You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan begins a series on Advent.

He outlines the many facets of the Christmas season, reviewing a study by the American Psychological Association about the conflict the season rings.

He then discusses the places where we get held up by many distractions, believing our

war is against culture and the way Christmas is celebrated.

He invites us to instead recognize that Christ's coming to Earth was an invasion, the signaling

of a war against darkness,

in which we are invited to participate.

Happy holidays, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

And as we point toward the end of the year and the coming of Christmas, we begin an Advent series,

and it will be a four-week series beginning today and will end around the 23rd of December.

And as we consider Advent, I want to open the door for us to have a relatively honest discussion about the fact that many

of us are very ambivalent about Christmas. We love the holiday, love the break, and love the meaning

of Jesus becoming God flesh, human, fully human, fully God.

Yet the very reality of what we often experience in the build-up to the day of Christmas

is a hectic holiday with lots of stress.

And it just seems like many complications. So I want to honestly talk about

what do we need to face about the actual story that we find particularly in Matthew and

Luke, Matthew chapter 1, or Matthew 2 actually Matthew, and then Luke chapter 1 and 2, what do we learn

about the story that helps us understand this intersection of ambivalence, hectic, crazy,

like this season is filled with stuff that just feels extraneous, distracting, but also deeply

conflictual.

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