Wait for the Light

All right, thanks so much.

I'm happy to be back.

I love speaking here.

I love being able to be back in town and uh spending time with my family and with you, my family.

Uh I love being here.

So um thanks so much for having me this weekend.

Uh we got to spend a little bit of time as a family this weekend, and uh we we my dad has a little bit of land where we like to feed the animals, keep them around and keep them fed and things like that.

And so we were we were working uh you know this a couple days ago, I guess it was on Christmas Eve, doing some work, and uh and we needed to fill up one of the feeders that feeds the animals, and so uh we we put a 10 or 12 foot ladder, leaned up against it, it's about 10 or 12 feet up in the air.

And uh I have this hose that that funnels all the feed down into the feeder, and so I was standing up there and it filled up, and so I handed the hose down to my dad.

And uh when he went walking away with it, it was wrapped around the leg of the ladder and uh just took it right out from underneath me.

And luckily I grabbed on, there was like a ridge on the top, and I grabbed on.

And uh when I looked back, um I said, Hey, help me.

He just laughed at me.

This is like a common theme.

My brother does this to me, my dad does this to me.

I I'm here in a time of need.

I needed help.

Well, he thought I would just let go and drop down because it wasn't it wasn't that far.

My feet were you know five or six feet off the ground.

And uh so afterwards he he got the ladder up and I got down.

He said, Why didn't you just drop down?

I knew the ladder was down there, I knew the hose was down there.

So I'm gonna show you what happened.

Uh normally, normally this uh wouldn't be the case, but uh I couldn't see below me.

If you'll just kind of zoom in right here so you can see this.

Uh I I was holding on to the feeder there, and what happened is when my arm went up, my beard just went like this.

I couldn't see anything below me.

I can't see a thing.

I can't see a thing right now.

I'm Santa Claus, not knowing what shoes he's wearing today.

That's it.

I can't see one thing just like this.

So I couldn't I couldn't fall down, and uh, he had to help me and get the ladder for me.

So most of the time my beard saves my life, but uh on that occasion it nearly killed me.

Um that's what we're gonna talk about today, actually, is waiting, waiting for help, waiting for the light to appear, waiting.

Christ is the light of the world.

He appears to us to save us, to bring salvation to us.

And um, in this season of Christmas, it's called Advent.

And Advent, if you were talking about technology or something like that, uh, the Advent of something would be the arrival of something that has been long uh awaited and anticipated.

Uh something that is showing up that is much needed, but something that we've been waiting on for a long time.

And so when we celebrate Advent in this time of year, on this weekend, we're kind of wrapping up Advent and then moving into a new season, uh, which you'll be doing with the first conference and the fast and starting your year off in the right way.

And when we get to this season of Advent, it's all about waiting.

It's putting ourselves in the position of the Israelites who were waiting on their Messiah.

They had waited for so long for their Messiah to arrive.

We place ourselves in that position of waiting, waiting on Christ.

And uh, if this has been a difficult year, 2020 has been a difficult year for a lot of people, and uh and and I I would venture to say, in some ways, it has affected all of us negatively in one way or another.

And so in this difficult time, we put ourselves in that position of waiting on Christ.

What will God do next?

What what redemption will he bring to this crisis or this situation?

And so this is that season of Advent where we learn to wait.

We like to emphasize that with our kids.

Part of uh the the waiting for that morning to finally show up and arrive for Christmas Day is to teach ourselves that that patience is a good thing.

And if we're honest, we're not very good at waiting.

We we all struggle with waiting.

Um, and and that's just the the the idea of that.

We we struggle to to wait sometimes.

We're in a world of instant gratification, and oftentimes we have trouble just waiting, just waiting on something.

And so uh I want you to think about for just a moment, for for thousands and thousands of years, thousands of years, people would be born, they would grow up and and and and get more mature, and they would grow up into an adult, they would live their old their adult life, they would go into their old age, and they would uh begin to work less or or whatever it might be, they would go into their old age and then they would die, and and all of that would happen in a span where nothing of substance in the world would change at all.

Nothing.

Uh you could see it in the history that's written in the Bible.

Sometimes it just skips over long periods of time.

It's like, and then we had this king and this king and this king, and then 800 years later something cool happened, and we'll tell you about it.

Just long periods of time of nothing at all changing.

The the advent of technology has uh vastly accelerated the rate of change that we experience in the world.

For for so many people, for the majority of the people that have ever lived on the earth, they they would have gone their entire life without very much changing.

