This is a Salabak Church podcast.

I'm so thankful today that you're here joining to celebrate Christmas with us as a church family,

and I do want to welcome all of you who are joining us online.

Those of you who are joining us at various campuses and extensions,

we have 97 Christmas services this year across 21 campuses on four continents, all declaring one message of hope from the Christmas story.

And one of the things that we recognize, all of us as we think about Christmas, we're all coming from different places in our journey. And for some of you, you love Christmas. You are the kind of person that you look forward

to Christmas all year long. You start the Christmas music mid-October. Anybody, just out of curiosity,

willing to be honest, okay, like five people in this service, and you love Christmas time.

And that's great. There are others that Christmas is a very difficult time of the year.

In fact, after one of our first services, a woman came up to me in tears and said, this is my

first Christmas without my husband. And so there's a lot of grief of pain, sadness, and loss that the holiday season

brings up for many people. And wherever you are in that continuum, regardless of your circumstance,

Christmas is an invitation for all of us. It's an invitation from God to us, to encounter hope,

to know the heart of God, and to receive from him his love for each one of us. And Christmas is not just this scene that shows up in nativity

figurines underneath Christmas trees or shows up in children's books or in Christmas movies.

Christmas is a true historical event that happened.

Happened about 4 BC when Jesus would come and split time in two.

And when he entered into our reality, it changed everything.

Now, God, in his sovereignty, wove together this beautiful story with shepherds and angels and sheep and camels and all of it to

proclaim his love and i love each christmas to take time and look at christmas through different angles

so each year i'll kind of zero in on one of the people or one of the characters in the christmas

story and i'll just imagine what it must have been like for them.

...