Glad to have you with us today at all of our live churches.

As we prepare our hearts to celebrate the birth of our Savior,

Jesus, in this Christmas season, today we're launching into a new

message series called The Gift.

And over the next three weeks, we're going to be looking at three

different gifts that some wise men gave to Jesus around the time of

his birth from Matthew's Gospel, Matthew chapter 2.

Let me give you the context of Matthew 2, and then we're going to dive into

God's Word today.

If you don't know the story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of

King Herod, and some wise men, or you might call them Maggi, traveled a great

distance to come and worship Jesus.

Now, how many wise men were there?

How many of you have maybe a nativity scene at your house, your

grandma has a nativity scene, raise your hand, all of our churches?

If you look at the nativity scene, how many wise men do you always see?

You always see three wise men.

How many wise men were there?

We don't know.

We tend to think that there were three because they perhaps brought three gifts.

But the reality is we have no idea how many there were chances are there could

have been dozens, but tradition tells us three.

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