Today, it's a completely different story.

My my grandmother is here tonight.

Um, my grandmother on my mother's side is is still living and she's here tonight.

And my grandfather on my father's side is here tonight and he's still living as well.

And I like to hear their stories uh about their childhood or their upbringing.

I like to hear uh the different things, and and what's fascinating about it is that so much has changed.

My grandmother grew up and and for a portion of the time she didn't have electricity.

They had a uh a root cellar, a hole in the ground that would keep their food cold, and uh and and and all of those things changed all in her lifetime.

We we just have a hard time understanding how much has changed in our lifetime, and we take that for granted oftentimes.

So I'm 38 years old.

I technically fall in the category of millennial, and uh and I'm not always very proud of that because let's be honest, millennials might be the worst at waiting on things.

We just we we we grew up right as everything was showing up, you know.

I pride myself in that I remember the day where I had to uh print out maps quest before my journey, because there was no GPS, there was no cell phones that were gonna lead me by down my way.

So I I pride myself in the very few things that I experienced growing up that kept me understanding some of those things.

But in reality, I I'm still technically a millennial, and and we're pretty bad about that.

Like I I've noticed that uh people want a response to a text message immediately, like immediately.

Okay, not that long ago, we used to write letters.

That's what you would do, is you would write a letter, and then you would just wait.

One of my favorite songs ever is about writing letters, and it's just called We Used to Wait.

And that was the idea with the letters.

You just waited.

I know I'm not making the song sound that good right now.

That's what the whole song is about.

It was so it's so good.

You just think about it.

We used to used to write a letter and hope it arrived to the person and then hope that they would take the time to write it back and send it back to you, and you would wait.

I had pen pals, and I would just wait and wait and wait for some kind of response.

And now the moment you send a text, like, why are they not responding?

What's going on?

What's happening here?

We used to have to wait for things.

We understood what it meant to wait, just to wait for a little while.

If I'm if I'm on the tarmac in an airplane, remember, remember airplanes pre-2020, remember that?

And you and they the pilot would go on and be like, Yeah, we're we're eighth in line, so it's gonna be a little bit of a slow up.

I'd be like, What?

Come on.

I the pilot should be able to call me out individually in that moment and be like, Josh Morse, um, you need to quit complaining.

For your grandparents, this journey took a month, okay?

Like, you need to stop complaining.

You're gonna be all right.

We have lost the ability to wait, just to wait on things, just to sit and be patient and wait.

And so when we went out and and we were spending some time on the land, I told my son, Grady, no cell phones.

Like in this time, whenever you go out and we're sitting out there and we're watching the animals, no cell phones.

It's gonna you're it's gonna feel so boring to you as after all of the constant entertainment that you uh consume.

But we're just gonna wait.

We're just you just wait in this moment and you just stop for just a moment and wait in that moment.

Um, I I just uh anytime you get the chance to talk to uh your grandparents or anybody of the older generation, do it.

Ask them, ask them to see their pictures.

You'll see you here's what you'll see, and I can verify this.

Uh in every family picture I've ever seen uh from my grandparents, there they always have at least one picture, and this is what it looks like.

And you'll know it because your family has it too.

This is the exact this is the setting that you'll see.

You will see uh the parents are dressed up really fancy, and uh, and so you'll see the the dad there and and the mom is there, and the dad, there will be a wooden fence in front of them for some reason.

You you don't know why.

And the dad will have his leg up on the fence, and the the wife is standing there proudly next to him, you know, and then they have kids.

And where are the kids?

They're directly below them on the other side of the fence, and they are either standing or holding like the ears of the family pig.

Every single, I've every single family portrait.

You see that old photo of the couple standing there, and they thought they that was a good idea.

We should put this pig in our family picture every single time.

And you see those kids down there, they're wearing suspenders with no shirts on, and they're just holding the pig, like, yeah, we got it.

And then eventually, like automobiles, like it was like the whole family picture is the whole family standing in front of the family Oldsmobile, and they're so proud of it.

And and then I'm like, in my generation, oh gosh, what did we contribute?

Selfies, selfies, that's what we contributed.

You know, the one where we take a sad picture of ourselves with our own camera just holding it out from us, that's what we've contributed.

We can't wait.

We just we we've gotta pause for just a moment.

We gotta use this season to learn to just stop and wait.

We we quickly expect things to change in our lives, but sometimes we just have to sit in that time and wait.

