This is the Salaback Church podcast.

We're going to start a message series today that goes for three weeks called Be a Light.

We're going to focus in on the reality that Jesus, he came to bring light to planet Earth.

He came to bring hope into the darkness. And Jesus, who is the light of the

world, calls his followers to be a light as well, to shine his light into darkness. We're going to look

very practically. How do we do that with our lives? With our time, with our energy, with our prayers,

with our words, with how we serve over the next few weeks, that's where we're going. And at the end of this, it's going to culminate.

We're going to have Christmas services at all of our campuses.

And our prayer is that every person at Saddleback would bring friends and family at Christmas

to encounter the love of Jesus.

And I'm going to talk more at the end of the message about how we can do that.

But I want to begin with a little bit of fun facts around Christmas lights and I did some

research this week to kind of historically figure out when did this whole tradition of lights

at Christmas begin. So I've got three or four little tidbits. The first one is who first put lights on Christmas

trees? So who was the first person to put lights on Christmas trees? It was Martin Luther in the 16th

century, and he actually put candles on Christmas trees, which does not seem like a very smart

idea, but that's what he did. Probably had

some trees burned down, but he started it. Okay, next one was when were electric lights first put

on homes? So when did this happen? Well, electric lights were started by none other than Thomas Edison

in 1882. So the man who created the light bulb created Christmas lights on houses.

So we can thank him.

Every time you drive past the house, you can say thank you Thomas Edison for Christmas

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