Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
You may be.
We're going to continue our worship this morning with our confession of faith. Our confession is taken out of the Westminster Confession. And we're going to deal with the questions and answers that deal with who Jesus is.
And so we'll be coming out of questions 3, 20, 21, and 8.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to read the question and I'm going to ask you to respond to the answer, which will be up on the screen.
What do the scriptures principally teach about the promise of salvation?
What did God promise concerning the coming of the Savior?
Let us pray together.
Heavenly Father, we come before you today with hearts full of gratitude and awe, knowing that you alone are God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, perfect in unity, boundless in love, and unshakable in faithfulness.
From the very beginning, you promised to rescue us, and through the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ, you fulfilled that promise. What a mystery, Lord, that the eternal King of glory would take on flesh to bring peace to a broken world and light to our dark hearts.
You are a God who keeps his word, and we stand in awe of your covenant faithfulness that never fails. Father, we thank you for sending Jesus, our Prince of Peace, whose kingdom will never end.
Jesus, we worship you as our Savior and King, the fulfillment of every promise, and the perfect expression of God's grace and truth.
Holy Spirit, we praise you for opening our eyes to this truth, for drawing us to Christ, and for shaping us day by day to reflect his righteousness.
Lord, it's hard for us to grasp the beauty of your oneness and your threeness, one God and three persons, working together in perfect harmony to save and redeem your people. But we know it is true, and we rest in that truth today.
Lord, as we reflect on the promise fulfilled in Christ's birth, may our lives reflect his peace, his justice, and his righteousness.
Help us to trust you more deeply, to love you more fully, and to shine the light of Christ to those around us.
Strengthen our faith when it feels weak. Renew our hope when the world seems dark, and give us the courage to live as citizens of your kingdom.
Even as we wait for the day when Christ will return and make all things new, we pray this in your name. Amen.
Let us stand together and sing "Angels from the Realms of Glory," hymn number...
Pray together.
Gracious God, we thank you for the greatest gift of all, your Son, Jesus Christ, the fulfillment of your promise and the expression of your boundless grace.
As we give today, let it be in response to the inexpressible gift you have given us. Teach us to give with hearts filled with gratitude and joy, thinking that you will use these offerings to spread peace, justice, and righteousness of your kingdom.
May our giving reflect the generosity of the one who gave everything. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Well, if you would like, you can open up your Bibles to Isaiah chapter 9. We're starting a new series today.
Oh, we need to dismiss Let's Grow.
Yeah, Let's Grow, you can go. They're headed out the back. Thank you for the reminder.
Yes, open up Isaiah 9. New series today, "Generous, Our Generous Lord." Don't we serve a generous Lord? Amen. He's a good God. He loves us. He cares for us.
But sometimes we can get our focus on the wrong things. And we're going to talk about a little bit today about trusting, trusting in the wrong things rather than trusting in the God of hope.
And so Isaiah chapter 9, I'm going to read in the CSB version. The words are up on the screen. It says this:
"Nevertheless, the gloom of the distressed land will not be like that of the former times when he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali. But in the future, he will bring honor to the way of the sea, to the land east of the Jordan and to Galilee of the nations.
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; a light has dawned on those living in the land of darkness.
You have enlarged the nation and increased its joy. The people have rejoiced before you as they rejoice at harvest time and as they rejoice when dividing spoils.
For you have shattered their oppressive yoke and the rod on their shoulders, the staff of their oppressor, just as you did on the day of Midian.
For every trembling boot of battle and the bloodied garments of war will be burned as fuel for the fire.
For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, and the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
The dominion will be vast and his prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now and forever. The zeal of the Lord of armies will accomplish this."
And this is the word of the Lord.
And you may be seated.
So I don't know if you've noticed or not, but we're in the Christmas season.
That was a quick turnaround from Thanksgiving, right? That was just Thursday and now we're already gearing up for Christmas.
I don't know about you, but when I turned on Netflix to see what was going on, all of a sudden, I was in the Christmas season. All I could see were all the Christmas movies, right? They were all front and center.
And so now the Christmas movies are playing. What's your favorite Christmas movie?
