Our Plans v. God's Purpose

This is scale for our conversations with Rose where we clear up all your holiday's confusion.

You know, I was out for a walk this evening here in the North Georgia wilderness, just kind of trying to clear my head as we enter the Christmas season.

I gotta think about my buddy Joe.

Joe is a he was a city boy from uh just a suburb just south of Detroit, Michigan.

And uh, you know, one night I I remember he he hopped on a on a train like in the middle of the night, um, and he was like, I'm going just like anywhere, like anywhere but here.

Um sorry, you're sorry, I don't interrupt you, but you know you know we're talking about Joseph.

No, Joe, no, it was Joseph.

He was like, he worked at the local Home Depot, that number he was like in store 511.

Um he was in my ninth grade science class at Winchester High School.

Joe Ferguson.

No, no, I never heard of that.

He was always saying stuff like that, whatever you do, don't believe it.

Awesome.

Well, uh good morning, and uh welcome to Church of the Grove this morning.

Hopefully you've had a fantastic week.

For those of you that I haven't had the chance to meet, my name is Nathan, and I'm one of the pastors here.

I'm normally at our social circle location, but me and Russ have switched this week, and so Russ is down there, and I get the opportunity to be with you guys this uh Christmas uh day of celebrating and going into the second week of our holidays series, and so we're excited about that.

But before we jump in this morning, I just want to say a special welcome to all of our guests that are here with us this morning.

We uh have one of our greatest honors and privileges is just to be able to host you this morning and just say thank you so much for joining us and spending part of your week and part of your weekend with us today.

And uh, whether you're watching online for the first time or if you're in here in person, we just want to say thank you.

And uh we would love to be able to connect with you here at Church of the Grove.

We're not just about consuming content, but we want people to actually connect and we want to help you not just believe in Jesus, but also belong here at Church at the Grove.

And so uh we would love for you to fill out our connection card or encounter card, and you can do that through our Church at the Grove app, or we got a physical card on your way out.

You can stop by the connections desk and we can fill it out there.

Um, but that's just a great resource and a tool for us to get to know you a little bit better and for us to follow up this week and just give you some resources on how you can grow spiritually and how you can connect here and belong here at Church at the Grove.

And so we would pray that you would uh do that this morning.

So uh as I said, we're moving into week two of our holidays series, and uh Christmas is just a little over a week and a half away.

Like, how crazy is that um that we are getting so close to Christmas, and it just feels like this uh year has flown by, um, that we are now in Christmas season full blast, and with Christmas season comes a lot of fun things, right?

There's uh friends and family gatherings, there's staff parties, there's uh decorations that are being hung, there's presents that are bought and given, there's joy and peace and love, as Jonah mentioned.

There just seems to be this extra generous spirit uh on uh this Christmas season where people want to be more and more generous, even more than they usually are.

Um it doesn't it without a week going by, there is always a text that I receive or a phone call from somebody that's saying, Hey, we want to help a needy family, we want to help and give to this person or this uh situation that's going on, and we get to be a part of that.

We get to be extra generous this time of year, and it's such a great time for that.

But at the same time, there's also some difficulties that come with this season.

Uh there's great things like friends and family gatherings, but then there's also friends and family gatherings, right?

That can be a little bit more difficult.

Um maybe there's some family that you have coming in from out of town that you haven't seen in quite some time, and maybe there's a family member that's kind of that Uncle Eddie character in your life, and you're just dreading having to sit at the dinner table with him or her, right?

Maybe it's a political belief that they held, and you're having to talk to them about, you know, the election or the current state of the economy or our president, and you're dreading those kind of conversations.

So it can bring in some negative things as well.

There's uh the weight gain.

Did you know that the average person between Thanksgiving and New Year's will gain 10 pounds between here and the end of the year?

So that's kind of a crazy thought as well.

And then you've got just the busyness where we're constantly moving and there's constantly all these activities and events and parties and different things that we've got to go to, and it can be kind of a stressful season because of that as well.

This season also is a time where sadness and depression can creep into our lives, where this season is supposed to be about joy and happiness and peace and love and all those great things, but it also is a time when the days are cold and dark get dark, it gets dark early, and as a result, we're kind of forced to kind of be indoors more, and it can just lead to sadness and depression, and especially this year.

Um, it just seems like there's so many families uh within our church and even outside of our church that have lost loved ones over the past year or two years.