And so, just in my lifetime, so much has changed, and and and in this time, we've got to stop and remember to slow down.

So while this season is celebrating the arrival of the Savior in the form of a baby born in a manger, we also need to remember that we are waiting as well.

Yeah, of course, we're waiting for the second coming.

We're waiting for the arrival of Christ again, the advent of Christ in the second coming.

But each and every one of us has an area of our lives where we are waiting on God.

We're waiting for Him to move, to show up, to arrive into our lives yet again, to arrive into an area that may seem dark or separated from us.

And in the darkness, that is where our imaginations run wild.

In the darkness, when we're in the worst times, that is where we start to believe things that we should not believe.

When when in the daytime, when everything is illuminated, say you're walking through the woods and and you hear uh a stick break in the woods or something like that.

In the daytime, you just look and you go, I see that that was nothing.

Something fell from a tree or something, you can see that.

At night, that sound in the forest is terrifying.

And the reason is not because there's necessarily something there, it is because our imaginations fill those times of darkness.

That is so often the place where we lose faith, is when we're going through a dark time.

And the reason is because we begin to fill all of those voids with our imagination.

And what we're waiting on is the light of Christ to arrive, to illuminate the darkness, to show us what is really there, to shine truth on whatever circumstance we're dealing with.

When we're in the darkest times that we experience, that is the moment where we'll say, God doesn't care for me, He doesn't love me, no one cares, no one cares what I'm going through.

All those things are in the moments of darkness when we're sitting in that moment waiting for the light to illuminate.

And in that, we will fill the void or the darkness with whatever it is that our imaginations can come up with.

I, as a grown man, was taking the trash out one night, and we live in Amarillo now, and in Amarillo, it gets very dark.

There are no streetlights in our neighborhood.

It gets very dark at night, and I've got to go down an alleyway to the dumpster to throw the trash away.

And uh I'm I'm embarrassed to admit this, but uh I sprinted back to my house one night because something scared me.

And uh I was like, as a grown man, like, oh, I'm taking the trash out and I threw the trash away.

And then I was certain that a mountain lion approached me and I just took off running.

I like came in the house.

Hannah was like, Are you okay?

I was like, I think it was a mountain lion.

And then you could kind of see a house cat walking by.

I was like, okay, no, we're good, we're good.

It's okay, it's all right.

In the dark, you will fill in the imagination with whatever your mind can produce.

But we're waiting, we're waiting for the light of Christ to show up.

We're waiting for the light of Christ to appear and to give us hope, to remind us of the truth that God is there, that he is with us.

In John chapter one, starting in verse nine, this is what it says.

It says, The one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

He came into the world, he created, but the world didn't recognize him.

He came to his own people, and even they rejected him.

But to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God.

It says here that he is the light of the world and that he gives light to everyone.

That everyone who asks, he will give light if we recognize him.

You see, Jesus didn't show up in the way that the Israelites expected him to.

He didn't show up in the form or the way that they were expecting.

When he arrived, he he arrived in such a small way that they thought, well, surely not.

This can't be Jesus.

This can't be the way that he will show up.

It might be that way for you in whatever difficult circumstance you are going through.

He might show up in such a way that he's hard to recognize.

He might show up in such a way that it's the smallest movement towards the light that that it brings you into that moment of experiencing God.

And so he came to the world to give us light.

And because we couldn't become like God, he became like us.

And we couldn't be enough like him, so he became like us and comes down into the world to become his own creation and to be there to illuminate the world for us.

And in Advent, we remember that he is always coming to us.

He's always reaching to us, he's always coming closer to us, he's always drawing near to us, drawing close to us.

And Advent teaches us to be patient in an impatient world.

The Israelites have been waiting so long for their Savior to arrive.

Jesus waited a thousand years after King David, before he came to the world.

It was seven hundred years after Isaiah's prophecy about his coming, and it was four hundred years after the last prophet Malachi spoke of his coming before Jesus arrived.

It was a long time where they were waiting on him, but his timing is perfect.

And so it's not just the evil and wrong things that come out in the night.

This is also where we find Christ.

We find him there in the darkest time, in the in the middle of the night.

That is when he arrives.

That is when Jesus shows up.

In fact, over and over, the Bible describes Jesus showing up as a thief in the night.

I want to show you five of those instances here.

So I'm going to just go through these quickly, but look how often it refers to Jesus as a thief in the night.

Revelation chapter 16, verse 15 says, Look, I will come as unexpectedly as a thief.

