This is a Salaback Church podcast.

Today, as we're launching a brand new message series called Journey to the Manger.

I'm so excited about what God's going to do in our midst over these next four weeks as we prepare our hearts for Christmas.

Now, Christmas season has historically been called Advent, and that word literally means to be in waiting.

And Christmas season, I know that there's a whole lot of waiting going on with kids getting ready to open Christmas presents on Christmas Day, and there's a lot of waiting happening in different areas of our

life, but there's this greater waiting that we're all in.

In fact, the Bible says in the book of Romans that all of creation is groaning and looking

forward with eager anticipation to the day where it's renewed when Jesus

returns.

And the Bible actually speaks about this reality of the waiting that people were in before

Jesus would come.

See, Jesus was the fulfillment of many promises in the Old Testament.

Close to 300 of them were written about His coming.

So during the holiday season, we're waiting for the return of Jesus.

We're remembering the birth of Jesus.

And we're actually looking at the Christmas story what was happening before Jesus came.

Now, for us as a church family, this is a significant

time of year. God does a lot in our church family, in our hearts. This is the time of year where more

people come to church for the first time than any other time of the year. This is also the time of year

where we're all busy and we got a lot going on, shopping and family events.

And I'm believing that this message series is going to be an opportunity to slow down in the busyness of this holiday season.

And so we're going to have four messages.

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