And this Christmas season, they're going to be sitting around a dinner table and there's going to be an empty seat.

For our family personally, my wife uh has lost both of her grandparents this year and an uncle.

Um, and as a result, our Christmas is going to look a lot different than it has in years past because there's there's death, right?

There's the loss of loved ones.

And I know that so many of us have dealt with that, especially coming out of a pandemic situation.

And so it can bring a lot of great things, but it can also bring a lot of hardship into our lives.

Not to mention that for many of us, we're just simply tired, right?

It's been a hard two years coming through a pandemic.

It's been a hard year for ourselves where we're just having to fight to kind of continue on with life and some normalcy that comes with that.

And for some of us, we've had uh trials when it comes to our finances.

For some of us, we've had relationship struggles, for some of us, we've had sickness and other issues that have popped up into our lives.

And so we come to the end of the year and we kind of just feel exhausted.

We feel tired.

And yes, we're physically here, but emotionally and maybe mentally, we're just kind of disconnected.

And that's what we're calling the holidays, right?

Where we're just kind of in the holiday season, but we're just kind of in this dazed kind of state where we're here, but we're not really fully present in our lives.

And if that's where you're coming from this morning, man, we have a message for you today.

Because I want us to talk about what do we do when life does not go the way that we anticipate?

What do we do when life is not how it we expect it to go?

What do we do in those situations?

That's what we're going to talk about this morning, and we're going to see ultimately that God brings clarity in the midst of our chaos.

That in the midst of the struggles and the disappointments in life, that God shows up, he's present in those moments, and he brings clarity in the midst of our chaos.

And we're going to look at the person named Joseph in the Bible.

And no, not Joseph from the journey song, but Joseph from the Bible.

And we're going to see how his story was a story that had incredible chaos.

But in the midst of the chaos, God brings clarity into his situation and works and moves to accomplish his divine plan.

So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Matthew chapter 1.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

We'll be there pretty much all morning today.

Matthew chapter 1, starting in verse 18, and it reads this way It says, This is how Jesus the Messiah was born.

Matthew 1 · chapter mention

His mother Mary was engaged to be married to Joseph.

Let's stop right there for a second.

Uh, you've got this engagement, and this engagement was really more than an engagement.

This was a betrothal.

This was uh uh something that could only be dissolved by divorce, even though they had not gone through fully with the marriage ceremony and committed vows to one another.

It was pretty much seen as if they were legally connected together.

And what would have happened back in this day was that there probably would have been uh Mary's father and mother, and there would have been Joseph's father and mother, and they would have gotten together and they would have arranged this relationship to happen.

It was an arranged marriage.

This wasn't Joseph and Mary probably falling in love.

They didn't go on probably tons and tons of dates, but this was probably arranged on their behalf, and there was probably a dowry, some type of payment that Joseph would have had to make, or Joseph's family would have had to make to Mary's parents as kind of this purchasing price of getting her hand in marriage.

And it was this way of uh protecting the bride's family in case the groom decided to back out at the last minute, that there was some protection on her part.

And so there's this legal kind of connection, although they had not taken their vows.

They were not officially married yet.

Um, this was a time of probation, a time to kind of test the fidelity that they would have towards one another.

Not to mention that this was also a time in their lives when Joseph would have probably been around the age of 16 to uh 18 or so years old, and Mary probably would have been about 12.

Now it's crazy to think that there was a uh sixth grader, a middle schooler, um, that's getting married, but that's what happened back in biblical times.

I just kind of relinquished the thought of having middle schoolers today get married in this way, but this is what happened back in this day.

And even though it was arranged, even though it was orchestrated outside of their control, most likely, this still would have been a day that Mary and Joseph would have looked forward to.

This was a rite of passage for them.

This was something that they longed for and hoped for.

They had dreams about their future together.

If they had Instagram and Facebook back then, they would be putting stuff out there about wedding dress shopping and the marriage ceremony and how all of this stuff was playing out.

But everything is about to change.

Their plans are about to be totally wrecked.

It says that they were engaged to be married to Joseph, but before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant.

So this is part of the plan, right?

No.

Joseph is hearing that his wife or his soon-to-be wife, the one that he's legally kind of connected with, all of a sudden turns up to be pregnant.

Now, Joseph, knowing that he is not the father of this baby, there's only one logical explanation for this, right?

That she has had a relationship with another man.

