Why celebrate Christmas?

God the Father has a purpose for every person ever born, He created each of us individually and He alone knows our hearts desires, our thoughts, our fears and our future. 

We are created for more than this, we are created for an eternal loving God, who wants to be with us.

We can’t get to the Father though unless we come through Christ.

God the Son came because the Father sent Him for this purpose:

““This is my servant; I strengthen him, this is my chosen one; I delight in him. I have put my Spirit on him; he will bring justice to the nations. He will not cry out or shout or make his voice heard in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed, and he will not put out a smoldering wick; he will faithfully bring justice. He will not grow weak or be discouraged until he has established justice on earth. The coasts and islands will wait for his instruction.” This is what God, the Lord, says — who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and spirit to those who walk on it — “I am the Lord. I have called you for a righteous purpose, and I will hold you by your hand. I will watch over you, and I will appoint you to be a covenant for the people and a light to the nations, in order to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, and those sitting in darkness from the prison house. I am the Lord. That is my name, and I will not give my glory to another or my praise to idols. The past events have indeed happened. Now I declare new events; I announce them to you before they occur.””

Isaiah 42:1-9 CSB

The purpose of Christmas is not too just celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Christ Jesus, the purpose is to celebrate that God loves us so much, that He sent His one and only Son to mankind to save us from our sins, from the beginning God had a purpose for everything and everyone, He desires to have a relationship with you and I.

Let us desire too have a relationship with Him through Christ Jesus, God is love, and He wants to give that love too you.

God’s gift of love is freely given, if you haven’t received it yet, why not? 

Why would you turn down the greatest gift of all?

This Christmas receive the love of God, ask Him and He will give too you freely.

“For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. “ John 3:16-18 CSB

Trust in God, not man.

The battle battle raging around us is real, dangerous and destroys lives and families everyday, it is a spiritual battle that has been raging against God and His children since the beginning.

It is a battle nevertheless that we fight from victory , not for victory we don't need to engage in our flesh only in Spirit, The Holy Spirit, it is time we stood only on the truths of God word and works in our lives and be steadfast and immovable.

C.S Lewis said this during WWII "The anti - Christian forces that are destroying the west from within are paralleled by the Nazis who threaten it from without. The sins of the democracies are very great. But very likely,those of the totalitarian states are even greater."

Don't look to man for answers, look to God.

Ephesians 6:12-18 HCSB
For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. This is why you must take up the full armor of God, so that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having prepared everything, to take your stand. Stand, therefore, with truth like a belt around your waist, righteousness like armor on your chest, and your feet sandaled with readiness for the gospel of peace. In every situation take the shield of faith, and with it you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is God’s word. Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert in this with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.

The dark hours

The hour is late. Our nation is, in the the clutches of the days of Noah. We can no longer sit back comfortably and say, "There's always been a crisis in the world. Today is no different. Our society will go on, and our country is basically strong." Those who do so are only kidding themselves. 

We are at a late hour in our history. We are nearer to the coming of our Lord than we have ever been before. His return is the last great event yet to come before the curtain of time is brought down. In this world of darkness, we are to be a light to those around us. Only God knows the hour, and His return is certain and irreversible.

As in the days of Noah God is leaving the door of the Ark open, He let it stay open 7 days after it was completed and the animals and Noah and his family were on board. None entered , none believed until God shut the door and the water fell from the sky and rose from the earth. Then they all believed but it was too late. Don't wait another day, to enter into the glory of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Genesis 7:4-5, 7, 10 HCSB

Seven days from now I will make it rain on the earth 40 days and 40 nights, and I will wipe off from the face of the earth every living thing I have made.” And Noah did everything that the Lord commanded him. So Noah, his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives entered the ark because of the waters of the flood. Seven days later the waters of the flood came on the earth.

Luke 17:22-27 HCSB

Then He told the disciples: “The days are coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you won’t see it. They will say to you, ‘Look there! ’ or ‘Look here! ’ Don’t follow or run after them. For as the lightning flashes from horizon to horizon and lights up the sky, so the Son of Man will be in His day. But first He must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man: People went on eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage until the day Noah boarded the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.

Fight fire with fire.

