Good to see you guys. Merry Christmas. And again, thank you for joining us. This is the last of 129 services over five days. And I am as excited about this one as I've been for the very first one and all the ones in between. We love you. We love you very much. And we love our God very much. Anybody in this place or at other locations

love Jesus with all your heart. Anybody, anybody? I don't know. I just feel like loving him

one more time. Yeah, good. Have a short little Christmas message I want to bring to you,

and then we'll light candles. You know, two years ago, uh, when I was preparing my Christmas

message, I brought a message that was very different from any I've ever done before. Um,

I'm not really a history buff or anything, but I, I found this cool story about the, uh,

Christmas truce that took place in World War I. It's called the Christmas truce of 1914,

105, uh, 115 years ago, a long time

ago, 105 years ago, during the middle of World War I, these two opposing sides who had everything

that they hated about each other, they had entrenched themselves, entrenched warfare into their political positions and

ideological positions and fighting in this bloody war. On Christmas Eve, 1914, they decided,

they realized that the one thing they did have in common was they were all Christians. And so

on that night, 105 years ago, they decided

to lay their weapons down for the evening and come to the middle of the battle line, and they would

play soccer, and they would eat some food and sing some Christmas carols together. The night was so

impactful that the next day, when the fighting was to resume, no one would

pull the trigger.

They could not kill their brother.

God had touched him in a great way as they celebrated Christmas.

And I talked about two years ago how I really believed that God could do that at that Christmas

service, that a lot of us have wars that are going on inside of ourselves or wars going on toward others.

And I think the world has become more polar in our ideological and political and all other kinds of beliefs.

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