Revelation 16:15

Blessed are all who are watching for me, who keep their clothing ready, so they will not have to walk around naked and ashamed.

Matthew 24, verse 43 says, But know this that if the master of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into.

Matthew 24:43

Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

First Thessalonians 5 2 says, For you know quite well that the day of the Lord's return will come unexpectedly, like a thief in the night.

And again, in First Thessalonians 5 4, but you aren't in the dark about these things, dear brothers and sisters, and you won't be surprised when the day of the Lord comes like a thief.

Second Peter 3, verse 10 says, But the day of the Lord will come as unexpectedly as a thief.

2 Peter 3:10

Often, whenever we listen to or read those scriptures, we think of the second coming, and it certainly applies, but it also applies to his first arrival here on earth.

This is the way that Jesus operates.

It was in the cover of night that Mary and Joseph received word of Jesus' arrival.

It was in the cover of night that the shepherds received the message that Jesus had arrived.

It was in the cover of night where the Magi could see the star and they could follow it at night in order to find him.

He was arriving in a sleepy, dark town, a nothing town, a nowhere place, under the cover of night, arriving.

King Herod is looking for him.

He can't be found.

He didn't arrive on a gold entrance or a red carpet laid out for him.

He didn't arrive on a war horse or anything like that.

He just uh secretly comes in like a thief in the night.

I was thinking through this time, uh oftentimes uh in any kind of Advent devotional book, whenever you read through it, you're you're gonna get to the place where you're preparing for the moment of the birth of Christ.

And you'll be reading all of these scriptures that that seem so and feel so apocalyptic, where you're saying Jesus is gonna arrive like a thief in the night, and we'll we won't know when it's going to happen.

And and and and we get to Advent, and all of these verses start popping up in scripture and in these uh devotionals.

And so I was just taking a moment to think about that, to meditate on that, to think what is it that's happening when Jesus does show up like a thief in the night?

And I placed myself then in the position of the Israelites who had been waiting and waiting for their Messiah, waiting for him to show up, and they probably expected a big party or a procession.

They probably expected all of the signs to point to this being the Messiah, and instead he shows up quietly.

He shows up in in the in the cover of the night, he shows up like a thief in the night.

What did he steal then from the Israelites?

Well, he stole their preconceived notions, he stole their idea of who God really is, who Jesus was.

He stole from them their pride and their arrogance in believing that they knew exactly who he was and when he would arrive and when he would show up.

He stole from them all of the things that they held fast to, all the ideas, all the expansions that they had added to the law.

He stole all of those things from him because he shows up and he shows a new way, a new way to do those things.

I uh let me let me explain this to you.

We need to think of Jesus' arrival around the time of Christmas Christmas, and as we're selling Advent, we need to think of him as showing up as a thief in the night, and you need to pause and wonder what does he need to steal from you?

What does he need to steal from you in this season of Advent?

What does he need to take from you?

Does he need to take from you your pride, arrogance, greed, lust, any of these things?

Does he need to remove those things from you?

Does he need to remove your preconceived notions about what this year might look like or what God might do or how he might show up in your life this year?

What does he need to steal from you?

Because if he can steal that thing from you, you'll be left empty-handed and ready to receive the true gift that is Jesus.

Ready to receive his true salvation, his true grace.

If he can just steal those things out of your hands so often we can't receive what we need to receive because we have our fists wrapped around all the things that we want, all the things that we desire.

And in a season where it the temptation is so strong to delve into consumerism, the temptation is so strong to be pulled into those things.

And we always talk about we need to remember the real reason for the season.

We need to not think of this as just a consumeristic time, just a holiday.

We need to remember the true meaning of this.

Let God steal from you all of those things that you're holding on to.

And that's the moment that your hands are empty and you receive the Christ in the form that he wants to present himself to you in, in the way that God wants to manifest himself in your life, in just the way that he wants to show up.

We have to remove all of those things, though.

The Israelites had such a hard time recognizing Christ as the Messiah.

And the reason was it's because of all those things that they were holding on to.

There was no room for Christ, just as there was no room in that upper room on the night that he was born.

There's no room for Christ in our hearts if we keep holding on to those things.

We receive him when we let go.

When we allow Christ to come in just as a thief in the night and to remove those things from our lives.

Do this as a spiritual exercise with your family.

God, what is it that you need to take from me to remove from my life?

The story of the magi blows my mind because uh here you have the magi who are wise men from far off in the east, and they see the signs in the universe, and they see the special star appear.