 We have all heard the expression "the way to fight fire is with fire." I've heard it all my life, but it came alive for me in a new way when I heard a story told by Norman McLean about a Montana smoke jumper who did just that. Wag Dodge was one of 15 smoke jumpers who were sent to battle a forest fire in August of 1949. Shortly after their jump, these tenacious, well-trained, young men were surrounded by an inferno. As the wind shifted 180 degrees and picked up velocity, what had been a manageable fire became what is known as a blow out. The only way to safety was to race 200 yards to the top of a ridgeﾗquite literally, to outrun the fire. When Dodge realized the fire would overtake them, he screamed to his men to stop and gather around him. Most did not hear, and were overcome. Then, with fire racing toward him, Wag Dodge lit a fire of his own and followed it, then circled back and laid down in the grass it had burned. When he did, the flames went around what had already been scorched, leaving him safe on the ground. He fought fire - with fire. We are surrounded on every side by the super-heated flames of our culture. How do we fight them? The way this young smoke jumper did. We set our own fire. And as the fire of our devotion to Christ begins to burn, our God who is a consuming fire, burns brighter and stronger than the flames of this fallen world. We fight fire with fire!

Life Church

Psalm 1

Psalms 1:1-6 HCSB

How happy is the man who does not follow  the advice of the wicked or take  the path of sinners or join a group  of mockers! Instead, his delight is in the Lord ’s instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. He is like a tree planted beside streams of water that bears its fruit in season   and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers. The wicked are not like this; instead, they are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not survive  the judgment, and sinners will not be in the community of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to ruin.

Hell is real

C. S. Lewis’s In The Great Divorce, describes a busload of people from hell who come to the outskirts of heaven. There they are urged to leave behind the sins that have trapped them in hell. The descriptions Lewis makes of people in hell are so striking because we recognize the denial and self-delusion of substance addictions. When addicted to alcohol, we are miserable, but we blame others and pity ourselves; we do not take responsibility for our behavior or see the roots of our problem. 

Lewis writes:Hell … begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps even criticizing it. … You can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine.

Modern people struggle with the idea of God’s thinking up punishments to inflict on disobedient people. When sin is seen as slavery and hell as the freely chosen, eternal skid row of the universe, hell becomes much more comprehensible.

Jesus said those who reject Him have condemned themselves (John 3:18) , so God does not send us there, we choose to go there. 1st, sin separates us from the presence of God (Isa. 59:2), which is the source of all joy (Ps. 16:11), love, wisdom or good thing of any sort (James 1:17)…

2nd, to understand hell we must understand sin as slavery. Romans 1:21-25 tells us that we were built to live for God supremely, but instead we live for love, work, achievement or morality to give us meaning and worth. Thus every person, religious or not, is worshiping something—idols, pseudo-saviors—to get their worth. But these things enslave us with guilt or anger or fear or a lust for things. Guilt, anger and fear are like fire that destroys us. Sin is worshiping anything but Jesus—and the wages of sin is slavery.

Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that the people on Lewis’s bus from hell are enslaved because they freely chose to be. They would rather have their freedom as they define it than salvation. Their relentless delusion is that if they glorified God, they would lose their human greatness (Gen. 3:4–5), but their choice has really ruined their human greatness. Hell is, as Lewis says, “the greatest monument to human freedom.”

Hell Is Less Exclusive Than So-Called Tolerance Nothing is more characteristic of the modern mindset than the statement: “I think Christ is fine, but I believe a devout Muslim or Buddhist or even a good atheist will certainly find God.” A slightly different version is: “I don’t think God would send a person who lives a good life to hell just for holding the wrong belief.” This approach is seen as more inclusive.

In preaching about hell, then, I need to counter this argument: The universal religion of humankind is: We develop a good record and give it to God, and then he owes us.

The gospel is: God develops a good record and gives it to us, then we owe him (Rom. 1:17). In short, to say a good person, not just Christians, can find God is to say good works are enough to find God.

You can believe that faith in Christ is not necessary or you can believe that we are saved by grace, but you cannot believe in both at once.

So the apparently inclusive approach is really quite exclusive. It says, “The good people can find God, and the bad people do not.” But what about us moral failures? We are excluded.

The gospel says, “The people who know they aren’t good can find God, and the people who think they are good do not.” Then what about non-Christians, all of whom must, by definition, believe their moral efforts help them reach God? They are excluded.

So both approaches are exclusive, but the gospel’s is the more inclusive exclusivity. It says joyfully, “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve done. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been at the gates of hell. You can be welcomed and embraced fully and instantly through Christ.” And Christ alone, John 14:6

Dr. Timothy Keller senior pastor of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church