where we say, “All is calm, all is bright.” When we read the scriptures we actually see that everything surrounding the birth of Jesus was a stressful event for everyone involved. Mary and Joseph encounter a pregnancy before the actual wedding vows Joseph was not the father of this baby Joseph was prepared to divorce Mary An angel appears to Joseph to tell him to stick with Mary The town doesn’t get this angelic visit, so Joseph and Mary get judged for the rest of their lives.

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From Series: "Jingle All The Way"

As we head into Christmas, it is usually a time when family gets together in various degrees; sometimes those family interactions don’t go so well. We are doing a short Christmas series called “Jingle All The Way” because most people feel like we have to act happy and everything is OK when the hard family members show up (we “jingle all the way”). Plus it is the name of an old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie and we had to (at some point) use an Arnold movie title for something. If we are honest, we can all admit that families are hard. In the church we are called a family because God has made us family by adopting us, it starts and ends with Him. Even if you don’t have messed up people in your biological “family” you will have them in the church, so we want to help you to know how to navigate some of that. We plan to look at many dysfunctional family dynamics and then discuss how we are sent to make a difference and be Jesus’ hands and feet to this world.

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