In this sermon, I discussed the importance of gathering and being in the presence of God, as emphasized in the third chapter of the book of Zephaniah. I highlighted God's desire to be among us and His promise to His people that He will be part of them. I also touched on the two gatherings mentioned in this chapter - the gathering of nations who've rejected God for judgment and the blessing of gathering for those who love Him. I emphasized the importance of connection, both among family members and with God, drawing parallels with a string of light bulbs that only work when each bulb is connected and the string is plugged into a power source. I encouraged listeners to dedicate their day to Jesus Christ, to be thankful for His blessings, and to make their homes a gathering place for Him.

Key Takeaways:
- God desires to be among us and promises to be part of us, as emphasized in Zephaniah chapter 3 ([22:01]).
- Connection is crucial, both among family members and with God. Just like a string of light bulbs that only work when each bulb is connected and the string is plugged into a power source, we need to be connected to God and each other ([25:37]).
- We should dedicate our day to Jesus Christ, be thankful for His blessings, and make our homes a gathering place for Him ([28:43]).
- We should strive to be a blessing to others, not just on special occasions but every day ([28:03]).
- Our homes should be a place where we teach our children about God, prayer, scriptures, repentance, worship, and being a witness for Jesus Christ ([20:11]).

Bible Passages:
1. Matthew 1:21-23
2. Philippians 2:15
3. Luke 2:1-20

Key Points from the sermon:
1. The importance of including Jesus in our daily lives and not just on special occasions or holidays.
2. The significance of our connection with Christ and with each other, likened to a string of light bulbs.
3. The role of our homes as the original church, where we should teach and practice faith.

Observation Questions:
1. What are the two names given to Jesus in Matthew 1:21-23 and what are their meanings?
2. How does Philippians 2:15 describe believers in Christ?
3. What is the significance of the events in Luke 2:1-20?

Interpretation Questions:
1. What does it mean for Jesus to be "God with us" as mentioned in Matthew 1:23?
2. How can we shine like lights in a dark world as stated in Philippians 2:15?
3. How does Luke 2:1-20 illustrate the importance of Jesus' birth?

Application Questions:
1. How can we make Jesus a part of our daily lives and not just a part of special occasions?
2. In what ways can we strengthen our connection with Christ and with each other?
3. How can we make our homes a place of teaching and practicing faith?

Day 1: The Power of Gratitude

Gratitude is a powerful force that can transform our perspective, our mood, and our relationships. It's a simple practice, but it can have profound effects. When we take the time to recognize and express gratitude for the blessings in our lives, we are reminded of God's goodness and faithfulness. This can help us to maintain a positive outlook, even in the midst of challenges and difficulties.

1 Thessalonians 5:18 - "Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus."

Reflection: Reflect on the past week. Can you identify three specific instances where you felt grateful for something? How did expressing gratitude in those moments affect your mood and perspective? Do you have a regular practice of expressing gratitude to God for the blessings in your life? If not, what is one simple way you could start incorporating this into your daily routine?

Day 2: The Call to Be a Blessing to Others

As followers of Christ, we are called to be a blessing to others. This means seeking out opportunities to show love, kindness, and generosity to those around us. It's not always easy, but it's a vital part of living out our faith. When we choose to be a blessing to others, we are not only helping them, but we are also demonstrating the love of God in a tangible way.

Genesis 12:2 - "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing."

Reflection: Can you think of a recent situation where you had the opportunity to be a blessing to someone else? How did you respond and what was the outcome? Reflect on your circle of influence. Who is one person you could intentionally seek to bless this week? What is one specific way you could do that?

1. "Speak of spiritual things, speak of Godly things, Eternal things. Yes, you pray, but keep the Lord in the middle of your celebration and then be thankful to God." [28:43]

2. "If God has blessed you, be thankful. Write your blessings down, count them one by one as the song says, and you are going to be amazed at what God has done. Be thankful for the gift of Jesus and for what he has done in your life." [29:19]

3. "We must be committed to the Lord Jesus Christ, we must be plugged into him so that we can be the light of the world, the people who shine like lights in a dark world." [26:11]

4. "God loves Gatherings. We see that very clearly in the scripture. He loves it when we gather for his glory, he loves us when we gather for the purpose of spiritual growth, spiritual identity, and spiritual purposes." [17:35]

5. "Jesus desires to be Emmanuel, God With Us. That means that God has chosen to gather with us. Will you dedicate your family and your home and your environment there to being a Gathering Place for Jesus where he is with you every day, with you every week because your time together as a family includes him as a very important, in fact, the ultimate person in that relationship?" [20:45]

Good morning and Merry Christmas, Grace for you! I hope you're having a great day celebrating the Lord's birth at your house. Thank you for being with us in our streaming service today.

This is a very different kind of gathering, isn't it? Gatherings are a big deal at holidays, especially at Christmas time. I can imagine that today you're going to be gathering around a table. Maybe you'll gather around a tree and share presents and open gifts. It could be possible that you'll be gathering around the fireplace today, as cold as it is, or around the fire pit in your yard.