So during this time of the year, Hollywood, obviously, they're looking for a lot of people to come to the movies. Everybody's on break. And so they have some movies that they're promoting and they're trying to entice people to go to.
That's pretty typical around this time that they really highlight some movies. I don't see a lot of Christmas movies coming out yet, but they do have two movies that are getting high push right now at the movie theaters.
One is Gladiator 2, right? It's going to be terrible. I'm not going to like it, but I'm going to watch it anyway. It's like one of those things you have to do. It's like when they come out with a new Star Wars movie, you have to watch it. You know it's going to stink, but you have to watch it anyway.
But then there's the other movie, which is Wicked. Some people are excited about Wicked.
Anybody seen it yet? Okay, we got some people who've seen it. So Wicked is a big, you see a lot of promotion going out with the movie Wicked.
And as you may be familiar with, Wicked really is a bookend. It's an origin story of Galinda, the White Witch, and then the Wicked Witch, the Green Wicked Witch.
What's that?
All right. Anyway, y'all are interrupting me. I'm joking.
Anyway, but anyway, so we've got this movie that's coming out. It's an origin story. We learn the origin of how the Wicked Witch became evil.
And then we also see Galinda and her origin story. It's part of that, but also a bookend. I don't want to tell you a whole lot, but actually, bookends. It's a bookend.
It's a story that starts before Dorothy arrives in Oz, and then it ends after Dorothy leaves Oz. And so Dorothy is right in the middle of this.
We're familiar with The Wizard of Oz, really is what the movie is about. It's bookending. It's a movie of The Wizard of Oz.
And so if you're familiar with Oz, which probably most of you are, I'm sure just about everybody has seen it. If you haven't seen it, sorry, I'm going to spoil it just a little bit.
And what is the story of The Wizard of Oz? Dorothy is in a storm, in a tornado in Kansas, and somehow she winds up. The house is lifted up by the tornado and dropped in Oz right on the top of one of the Wicked Witches.
And what do we hear right off the bat? The Wicked Witch is gone. Ding dong, the witch is gone, right? The munchkin land. We're in munchkin land.
And they're really happy about that. But all Dorothy can think of, all Dorothy wants, is she wants to get back home. And she's not really sure how that's going to happen.
So the Munchkins tell her, well, if you just follow the yellow brick road, it will lead you to the Wizard of Oz. And when you get to the Wizard of Oz, he will give you everything you wish for. Because the Wizard of Oz is all-powerful.
And so she sets off on her course. And as she's on her way, she meets the Scarecrow. She meets the Lion. She meets the Tin Man.
And when she meets each one of them, what does she tell them? She has heard that she's got a promise to believe and a hope that she can get home.
And as she learns more about the Lion and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, she comes to understand that they're longing for things as well.
And what does she tell them? That all of her longings, all of their longings, can be fulfilled, just like the Munchkins, if they get to the Wizard.
And so the Scarecrow, you can have a brain if you can just get to the Wizard. Lion, you can have courage if you just get to the Wizard. Scarecrow, you can have a heart if you just get to the Wizard.
So they're off to see the Wizard. They go to see the Wizard. And what do we find when we get to the Wizard? The Wizard really isn't all-powerful and all-knowing, is he?
He's just somebody who can project a lot of magic and a lot of power. He can project a lot of illusion and give the projection that he can answer all of their hopes and dreams.
But in reality, he has no power whatsoever to do any of that. Instead, he's behind the curtain and he's pulling the strings.
And so all of the land of Oz has placed a false hope in what the Wizard can do.
What kind of false hopes do you place your heart in? What do you look to and place as a false hope in your life?
You know, Christmas actually can be that opportunity where we begin to place our hopes in the wrong things.
Now, I love Christmas. It's my favorite time of the year. You know, the first thing we do on Thanksgiving Day is we get the Christmas tree out after we eat, do all that other stuff.
We turn on the Christmas music, get the Christmas tree out. We put the lights on. We put the ornaments on. We drink hot cocoa. We sing "Last Christmas" by Wham.
Yeah.
But, you know, and there's just something nostalgic about Christmas. Isn't that the truth? Don't you all just feel that nostalgia kind of building up?
