You know, without fail, this time of year, the Lord really shows me some convicting things about my heart

when it comes to expectations, my own expectations, and my striving and performance.

And what I mean by that is there's just something about Christmas, although it is my favorite time

of year, the consumerism, the money, the presents, the hosting, the pressure, the aesthetics of

people's lives on social media, of what their

Christmas is looking like, that really reveals the state of my heart and what I'm expecting

and what I'm putting my hope in and how maybe I'm striving to look a certain way or I'm striving

to perform to prove something. And so as we are on our last episode, our fourth episode of this

Advent series, I wanted to give you two pep talks and not just you from my heart because like I

said, the Lord has been showing this to me in a very real way lately. But I want to talk all about

how to manage our Christmas expectations and how to not live

to prove anything, especially as we are less than a week away from celebrating Jesus' birth.

I don't know about you, but I tend to be a forgetful person at times where I know one thing to be true or one encouragement or one

truth or one scripture to be true about God and about his character and about his word.

And then circumstances of life come up and I am I'm prone to wander as that beautiful old hymn

says and I'm prone to wander Lord, I feel it. And so if you're feeling that way, if you're feeling like, man, I have loved this Christmas

season, but it's also been hard, it's also been good, it also feels like it's flown so fast

and I can't believe that we're almost a Christmas day.

I don't want us to take this last week of the Christmas season and not be intentional about putting our expectations

and our hope in the right place. For some people, the week before Christmas feels very chill and

calm and maybe even the slowest week of your entire Advent season of your entire month of

December. You finally feel like you're slowing down and getting more intentional with your family. of your entire month of December, that you finally feel like you're

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