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.

If you're new with us we are in part three of a four-part message series called God With Us.

This coming week we have Christmas services at my particular Life Church. We start on Thursday.

We go Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday. Amy and I already have a couple from a restaurant that we met

and a guy that we met at a department store joining us. I hope you'll look around. I hope you'll let God prompt you to reach out to

people who might not normally come to church. I'm going to teach this coming weekend Christmas services on

Matthew chapter 1 verse 23 from which we get the title for this message series. Look the Virgin will conceive a child.

She'll give birth to a son and they will call him Emmanuel. What does it mean? All of our churches let's say

God is with us. We're talking about the presence of God in different seasons of life because we experience God in different ways based on what's going on in life around us.

The first week we talked about the presence of God in the valleys. We learned the key principle that we may enjoy God on the mountain tops.

But we experience him intimately in the valleys. Last week we talked about God in the wilderness. God often whispers in the wilderness.

Why does God so often whisper? He whispers because he's close. We learned the valuable principle last week that our deepest needs become a gift when they drive us to depend on God.

Our deepest needs become a gift. Today what I want to do is I want to talk about God's presence in the storms.

My pastor used to say something I was always a bit discouraged by this but he was really, really true. He said you're either coming out of a storm.

Or you're in the middle of a storm or there's a storm around the corner in other words life can be really difficult. I didn't encourage him. I didn't never say amen when he said but it can really be true. It seems like you're either coming out of a difficult time in the middle of the one or oftentimes around the corner.

There are just difficult and painful things that happen in this world. Where is God with you in the midst of a storm?

We had some big storms hit our country this year, a couple of big hurricanes. I was kind of thinking about this. It's funny to me that we name killer storms after names of people.

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