And so they go looking for the king, and they arrive to King Herod, and they say, Where is where is this happening?

Where is it taking place?

Something is going on.

Where where what's happening?

What's taking place?

The Bible says that King Herod then goes to the scribes and the the chief priests, and and and he asks them, Where will Jesus be born?

And they say, In Bethlehem.

And they quote the scripture to him.

This is where the Bible says that that the Savior will be born in Bethlehem.

Obviously, we know King Herod has evil intentions.

And so that's why he's like, hey, let me know once you find him, let me know where he is.

But the thing that fascinates me is that here the magi are going to see the Savior.

All the chief priests and scribes know where he's going to be born.

They're the ones that give the magi the tip on where to go.

And not one of them goes with them.

Not one of them goes with them to find the king, to experience the Messiah.

We've got to go to the king.

We've got to remember that we've got to find him.

We've got to press in.

We've got to work for, to wait and to watch for the light, to wait and watch for the tiniest ways that God might show up in our lives.

There's so many times that I feel a prompting to do something.

The Lord is leading me to something.

And I think, eh, that's too small.

I'm just, it's not right.

That wouldn't be the case.

I'm thinking things or I'm hearing things.

It's the tiniest moments, the smallest moments that God calls us to pay attention to, because that is where you will find him.

And oftentimes it is in the darkest places.

God calls us to reach out.

Whenever he says, when you've done this to the least of me's, then you've done it to me.

And we think, What what are you talking about?

That is because you will find him in the darkness.

You will find him amongst the weakest, the ones who need him the most.

And when we go to those people, when we uh go to that place, we find the king there.

We find the king in our ministry to the ones who need it the most.

That is where we find them.

That is the press that we should be doing.

Now, let me uh let me tell you about something um that just happened a couple days ago.

It's called the winter solstice.

Uh some of you might already know this, some of you won't, but I'm just just so I can uh tell you something about it, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what the winter solstice is.

Okay.

So you have the the earth and uh and it spins on its axis, but it also uh rotates around the sun.

And so when it makes one full circle around the sun, that's 365 days, that accounts for one year, and it's also spinning uh each time, and that's what gives us uh 24 hours in a day.

And so as it turns and and and we have new days, it also wraps around the sun.

And what happens then because of that is we have long days where we see the sun a lot.

And the reason is because the earth is canted on uh so when it spins, it's not straight up and down spinning, it's actually canted just a little bit.

And so as it spins then uh and and moves around the sun for the northern hemisphere, that creates longer days in the summer and uh shorter days in the winter.

And so uh as it spins and then moves around the earth, we experience long days, long days of sunshine in the summer, and uh very short days of sunshine and long nights in the winter.

And uh it like in the North Pole, the on the on the winter solstice, that is the longest night of the year.

They will not see the sun at all.

And so uh for all of us in the northern hemisphere, uh, we just had on December 22nd the winter solstice, which will be our longest night of the year.

And uh and and interestingly, that's when our winter is.

So you would think that that is the moment when the earth, as it rotates around the sun, is farthest from the sun.

But the reality is that the earth is closest to the sun in our winter.

So when we wrap around, we're closest to the sun there in our winter, and we go back around, we have the long days of the summer, then come back for the long nights of the winter.

Okay, that quick lesson.

All right, here's why I'm telling you that.

All right.

Um, when the church, we have no idea what exact date Jesus was born.

Maybe you've wondered why do we celebrate on December 25th?

Why do we do that?

Why do we we participate in this?

And and how did we get to that date?

When the church was trying to decide when we should celebrate the birth of Christ, they looked to the cosmos for the signs.

They wanted each uh celebration that we celebrate and participate in to line up with what the universe was telling us, what God's creation was telling back to us.

We they they were big into stories, and so they wanted the story of Christmas, the story of Christ's birth to be told in the world, in the universe, as well as through our our reading and our speaking to each other and our celebrations.

And so they thought, well, when should we then celebrate Christmas?

And so for 1,600 years until the 16th century, Christmas was on the exact same day as the winter solstice.

Now, in the 16th century, uh all prior to that, they only had 362 days in a year, so they added three days to the year, and that meant now that the winter solstice typically happens on December 22nd, and we celebrate Christmas on December 25th.

But that is not the date that we were intended to celebrate.

The date that we were intended to celebrate was on the winter solstice.

Why?

Because Jesus showed up in the longest, darkest, coldest night.

