Tomorrow is our Christmas worship at another venue. For the past couple of years, our neighbors, Abram Farm, have offered us the use of their venue for our Christmas and Easter worship.  We like to be together at least on those two services and worship as one body in one place. Due the space limitations of our building, we appreciate the opportunity to be together. It takes an extra effort by many of our people to help us make it a good experience. We have to move our music equipment (drums, stands, keyboards, etc). We hire a local man who does sound stages all over the state to do our sound. He also has his own equipment which saves us having to cart ours over. We have to meet at 7:00 on Sunday morning to set up because she has a wedding Saturday night. We have to come back Sunday afternoon to put things away. The parking lot is a challenge so we shuttle folks from the church lot to the venue. Fortunately, our properties are right next to each other.  We are blessed that Bill & Suzie are such great neighbors. They offer us the use of their venue as a gift to us. WOW! After our first use of the venue for Easter several years ago we gave them a gift of money that blew them away. However, they told us the only way we could use the venue again was if we would accept it as a gift on their part. We accepted although this past summer we paid to have loads of gravel brought to their property for their road.  One of our men was gracious enough to do that.

Anyway, our worship will be at 10:00 so if you are thinking about it, I would appreciate your prayers. My message will be simple and will follow the theme I had developed for the month: Don’t Miss It! Tomorrow’s sermon will be called Don’t Miss Christmas! I’m using three example of people in the Bible who did. I cannot take credit for the thought. It came from John MacArthur’s book God With Us: The Miracle of Christmas. Here are the people I will be using and the reason they missed it:

1. The Innkeeper- he was preoccupied.
2. Herod- he lived in fear.
3. The Religious Leaders- they missed it because of indifference.

There are more I could add, but the atmosphere will already be foreign and I prefer to “whet the appetite” for more than to go too long. The venue does not have childcare space so we make up one for the nursery. But the other young ones have to stay with the parents and that can be challenging.

Your prayers would be much appreciated for things to go well. But most importantly the gospel will be preached and hearts will be touched to not take Jesus’ birth for granted and to miss its message.

Please check out my fellow #ChristmasChallenge bloggers:

Diane at Hadarah

Ed at Word!