Advent 2025: He Shall Be | God with Us - Ralph Castillo
Church of the City New York
COTC NYC
4.8 • 837 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Sunday, Pastor Ralph Castillo kicked off our new sermon series during the Advent season, He Shall Be, with a teaching on Jesus as Immanuel, or "God with us". Pastor Ralph posed two questions for us to consider during this Advent season: How is the coming of Jesus at Christmas good news? And how does He meet the core longings that surface most intensely during this Advent season? Pastor Ralph explained that this is why we celebrate Christmas: because God came. He answered our loneliness and grief with Himself, and Pastor Ralph invited us to consider that the best Christmas present of all is Jesus' tangible presence with us.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Go ahead and bring it back. We're going to read our teaching text for tonight. Our teaching text comes from Matthew chapter one. Teaching text, Matthew chapter one, verse 22 and 23. The word of the Lord says this. All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet. The Virgin |
| 0:23.0 | will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God |
| 0:29.0 | with us. This is the word of the Lord. You guys could take a seat. |
| 0:40.9 | Well, good evening, everyone. |
| 0:46.4 | I trust you all, had a good Thanksgiving. |
| 0:52.4 | If you fall asleep during today's sermon, |
| 0:58.4 | we can blame it on the triptophan, which is a sleep-inducing agent found in Turkey. |
| 1:04.7 | If we've not had the chance to meet, my name is Ralph, and I have the honor of serving on staff on the care team and I have the double honor of launching us into our new series today. |
| 1:20.6 | For us at Church of the City, today marks the launch of Advent. Advent comes from the Latin Adventis meaning arrival. |
| 1:36.8 | And for Christians, it refers to both Jesus' first arrival in Bethlehem and his promised second coming. |
| 1:50.1 | And today we're beginning a new Advent series entitled, He Shall Be. |
| 1:56.9 | And this title comes directly from the birth narrative in the Gospel of Luke. Luke chapter 1 and verse 32 reads like this. |
| 2:08.6 | He shall be great and shall be called the son of the highest or the Son of the Most High. |
| 2:19.6 | And throughout this series, our attempt will be to show how each of the names given to Jesus, |
| 2:29.7 | Emmanuel, which will cover tonight, Holy Son of God, Messiah Shepherd, and Yeshua speak both to Jesus' |
| 2:41.0 | identity and to the longings that surface most intensely during the holiday season. |
| 2:53.6 | The ache of our loneliness, the weight of our grief, the weight of our grief, the exhaustion |
| 3:04.6 | beneath our hurry, the anxiety beneath our striving, and the shame beneath our performing. |
| 3:16.1 | And the questions that we'll consider throughout this series is, how is the coming of Jesus at Christmas good news? And how does he, Jesus, |
| 3:30.6 | in himself, meet the core longings that surface most intensely during the holiday season? I would like to submit to you a simple |
| 3:44.8 | point from today's message. The best Christmas present is Jesus's tangible |
| 3:52.6 | presence with us. This is a gift that is on offer tonight. This is a gift that you can take home |
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