You begin to think about when you were a child and that day that you would race down at 3:30 in the morning and wake your parents up and they tell you to go back to bed, right?
But that anticipation of going down at Christmas and it's beautiful and it's just something about that. We build up a lot of nostalgia about that.
And the reality is the world really works up that nostalgia. They really pump that up. Most towns will decorate their town with decorations.
You go into the mall and that's what happens. You get bombarded with advertising. You know, your Thanksgiving Day routine is to watch Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
What is it? It's really just three hours or however long of just mass marketing. They're marketing retail. They're marketing products. They're marketing low-level musicians who are trying to sell some records, right?
There's just a lot that's going on and everybody is invested in building up your anticipation, your nostalgia about Christmas.
And what happens is we begin to get our eyes off of why Christmas is so important.
It's a beautiful time of year. I love it and I'm going to embrace it as much as I can. But you begin to see that culture is really kind of swaying, you know, swaying culture away from Christianity.
Case in point, and listen, I get it. We are in an increasingly growing secular nation. And so that's just the reality of it.
But I went into Walmart to buy a couple of things the other day. I'm like, I'm going to buy a couple of things. I'm going to buy a couple of things.
And while I was in there, what I was noticing was, like, I could see shirts or sweaters that had like a skateboard dude saying like a party on whatever, X, Xmas, right?
Or I saw, I remember seeing a pillow, a red pillow with writing, white writing on it that said "Mary," as in M-E-R-R-Y.
But I couldn't find the pillow that said Christmas.
Christmas, and I began to look around the store, and I noticed that the word Christmas, you're going to be hard-pressed when you go to this Walmart to find the word Christmas anywhere.
You're going to be hard-pressed to find any nativity scenes anywhere, and like I said, I get it, and I understand the area that we live in.
I'm sure if you went into middle America somewhere, you're probably going to see Christmas and the nativity at the retail stores, but I get what the culture is all about.
But my point is that what we're seeing is that our eyes have been turned away from the idea of what Christmas is all about, and as I said, Christmas can become that opportunity where we place our false hope.
Why? Well, you think about gifts, you think about love, you think about hope, you think a lot about a lot of the themes that go along with Christmas.
We even have songs that talk about having peace on earth, goodwill towards men, kind of like this altruistic, if everything was just good and peaceful and the world was at rest.
That's what we long for, but the problem is we're longing for it, and we're looking for the answers in the wrong things, and that's why Christmas can be a little bit of a misguided place of hope, a false hope.
It can be more than a time of year. Christmas can be that time of year where we recognize this misplaced hope, and this is what I mean by that.
We need to be mindful about how we celebrate this season, how we celebrate Christmas, because it can be a false hope. It can even be kind of an illusion.
What I mean is for the next four weeks, we're going to experience a great time of year full of nostalgia, marketing, advertising, the idea of an altruistic, perfect world, but here's the reality.
When the lights come down and the tree is discarded and the marketing shifts to Valentine's Day, and the gifts gather dust, right?
My kids, they get the Lego, they put it together, and that's it. That Christmas Lego that they got, that's it. Two hours putting that together, and it's done. They put it on the shelf, and it gathers dust.
The illusion of Christmas fades.
If we celebrate Christmas for its own sake, here's the deal. The darkness remains. It remains because it never truly lifted.
Christmas can be like a palliative therapy. It just covers up the symptoms. It covers up the problems.
The light we long for is a fountain and a tree adorned with ornaments. The true light that we're seeking is Jesus on the tree, the one who shed his blood.
He is the one who gives us lasting hope, and we know this, yet we can get our eyes off of that prize. We can get our eyes focused on the wrong things.
Christmas is a time of year for God's people. Here's the deal. When you're thinking about, what is Christmas? What am I supposed to do that Christmas?
Celebrate. Dive into nostalgia. I get it. Enjoy it. Embrace it, right? But at the same time, Christmas is that time of year for God's people to realign their hope with the true promises of God.
That's what Christmas is all about. It's realigning or making sure, restoring our alignment, making sure that we have our eyes fixed on the true hope.
And so when we look at Israel, we begin to understand what Isaiah chapter 9 is all about.
