Amen, amen, amen. We love celebrating life change around here. If you're new, they let you know one thing.

I'm not the lead pastor here. I'm not that good looking. I'm trying. I'm working on it.

My name's Ryan Stone. I am one of our campus pastors, and I get the opportunity to open up God's

word with you this morning and excited about that. And man,

for the saints at Bay Meadows, we just want to say hey to everyone, to San Pablo and

Mandarin, to all the other campuses. Man, Bay Meadows is going good. And we are honored as a

campus to be a part of this church and what God is doing across our city. And just even as we were getting ready

for this week, I began to think about what God's been doing at Bay Meadows and really what God's

been doing across all our campuses and just been looking back at this year of ministry and

absolutely amazed. I mean, if we just look back to last weekend at the thousands of people who gathered, and just think about this, over 70 people surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ last week, right?

That is unbelievable.

I mean, there were guys showing up because they wanted grandma's sweet potato souffle about halfway through the service.

They realized, uh-oh, uh-oh,

and they raised their hand and they surrender life to Jesus. They're going to get baptized in January.

They're going to go on a mission trip for the next three years. And it's all because Grandma said,

if you don't go to church with me on Christmas Eve, you don't get to be a part of. And I'm excited about what

2018 holds for us as a church. And I'm a little bit giddy this time of year. Like, I love

Christmas. We watched another Christmas movie last night, Gremlins. And so we've just been watching

Christmas movies and singing Christmas carols and to the point that I don't, I can't convince my four and six year old that it's now time to switch from Christmas carols to glory, glory to old Georgia.

But we'll make that switch.

But we love Christmas.

And I love this week.

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