And think about how embarrassing that would have been for Joseph, how humiliating that would have been for his friends and his family members to find out.

Think about their parents.

And when their parents find out that Mary is pregnant, man, their parents are either thinking that her and Joseph were together before the marriage was actually finalized or that there was some other instance that happens.

And so this is not the plan.

This is not the way that they anticipated it to go.

And for Mary, this was a dangerous situation for her to be in because in the Old Testament, there's this law that was mapped out in Deuteronomy chapter 22, and it says this in verse 23.

Deuteronomy 22 · chapter mention

It says, Suppose a man meets a young woman, a virgin, who is engaged to be married, and he has sexual intercourse with her, and it happens within a town.

You must take both of them to the gates of that town and stone them to death.

So this is a dangerous situation for Mary.

She finds out that she's pregnant, Joseph is not the father, and legally, according to the Old Testament law, they could take her outside the city gates and stone her and whoever the father would have been.

So this is a crazy situation.

This is not what they anticipated.

This is not what they asked for or wanted out of life.

But then it gets even stranger than that.

It says that she was, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now it gets really, really weird, right?

That here we see that she's pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And you can imagine how people probably would have heard that and said, Yeah, right.

That didn't happen, right?

There's no way that that happens.

Who's who is even the Holy Spirit?

This makes absolutely no sense.

And they look at the response of Joseph, and Joseph, even though he finds out this information, Joseph was a righteous man as we read in verse 19.

It says, Joseph, to whom she was engaged, was a righteous man and did what did not want to disgrace her publicly.

So he decided to break off the engagement quietly.

So here's this mess in the utter chaos of their life that is supposed to be the happiest time of their life.

A time of joy, a time of celebration, a time when everything seems to kind of be falling into place, and then everything changes, right?

Joseph, a man that was thinking about how he was going to marry Mary, that they were gonna have kids together, they were gonna have this beautiful life.

He had a job following in his family's footsteps and his family business of being a carpenter.

And now all of a sudden the Holy Spirit shows up and totally wrecks everything.

Everything they dreamed for, everything they wanted, everything they hoped for, suddenly was crushed because the Holy Spirit shows up and does a in a chaotic and moves them into a chaotic situation in life.

And so what does Joseph do?

Joseph has every right to have Mary taken out to the public square and stoned to death, but Joseph doesn't do that.

He decides to withhold that judgment and withhold that punishment, instead to just divorce her quietly and walk away.

And so that's what Joseph intends to do.

And this is something that I see in our world and our culture today.

That when the things get tough in our lives, we have this tendency to kind of walk away from difficult situations.

And we're seeing this on a huge scale with the politicalization of our nation and the polarization of our nation, right?

When there's relationships that we don't like, when there's relationships that are hard, when there's relationships of people that we don't agree with, what do we do?

We just say, well, unfriend him or her.

I'm walking away from this relationship.

It's not good for my mental health to be around this person or that person.

And we just walk away from relationships and walk away from difficult situations because we think that in walking away from difficult situations, we have peace.

But peace is not the absence of chaos or not the absence of conflict.

Peace is ultimately the presence of God in the midst of chaos and conflict.

And so Joseph wants to walk away.

He wants to leave, he wants to quietly kind of end this relationship and move on to the next stage of his life and kind of hold on to what little dignity he might have had left.

But the angel of the Lord comes to him and doesn't want him to walk away.

He doesn't want him to have a false version of peace.

He doesn't want him to have no conflict in life, but instead, God's presence is going to come to Joseph in a dream and as a result show him that in the midst of our conflict, in the midst of our chaos in life, God is there.

And I don't know what situation that you might be walking in here with this morning, where you maybe you've had a difficult year, maybe you are facing some empty chairs at the table for Christmas dinner.

Maybe you've lost loved ones.

Maybe you have financial issues or marriage issues.

Maybe there's divorces that have happened this year, and you're walking through difficult situations that you've never asked for, you never wanted, that you never anticipated.

And it's so we have to be so careful just to walk away from difficult situations because it's in the difficult situations of life that God reveals Himself to us in deeper and more intimate ways.

The last year and a half have been some of the most difficult years for some of us to walk through.

But I can say for my life personally that the Lord has spoken and worked in my life more than any other time in the history of my 36 years of existence.

And so God is in the middle of our chaos, and the Lord wants to give us clarity in the midst of our chaos.