Maybe you have a lot of times in your family when you gather around a birthday cake and sing "Happy Birthday" to somebody, or you gather around a new baby that has come into your family, and everybody's got to see the new baby. Or maybe you gather just around something new that you got—a new television, a new gaming system, a new car, a new pool table, whatever. Everybody just gathers around to enjoy and celebrate that.

Today is a very special gathering, a special day indeed. You're gathering in your home, and the home is the very first place where church is and what it's all about. If you read the Old Testament, the Old Testament Jews used the home as the teaching place, the discipling place, the place where children learn to pray, have faith, and even learn to repent and learn how to follow God.

So today we have a different kind of gathering. We're not in the church building, as I am, and as the music team is, but we're in our homes. How often, when you gather in your homes, do you really have a gathering to celebrate Jesus? Maybe you're very faithful together here on Sunday or most Sundays, and you do that with consistency, and that's good. We should do that.

But as you've gathered today in your home because of the worship service being streamed on YouTube, can we honestly say to ourselves that we often gather in our home to celebrate Jesus Christ? A family gathering that's about Jesus? I don't know, maybe you're too busy to do things like that. You leave home early, you get home late, kids are busy with homework and chores, and all the other things that just have to be done because our lives are so busy.

If we're not careful, we just kind of really squeeze Jesus out of every day and even sometimes out of every celebration. But I want to encourage you this morning, as you're worshiping with us, to make it your goal, to make it your pattern to include Jesus in family gatherings as you worship and grow and follow Him.

I wonder if there's a need, perhaps in your family, to make these family gatherings not just dependent upon a holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter, but every day to be emphasizing and recognizing the importance of Jesus Christ being the center of attention in your home.

You know, God loves gatherings. We see that very clearly in the scripture. You look at the feasts of the Old Testament, in those times when all of the Jewish believers were to come together at the temple and join together in their celebration of Jehovah God. He loves it when we gather for His glory. He loves us when we gather for the purpose of spiritual growth, spiritual identity, and spiritual purposes.

The whole concept of God gathering with us is seen in the Christmas story in the Book of Matthew. We are told that Jesus is to be called two different things. First of all, you're to give Him the name Jesus. Why? Because He will save people from their sins. Secondly, you're to give Him the name or call Him Emmanuel because He's going to be God with us.

He's a God who wants to gather with us, a God who wants to spend time with us and be with us, calling us to Himself, blessing us with the abundance of life in the fullness of His presence.

In our church's description of our identity, we like to use the word "Grace" as an acronym, and it has special meaning to us. The letter G stands for our Gospel identity, being found in Jesus Christ. We belong to Him; we are His family. That's our identity—we're the family of God.

The letter R stands for the relational community, the community that we have with each other, the community that you have in your family with each other as believers in Jesus Christ. In that relational community, there is a standard of truth, which is the authority of God's Word. It guides our life, enriches us, teaches us, and builds our faith up as we build our lives around it and have times when we dig into the Word of God.

That brings us then to the place where we have a compassionate sense of caring. That's what the letter C stands for. We care for one another. We gather with people, we come to know each other, we share our lives with each other, and we care with great compassion.

Then that is followed by the E—the empowering of the Holy Spirit, the empowered presence of the Holy Spirit in our life. When we are gathered together in the church house or in your house, we experience that presence of the Holy Spirit. As we've learned about this past fall, as we walk with Him, He empowers us to do so many things we could never do on our own.

As we think about our homes being the original church, this is the place where you should be teaching your children to pray, to read the scriptures, to hide them in their hearts. You should teach them what it means to repent, what it means to worship, what it means to be a witness for the Lord Jesus Christ.

We need to be reminded, I think today, that even as we are gathering for the Christmas celebration in our homes for this special occasion, that every single day ought to be a gathering place in our home for the Lord Jesus Christ. Because Jesus desires to be Emmanuel, God with us. That means that God has chosen to gather with us, and we're doing that today around the theme of the birth of our Savior.

I want to ask you this question: Will you dedicate your family and your home and your environment there to being a gathering place for Jesus, where He is with you every day, with you every week? Because your time together as a family includes Him as a very important—in fact, the ultimate—person in that relationship.

We see the importance of gathering in the mind of God throughout the scripture. Most of the time on Christmas Day, you might think that I would be reading from Luke Chapter 2 or Matthew Chapter 1, but God has laid a different passage on my heart today. It's one of the Old Testament prophets, one of the minor prophets named Zephaniah. You may want to open your Bible to that; it's near the end of the Old Testament—just three short chapters.

In this third chapter of the book of Zephaniah, God emphasizes His desire for gathering, for being in our midst and being among us. This is a chapter in which God is making a promise to the remnant of His people that He will come to them, that He's going to be part of them, and He wants to be in their midst.

There are actually two gatherings mentioned in this chapter. The first one is not a very happy one; it's about the gathering of nations who've rejected God for judgment. But He spends the rest of the chapter then speaking about the blessing of gathering that will be from God because of those who love Him and look forward to Him.

He says in Zephaniah Chapter 3, verse 15: "The Lord has taken away the judgments against you; He has cleared away your enemies." Now listen to this next one: "The King of Israel, the Lord, is in your midst. He's with you; He's Emmanuel. He wants to be with you, and because He is in your midst, He says you will never again have to fear evil."

