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Well, I need a little bit of help today from all of our network churches and all of our churches to help me celebrate right now live the launch of the 18th LifeChurch.tv location happening right now in more Oklahoma.

We love you guys. We are so thankful we've been praying and so many of you have been serving and we are very, very thankful that God has allowed us to have a permanent place of ministry in your community.

Today we're in the second week of a three-part message series called Fear Not. If you missed last week what we're doing is we're looking at three different versions of the story of the birth of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In each of these gospel stories we see angel appear to different people and the first thing that the angel always says is help me out.

The angel always says fear not. Last week we saw the angel appear to marry and we let the story help us to overcome our fear of what God is asking us to do.

Next week on Christmas weekend we're going to see the angel appear to some shepherds when the angel says fear not.

Today a Savior has been born unto you in the town of Bethlehem.

Today if you have your Bibles with you or your version app and want to turn to Matthew chapter 1 we're going to see the angel appear to Joseph and talk about how do we overcome our fear of what people think about us.

Let me get a little participation in all of our different churches. How many of you would say you often care a lot about what other people think about you.

Just raise your hands. Just raise them up. Leave them up for a second. Look at the people that hand they're not in the air. Just point it and say your hands that up because you care too much what I think about you.

That's just that's probably why they're hands that up because the reality is that at one level or another all of us are very concerned you know do you like the car I drive?

Do you like the clothes I wear? Do you like my hairstyle? Do you think I'm funny? Do I fit in? Do you like my Instagram selfie?

If I hold it up here I only have two chins down here I have four. Do you like this filter in my duck lips? Do you like my duck lips?

We become so easily obsessed with what other people think about us and in this week's story we're going to watch Joseph battle with the opinions of people when he has to decide between doing what is easy and what is right.

Between what people would want him to do and between what God wants him to do and so let me give you the context and then we're going to dive in.

Joseph is engaged to be married to a young teenage virgin girl named Mary. Now in this time in history engagements were a lot different than they are today.

Today if you're engaged in things kind of go weird you know then you can just break off the engagement. Back in this time an engagement was actually a binding agreement.

You would be engaged for a year's period of time and in that time if you wanted to break off the engagement you actually had to file for divorce.

So the only way to get out of an engagement during this time would be to get divorced or to die and the engagement was so serious that if one of the two people died the other one would be considered a widow or a widower.

So this was what the engagement would mean. With that in mind we pick up the story in Matthew 118 and this is Matthew's version of how the birth of Christ came to be.

This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about. His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph but before they came together she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.

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