And as the ancient people would watch the stone hinge or the sundials or the rocks that they would see, that is the day, the winter solstice, where the sun stands still.

And we have the longest night that night.

It is an indication to farmers on when they will plant.

It is an indication of how the year is wrapping up.

But the the creators in the early church of choosing December 25th as the date for us to celebrate wanted us to know that on the longest, coldest, darkest night of the year, Jesus was arriving.

And in a long process, it doesn't happen immediately.

We know we have many more days of winter ahead of us, but in a process, what we know is this is the longest night.

Every night after this will be a little bit shorter.

When Jesus arrives into your life, you can safely say this is the longest night I'll have.

Luckily, she's very capable of doing all of that stuff.

She she knows what she's doing, but she she did all of that stuff.

She entirely negotiated and bought our house for us in Amarillo.

And we got to Amarillo and we decided to have some painters paint the house to freshen it up.

And uh, and my son had just turned 13 years old and he had wanted to go to Colorado on a little man trip with me.

And I kept telling him, you know, with the church shutting down, with COVID, I don't think there's any way that we're gonna be able to do it this year.

We'll try to make it up to you on another year.

And so uh on on that on that time, then we we got to Amarillo, and after trying to wrap up everything in Austin and move and all of the chaos of all of those things, emotionally I was completely shot.

And Hannah said, take Grady, go to Colorado, and and and you know, we can't even live in the house right now, so I'll take care of everything here.

He he wants this trip, go go to Colorado.

We got there, and after all the craziness of everything moving and all of these things and shutting down the church and doing all of these things, I got into the mountains and it was just me and him, and it was quiet.

And all of all of that caught back up to me, all of it that that I needed to avoid or put away so I could try to get things done, rushed back in.

And I was such a mess.

I was telling Grady, hey, you're 13, you're a man now, you you need to go into this restaurant.

We we weren't eating in restaurants, so we would just go in to pick up the food.

You need to go in and pay and get the food and come back out.

And the reality was that my anxiety was so high I couldn't walk into to a restaurant.

I couldn't just walk in and talk to people and say, hey, this is this is our order, this is what we would like.

And so I just kept sending him on errands and and and I was calling Hannah.

I was saying, I don't know what to do.

I can't, I can't function, I can't go to this place, I can't do this thing, I can't I can't do this.

And so I pulled up a devotional one day and I just I just spent that time just soaking, just asking God to heal me from the hurts and the wounds, to to restore me, to try to bring me back to being a person that I was before, that I could just try to find some semblance of that.

And and and and there in that moment, in that darkest time, I'll never forget how powerfully God showed up.

And it wouldn't have happened unless I had been driven to the darkest place and I couldn't then fill in all of the void with my imagination.

I had to turn to God and say, God, will you show up?

And I want you to remember, whenever they they designed Christmas to be on December 25th on the longest, darkest night, it makes no sense to us because it's this grand celebration of the birth of the child.

And just when you think it's long and dark and cold, that's when you're the farthest from the sun.

You're actually the closest.

Actually, that's the moment that you're the closest to the sun.

He arrives in the darkest times of your life.

And you can count on him.

You can count on him to show up in the darkest, longest, coldest night you've ever experienced and close your eyes with anything.

For some of you, you might be saying, I've never experienced the light like that.

I've never experienced the presence of God in such a way.

It's simple.

It's a simple prayer.

You can say, God, I remember that these wise men that traveled from so far to see you fell to the ground and worshiped a toddler.

Because they needed a king.

They needed God in their life.

If that's you today, it's as simple as praying a prayer that says, God, I make you the king of my life.

I serve you from this day forward.

For those of us who have already accepted Christ, this is a season and a time.

As difficult as this year has been, to remember that this is when God is closest to you.

You may not be able to feel the warmth of the sun in this moment, but the days are lengthening and the nights are shortening.

Christ is here, he is present.

No matter how dark or difficult it gets, we have hope because a savior was born.

And so, Lord, today we give you everything.

God, we remember that you're there in the darkest times.

So we give you our disappointments, we give you our preconceived notions, we give you all of our ideas of who you are and which ways we think you'll show up.

And instead, God, we wait and we watch, waiting for your presence, waiting for the sun to dawn, waiting for these long nights to end.

So, God, we where we rest and we wait in your presence.

And Lord, would you help make us bearers of your light that make a difference in this world and continue to shine the light of your glory and your goodness?

We pray all these things in the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit.

Amen.