La La La, la, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, friends, Greg Kokel here, and my final show before Christmas.

We'll have another show, I guess, next week.

Is that right?

The final week of the year, but Christmas is upon us. And I have some thoughts about that, that may be a little tongue in cheek that I wanted to share with you. I'm just calling these Christmas spoilers, all right. You know, an inherent problem

with studying scripture is you learn that there's a lot of speculation and even accretion of,

oh, I have written down nonsense here, but false things surrounding important

theological events like the birth of Christ and popular kind of characterizations.

And I wanted to talk about that. I was queued into this many years ago

as I was traveling behind the Iron Curtain, and I had three and a half months in Europe and

five and a half weeks in the communist countries, and there were four of us traveling. And my

kind of traveling buddy, there was a married couple and me, and my buddy Lance. Now, Lance, he,

when he, God bless his heart, man, he came back and later on became the pastor of the Anaheim

vineyard and just did remarkable work for the Lord, as it turned out. But we were just a couple of guys,

you know, trying to make a difference in behind

their recruitment working with Christians.

But he did make an observation once because somebody cited Psalm 123, and you might know

this Psalm from Sound of Music, you know, I lift mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my

help.

Now, of course, the implication is, I'm looking to the hills where my help is coming from,

and then, of course, you know, then the gal goes to the hills and escapes and all that.

But what he said to me is he said, yeah, you know, seminary education kind of ruins these kind of things,

because really what the psalmist had in mind in Psalm 123,

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