Merry Christmas from all of us here at Life Church where we are one church meeting in multiple

locations and reaching around the world thanks to what God is doing at church online.

If you ever have any questions or you want to learn more about us as a church you can always

check us out online simply by going to life.church. We love you to stay connected throughout your week and

everywhere you go with the Life Church app. It's free and available wherever you download your apps from.

Well right now let's join up with our senior pastor Craig Rochelle for his message called God with Us.

And in our waiting we are never alone. God is with us.

Hey I wonder if there's anybody today a little bit excited to hear from God's word at all of our churches. I hope that you guys are.

We are in part two of a message series that's called God is with us. God with us. And what we're doing is we're looking at the different ways that we can encounter the presence of God in different seasons in our lives.

And what we're doing is we're letting a text from the New Testament be an anchor for us for those of you that are followers of Christ.

This is one of the most important verses that really solidify our faith and believing in the presence of God. And this is the verse that during Christmassy services I'm going to teach on this one in particular.

But I want to use it as a place to start our study today. Matthew's Gospel chapter 1 verse 23 Matthew said look the Virgin will conceive a child.

She'll give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel which what does it mean? Let's all say it aloud which means God is with us.

Our series is called God with us. And we looked last week about how we experience the presence of God in the valley.

If you're with us we talked about the truth that we often enjoy God on the mountain tops. But we experienced him intimately in the valley.

Today what I want to do is I want to talk about another metaphor from scripture and that is the wilderness.

How do we experience God's presence in the wilderness? The wilderness is different from the valley because time in the wilderness usually lasts a lot longer.

The wilderness is a barren place, a dry place, a desolate place where you feel very alone. One of the images often found in the wilderness is wandering through the wilderness.

We're wondering when in the world is this going to be over? We're wondering when are we going to get out of the wilderness? Some of you right now you might be in some type of a wilderness.

You're stuck in this job and you're wondering should I stay in this job or should I go back to school and then I may have to go into a student loan debt but I may have a better job.

I'm kind of stuck in this place. Should I stay or should I do something different? I'm renting a house and I wonder should I buy a house? I'm not getting an equity but if I do that I may get transferred.

I don't know. So you kind of feel stuck in this place. I'm dating some guy and he just won't ask me to marry him and I'm dating him and I'm not breaking up and still having to do a video game.

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