Isaiah chapter 9, verse 1. I'm going to kind of go through Isaiah chapter 9 a little bit. Verse 1 says this:
Okay, let me just talk a little bit about Isaiah. Isaiah is a very unique writer. Well, actually, not really unique, but when he writes, he writes in a unique style.
He writes in a way where he's talking about a lot of things. Some things you understand, some things you don't have any idea what he's talking about.
Then every once in a while, he comes up with just this powerful, impactful, universal point. They call Isaiah the fifth gospel.
Why do they do that? Because it talks so much about Christ. More than any book in the Old Testament, Isaiah talks about the coming Messiah.
And so, when we look at here, the first verse 1, when it's talking about, "Nevertheless, the gloom and the distressed land will not be like that of the former times," when he humbled the land of Zebulun and Naphtali, what's going on is, back in the day before Isaiah, at the founding of Israel, we know the history of Israel.
And it was a very sordid history when it comes to God. We see that they were constantly in this state of being on fire for God and then drifting away, falling into worshiping false idols, following after the wrong things, indulging in things that were not of God.
And then God would do something. He would bring some kind of judgment and the whole goal was to bring some sense of restoration.
He might bring judgment. He might set up a good king. We see David. We see throughout the land of Judah. We see every once in a while a good king would rise up and would bring back revival and restoration.
But the end was always the same. They never maintained a level of their faith into Jehovah.
And so what God says in Isaiah is that I'm going to do something a little bit different. No longer am I going to bring up judges against you. No longer am I going to allow you to backslide and be in need of restoration.
What I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take you out of the promised land. Remember, Israel was the promised land.
And what God said was your judgment would be, I'm going to remove you from the promised land.
And so reading that, the very first word that we see in Isaiah chapter 9 verse 1, it says, "Nevertheless."
Now, whenever you see nevertheless or otherwise or therefore, that tells you that it's in response to something else.
And to understand what that response is, you have to go back to Isaiah 7 and Isaiah chapter 8.
Isaiah chapter 7, what we see is that as God is bringing judgment on Israel, how he's using, how he's bringing judgment is he's using the nation of Assyria on the land of Israel.
And this Assyrian army, this Assyrian nation is enormous. And yet you have little Israel and even little old smaller Judah.
Remember at this time, Israel is a divided kingdom. You have the north and the south kingdom. You have Israel in the north, you have Judah in the south.
And so this Assyrian army is wiping out everybody and they're coming and working their way to Israel and they're going to come and conquer Israel.
And so what happens, remember, Israel and Judah are divided. They're not friends right now. They're kind of in a civil war state with each other.
And what happens is Israel comes to the king, King Ahaz at that time, and they tell him, look, in order for us to defeat the Assyrians, we need to join together. We need to form an alliance.
Yet God is telling Ahaz that he needed to trust in God. He's telling Ahaz not to make an alliance with the northern kingdom or anybody else.
But what Ahaz does is he says, you know what? I'm not going to form an alliance with Israel. I don't think that they can protect us.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to create an alliance with Assyria.
And we know through history, what happens is that the Assyrians come in and they destroy Israel.
But through this alliance, for whatever reason, they're going to destroy Israel.
And for that reason, God keeps Judah. Well, we know why, because it was prophesied.
Because King David was from Judah, God said that they would always remain, that they would always be the land of Judah.
And for that reason, God restores the land of Judah. But he says to Ahaz, I'm still going to bring judgment on you because you did not trust in me.
I told you to trust in me, the sovereign God, the only one who can protect you.
And instead of doing that, what you did is you made an alliance with the Assyrians. That's chapter seven.
And then in chapter eight, we see all of the judgment that is going to be beset upon Ahaz and the kingdom of Judah.
That's what's going on in chapter eight. And then when we get to nine, he says, nevertheless, and that nevertheless is a powerful thing.
And this is what God does over and over again. Anytime that the people of Israel would go through a moment of struggle and difficulty, God would always lay out a promise.
A promise of hope, letting them know that God would still at some point restore them.
We see that in this timeframe where the people are taken into exile and God says, and they're trying to figure out what they need to do during exile.
God says to get married, build houses, plant your families and your lives here in exile, but be a welfare to the city.