On that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, "Fear not, O Zion, and let not your hands grow weak." And here it comes again: "For the Lord your God is in your midst; He's with you, the Mighty One who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness; He will quiet you by His love; He will exalt over you with loud singing."

"I will gather those of you who mourn for the festival so that you will no longer suffer reproach. Behold, at that time I will deal with all your oppressors, and here's what I'll do," He says. "I'll save the lame; I'll gather the outcasts; I will change their shame into praise and renown in all the earth. At that time I will bring you in, and at that time I will gather you together, and I will make you renowned and praised among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your eyes," says the Lord.

As you read those verses, it is so obvious that the Lord desires to be gathered to us. He desires to be in our midst. He doesn't want to be just left for Sunday or when we show up at the Grace View Baptist Church building. He wants to be gathered with you in your home.

I want to encourage you this morning to gather together—not just around the tree, or the fireplace, or the table, or the gifts—but to make today a gathering for the presence and the gift of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Apostle Paul said something to us, and I'm going to read it from the King James Version, that is so important. In the middle of talking about a whole lot of wonderful things God did for us through Jesus Christ, he comes to the middle part of Chapter 1 and he says in Ephesians 1, verse 9: "Having made known unto us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself."

Now listen to this verse 10: "That in the dispensation of the fullness of times He might gather together in one—that is, in Jesus—all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on the earth, even in Him."

There is this desire of God all throughout the scripture for us to be united with each other but also to be gathered together with Him. That's Emmanuel—that's God with us, the God who loves to gather with you.

I want to encourage you this morning, as you think about celebrating Christmas, that this would be a day when you make it a holy gathering—a day when you understand how you really can't even be the family or the marriage that God wants you to be unless you are connected to God and to each other in a very important relational commitment.

When I was a kid, I always looked forward to Christmas decorations and putting the lights on the trees. But a long time ago, the way the lights were is if you had one bulb that was out on the string, the whole string wouldn't work. You would go through the process of unscrewing the bulbs and putting in a new one, and go to the next, and then go to the next until you finally found the bad bulb.

Once you got that bulb replaced, all the lights would come on. What that shows us is the importance of connection—the lateral connection of bulb to bulb, person to person in the family—moms and dads, children and parents being connected to each other in Christ.

But there's an even more important connection for that string of light bulbs, and that was that it had to be connected to the plug, the wall, the socket where the electricity came from. We must be committed to the Lord Jesus Christ; we must be plugged into Him so that we can be the light of the world—the people who shine like lights in a dark world.

According to what Paul said in Philippians 2:15, it is our connection with Christ that enables us to shine like lights in a dark world. You are the light of the world, a city that cannot be hidden because you're on a hill. But God wants to be the light in your life—not just on Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or Easter, or some other special day, but every day.

I want to encourage you, Grace for you, to let this day be a day that is truly dedicated to Jesus Christ. We say that, but are we too busy for that? Are we too committed to other things?

It doesn't take a long time. You can just start this day by having dads, men, lead your family in reading Luke Chapter 2, verses 1 through 20. That'll take you about three or four minutes, and you can share with them how important this day is from the standpoint of eternity and what Jesus Christ has done for us.

Let them know what the first real Christmas was all about. Maybe after that, you can look for a way to be a blessing to somebody else. You can look for ways—not just on Christmas, because for most of us that's already done—we've given our gifts to the nursing home and to Team and whoever you've blessed.

But we start as a process of living our lives, saying, "How can I be a giver? How can I be a blesser of people that are in my circle of influence—my neighbors, my co-workers, my school classmates? How can I be someone who gives blessings every opportunity that I have?"

Celebrate Christ when you sit down at your meal today or this evening. Invite Him. It's not just thanking Him for the food that you have, but invite Him to the table. Then let your conversations at that table be geared around the fact that Christ is there with you. Speak of spiritual things, speak of godly things, eternal things. Yes, you pray, but keep the Lord in the middle of your celebration and then be thankful to God.

Now, I know Thanksgiving was last month, and maybe you got all the Thanksgiving you could in your system. I don't know. When I was a kid and people gave me Christmas gifts, my mother was pretty adamant that I would write thank-you notes to the people that gave me gifts.

I remember being really little and going to a department store like Sears or JCPenney or someplace and standing in line to wait to tell Santa what I wanted for Christmas. I would give him my long list and then be done. He's supposed to do his part, right? I don't ever remember as a child writing a thank-you note to Santa for any of those things.

But when people gave me gifts, I was to be thankful. If God has blessed you, be thankful. Write your blessings down, count them one by one, as the song says, and you are going to be amazed at what God has done. Be thankful for the gift of Jesus and for what He has done in your life.

So thanks for being with us today. I guess the next time I'll see you, it'll be next year. So have a Merry Christmas, and may you and your family be blessed by the presence of Jesus Christ, who has chosen to gather with you today.

God bless you! Thank you for joining us this morning. We pray you'll sing one last song with us, and then please enjoy this day with your family in the spirit of Jesus.