I am pumped up about what God is doing and I'm pumped up to be a local church that gets to send students all over the globe.

I'm also pumped to be a local church that's having an impact all over the globe.

We're going to talk about that in just a few minutes.

But more than anything, I just want to ask in this moment that you would ready your heart

for whatever God wants to say. Because we are going to jump into a Christmas series.

Our Christmas series this year at ACC is called King of Kings. And every year at Christmas,

when I get the opportunity to preach this incredible story of Jesus coming down

from heaven into the life of a human being, it's very difficult because I never want church

to be the place where we're doing the Jesus juk. You know what I'm talking about? Where

everything's fun and everything's great

in the celebration of Christmas and then you come into church and it's like, hey, stop it.

Remember the reason for the season. This is about a poor baby who was born without a room to be

born in. This is about a teenage girl who found out she was pregnant and she was engaged and almost

lost everything. This is about stuff that is serious and it's like the fun of Christmas kind of gets disconnected

from the narrative that we're supposed to rally around in the church.

But what I want to do is I want to take what we're used to experiencing in our cultural

Christmas experience and I want to take the fullness of joy

that that stuff represents and put it on full display during this season.

So it's okay if you enjoy decorating.

It's okay if you're a big Christmas person.

It's okay if you enjoy Christmas songs or Christmas movies.

In fact, just to get you in that wavelength,

...