And then he goes in and says, for I have plans for you, plans to prosper you.
God does this over and over again. He gives us promises in the midst of our darkest hour.
If you're in a dark hour, what's the promises that God is making to you? Because he is making them.
Anytime we're in a dark hour, God, his plan is always to restore us and to carry us through these dark moments in our lives.
And so we see this going on in Isaiah chapter nine, that he says, nevertheless, I'm going to give you a hope, a hope to sustain.
And we see that he does this. He desires to restore his chosen people. And that's what Isaiah later in the chapter is all about.
We see that in Isaiah chapter nine, he addresses this idea that he will restore, that he will restore them. He will have a promise for them.
But first of all, they're going to go through a difficult time. And Isaiah 9:6-7 gives us an idea of this difficult time.
And here's what we need to understand about this difficult time that they're going to go through, that God is laying out promises.
He's also pointing out false hopes that the people of Israel had placed their hopes upon, these false hopes.
And these false hopes, I believe, translate to us today. And so we will look at Isaiah 9:6-7.
This is the familiar passage. It says, "And the government will be on his shoulders. He will be named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
The dominion will be vast and his prosperity will never end. He will reign on the throne of David and over his kingdom to establish and sustain it with justice and righteousness from now on and forever.
And the zeal of the armies will accomplish this."
So he talks about what God is going to do, what God has planned for them, the promises that he has.
And he goes into detail about them. And what I want to do is I want to take a moment to look at some of the exact opposite aspects of what God is going to do, because I believe God is drawing light to some of their false hopes and saying, these are your false hopes.
I'm going to answer it with this one who will be coming.
And the first false hope is the false promise of worldly governments.
The false promise of worldly governments. Psalm 146:3 says this, "But now your trust in princes and a son of man in whom there is no salvation."
Don't put your trust in princes. Don't put your trust in governments. Don't put your trust in the governing bodies.
Now we just went through an election. We just went through an election. And here's the thing about this election and really every election.
And it's been the way all the elections have been. And it's going to be the way that the elections will be going forward.
What's going to happen is what has happened is 50% of the country has said this, right? All of my problems are going to be solved. This guy is going to do everything.
Meanwhile, the other 50% are saying, we are at the doorstep of Armageddon. Everything is going to be horrible, the world is at risk, and we got to wait four more years.
But what's going to happen in four years? It's going to be the exact same thing.
And if a different color gets in the office, we're going to be saying the other thing. The guys that were full of hope and promise for the next four years, the following four years are going to be full of doom and gloom.
And the people that were full of doom and gloom, now they're going to be full of hope and promise. But guess what? It's always problematic.
It never seems to get fixed. We're always given the hope and promise that everything's going to be fixed because X, Y, Z, or this guy, or that guy, or that woman is now in office.
The world likes to set us up for false hopes. And we have to be very, very careful how we look at government.
We look at government as the answer to everything that is wrong in the world. We're going to walk away very disappointed.
You can't go through any time period in history to find where a government has solved all the problems and ills of the world.
In fact, probably just the opposite. They're the necessary evil in a lot of ways.
So we have to be very, very careful. And that's what he says. He says that the government will be on his shoulder.
In other words, there is no government who can solve all the problems, so we need to put the government on the shoulders of this one.
And he will shoulder the burden that the governments can't do on their own.
So the one that's coming, he will have the government on his shoulders.
And Matthew 6:33 tells us, "But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you."
Kings and princes and presidents and prime ministers, they can't solve it. But if you seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness, you will be provided for.
All these things will be provided unto you. That is where we seek our hope. That is where we put our trust in. That is the true hope.
What's another false promise that the people of Israel would put their trust in and is addressed in this Isaiah 6 and 7?
Well, the false promise of worldly philosophies.
Colossians 2:8 says this, "Don't let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that comes from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than put them in Christ."
Colossians 2:8. Don't be captured by empty philosophies, high-sounding nonsense, the things of this world.
Now, I'm going to tell you something. One thing that the world is really good at is talking in a way and projecting their ideas and their philosophies in a way that seems so, so, uh, so truthful, so confident.
They're so confident in their philosophies, yet when you look at history and see what their philosophies have done over and over again, they've caused ruin.
Whether it be Freud or Jung or Aristotle or Socrates or whoever, these philosophies, these philosophers, if we're looking to their wisdom, we are going to fail.
We're going to have our hopes misaligned. Our trust will be misaligned. Yet, just through the simpleness of the gospel, this simple gospel can turn the world upside down.
And we know that that's the case. Twelve men, twelve fishermen, and a ragtag group of guys turn the world upside down.
That's affected us to this day through the work of Christ. It's the philosophies of Christ that will carry this world and give us hope.
Instead, we need to trust the Wonderful Counselor.
Romans 12:2 says, "Don't be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern what is good, pleasing, and the perfect will of God."
That's what we're longing for. Not the philosophies of mankind, but a transformed mind placed in the ideology and the philosophies of scripture and Christ, placing our trust in the Wonderful Counselor.
The third thing that is addressed is the false promise of worldly religions.
Trust in the Everlasting Father. Who is the Everlasting Father? He is the one true God who created all things, is sovereign over all things. He holds all things together.
That's what we trust in. But this is what Exodus 23:20 verses 3 through 4 says, "Do not have other gods beside me."
That was one of the big pitfalls of the people of Israel. They were always going to other gods.
Don't have other gods beside me. Do not make an idol for yourself.
John Calvin, he says this, "We are idol factories." We make idols out of everything.
That is something that we have to be very, very discerning and very, very careful about in our life.
Things that we are very passionate about, Christmas being nostalgic, whatever, hobbies that we have, careers that we have, if we place those above, if we make that the center of our life, then what we are doing is we're creating idols for ourselves.
Anything that takes precedence over God and God's plan and God's philosophies, anything that takes precedence over that is false and will lead us down the wrong path.
Instead, trust in the Everlasting Father.
Acts 4:12 says this, "There is salvation in no one else. For there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved."
All these religions have a lot of flash, have a lot of promise, have a lot of ideology that sounds good, but at the end of the day, there is only one that offers salvation, one that offers us true hope.
And if we miss, if we get our eyes on the wrong things, we'll be worshiping the wrong idols.
What happens is we're no longer relying on God. We have our hearts set on falsehood. False hopes.
But he does give us a hope. That's the beauty of Isaiah 9:2-6. He addresses our misguidedness.
He sees the misguidedness of the people of Israel and he offers a hope.
And this is what the hope is. First of all, the people walking in darkness have seen a great light.
The world is walking in darkness and God, when he presents himself through Jesus Christ, now he presents light.
It's not a mistake that he uses the star as a symbol in darkness to bring lightness, to bring guidance to where Jesus is laying at.
It's not by mistake that when we look at John chapter one, the analogy that John uses when he's writing his gospel, he writes over and over again how Jesus is the light.
He is the light of the world, right? What is darkness? It's nothing when the light comes in.
Darkness is simply the absence of light. But when light comes in, darkness can no longer exist. The light always outshines the darkness.
You have enlarged the nation and increased its joy. He's talking about what happens when we find this light, when we're no longer in the darkness.
We enlarge our nation and increase its joy. The people rejoice before you as they rejoice at harvest time and as they rejoice in dividing the spoils, talking about great times of celebration.
Anytime there's a great harvest, that's a great time to celebrate. That's a great time to celebrate the abundance and the giftings of God.
Anytime they would go to war and they would conquer a nation, the spoils would be divided up amongst the people and they would all prosper through that and because of it.
Going on in verse four, "For you have shattered the oppressive yoke and the rod on their shoulders, the staff of the oppressor, just as you did in the days of Midian."
No longer are you in bondage. When you find Christ the Savior, your bondage is removed.
"For every trembling boot of battle and the bloody garments of war will be burned as fuel for the fire."
Why? "For a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us."
What kind of false promises might you be putting your hope in?
The message of Isaiah 9 is to say, look, you need to make sure that you've got your hopes and trust in alignment.
If you're trusting in the things of this world, you're misaligned. But if you put your hope and your trust in Christ, no matter the circumstances, he will always come through.
He will always be your light. He will always shine in your life.
Why? Because Jesus is the real, true hope for us. Even today, even today, he is our hope.
Let's go ahead and pray.
Heavenly Father, we're grateful that you have given us a hope. And it's a hope that we can trust in. It's a hope that is faithful.
It is a hope that is always there. It is a hope that regardless of the circumstances, both good and bad, difficult and easy, we know that we have that hope.
And Lord, I pray that as we recognize this hope, that that joy, that joy, that joy, that joy of this hope would just resonate and just bubble up in our lives.
Lord, I pray that as we are preparing to participate in the Lord's meal together, I pray that you would bless this church and bless our families.
Lord, I pray that we can reconnect in deep and great ways and into your kingdom as we join together in communion.
We pray this in your name. Amen.
Well, at this time, I'm going to go ahead and invite our elders to come up as we prepare for communion.
And as they're coming to prepare for delivering this meal, I want us to stand together and we're going to recite the Apostles' Creed together.
The Apostles' Creed is our statement of faith. It's where we can all come together and know that when we recite the Apostles' Creed, we are reciting who Jesus is, who God is, and what our faith is.
Your relationship is in him, and it's something that we can come together in.
And my prayer is that everybody in here can make this prayer, can say this prayer, and know that this prayer is truth for their lives.
So let's go ahead and say this together. The words will be up on the screen.
I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven, and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried.
He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
From there he shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
Before we go ahead and partake in this meal, what I want to do is I want to take a few moments for a time of confession.
And what confession is, is, you know, as believers, we are part of the kingdom of God. But the reality is, is that we still carry around a broken person, a broken person in a broken world.
And we are all prone to wander from God. We are all prone to harbor sins and ideas and thoughts and actions that are contrary to God's word.
And that's what sin is. Sin is merely missing the mark of the perfection of who Jesus is. And none of us can attain that.
So at this time, what I want us to do, I want us to take a few moments to examine ourselves and see what sins are there that need to be confessed to God.
Confess those sins. Let's take the next 15 to 20 seconds and let's confess our sins together.
Well, the scripture gives us a beautiful promise. It says that when we confess our faults, he is always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always, always faithful and just to forgive us of our sins.
If you are coming today and you feel like you're walking in right standing with God, and you can say the Apostles' Creed, then we want to welcome you to this table today.
If we would, let's prepare to receive. What I'm going to ask is that you all kind of work your way to the middle aisle.
Come forward. Take the elements, the bread and the wine. Don't eat and drink yet. Let's go back. You can sit down. Just pray quietly to yourself.
And when everybody has been served, we will eat the meal together.
As Jesus was with his disciples, he took the bread and he broke it and he passed it to each of them and he said, "As often as you gather together for this meal, do this in remembrance of me."
Let's go ahead and take the bread and let's eat it together.
Likewise, he took the wine, he took the cup and he poured it out.
He passed it to each of his disciples and he said, "As often as you gather together, take this wine, drink this, drink this in remembrance of me. This is my covenant that I share between you and I."
Let's take the wine together and let's drink.
Let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, we are grateful for the great hope that we have in your Son, Jesus Christ.
Lord, we're grateful for this season that we can celebrate openly and exuberantly knowing that we are worshiping the one true King.
Lord, I pray that as we go through this season that we don't get our priorities misaligned, that we don't put our hopes in the wrong things.
But Lord, I pray that we can be trained on you, on your Son and what he has done.
Lord, I pray for each family that's here that you would bless them. I pray that you would bless their households.
Lord, it says in the scripture that we just went through that you bless those, you bless those, you give them everlasting joy and you give them peace.
So Lord, I pray for every household here. I pray that you would give them joy. I pray that their homes would be filled with peace.
I pray that their homes would be filled with blessing.
Lord, I pray that as we go through this time and through this season that as we see your blessings that we don't grow prideful in those things, Lord, but we see those as gifts from you.
And Lord, I pray that we can take those gifts and share them with others.
So again, Lord, I pray that you would pour all blessing on our families. I pray that you would pour blessing out on this church.
I pray that in your name. Amen.
Well, let's stand and let's sing our final hymn. Amen.
on Dec 01, 2024