And so an angel shows up in verse 20.

It says, As he considered this, Joseph considered this, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph, son of David, the angel said, Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit.

And she will have a son, and you will name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

So there's this promise that Joseph has given through a dream.

Now I don't know if Joseph is thinking he ate some bad chili the night before or whatever, but this is confirming everything that Mary has said, and as a result, he's going to believe that what the angel has told him, what the Lord is doing, and what the Lord is uh orchestrating in their life is actually going to come to fruition.

That this sounds great, right?

This sounds awesome that the Son of God would be given to Joseph for his care to raise as a father, even though he was not the legitimate father.

But there would have been a lot of chaos in this situation.

There would have been a lot of uh embarrassment on his part.

Even as this child was born, right?

There would have been this stigma that came with Joseph and Mary, where people would have assumed things about them.

And Joseph is willing to take what the Lord has said and be obedient to what the angel has commanded him to do, to not divorce and walk away, but instead to continue on in the middle of the relationship, to continue to marry her, to withhold the sexual relationship until after the child was born.

And Joseph was obedient to that.

See, Joseph's interruption was actually God's intervention.

And I think that sometimes in our lives when we're interrupted and we're inconvenienced, we can see that as a this issue where we we don't want that, right?

We don't want to be inconvenienced.

We don't want to be interrupted.

We don't want our plans to go off the rails.

Instead, we want our plans to go exactly how we have seen them play out.

But oftentimes it's in the middle of the interruptions in life that God is intervening.

It's not an inconvenience when God interrupts, but it's an intervention for God to work and to move in our lives and in our hearts and in our community and the people around us.

And we have to see that.

In the middle of your pain, in the middle of your chaos, in the middle of your frustration, God is there and God is working out his plan.

He has a bigger purpose in mind than even you do.

And I think this is interesting because I think, especially around Christmas time, we come to the table with these expectations of what Christmas is going to look like.

I don't know if you guys can agree with this or relate to this, but for us, like we kind of have this picture, this picture-perfect Christmas expectation in our mind.

And I blame it on Hallmark movies.

If you're a Hallmark person in the room, I have no condemnation except you got to find something better to watch.

But um, you got this picture, right?

And so we're decorating for Christmas, and you know, everybody's wearing matching pajamas, and we're all hanging ornaments on the trees, and the kids are laughing and happy and drinking hot chocolate, right?

And then you got gingerbread that's baking in the oven and it's just smelling up the house, and it's just this beautiful scene, right?

There's this light kind of layer of snow that's falling gently to the ground, and everybody's just happy and loving each other, right?

And then there's reality.

And reality is, right, that you don't have matching pajamas.

There's kids that are running around naked, you're right, you don't know where that's coming from.

There's they're fighting and yelling at one another, there's ornaments that are being dropped on the floor and they're breaking, the gingerbread in the oven is burning, the hot chocolate is being spilt.

That's the reality of the situation.

And sometimes we can build up the expectations of what we think is going to uh something that's going to happen, and we can be very, very disappointed when it doesn't happen the way that we anticipated.

Um, think Christmas morning.

Um I I can think of just the past couple of years with us.

We've got a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and then uh finally a six-month-old now.

And um just watching our boys uh open up gifts on Christmas is always this kind of great expectation.

As parents, you know, we want to buy them all these gifts that they think they're gonna love and they're so excited about, and they come down the hallway in the morning and they're opening up all the gifts and they're excited for about five minutes, right?

And then like the next rest of the day, they're playing with the boxes that they came in.

And it's not what we anticipated, right?

But it's the reality of the situation.

And while those examples are humorous, there's other examples in your life and in my life that are much, much more devastating than that.

Where we had an expectation of what we thought life was going to be like, and we're solely and sorely disappointed when it doesn't go the way that we want.

And so we have to understand that in the middle of our interruption, that God is intervening in our lives, that he's working out his divine plan and his divine purposes.

And we've got to ask ourselves this question that in the middle of our disappointment, in the middle of the chaos, in the middle of the confusion of life, what will we do?

Will we choose to hold on to our plans tightly, or will we embrace God's purposes for our lives instead?

Because here's the real reality of the situation.

Even though we think what's in our mind and the expectations we have are the best version for our life, ultimately.

God's purposes for our life are the best thing for us.

And so will we trust in our own plans and embrace our own plans, or will we embrace God's purposes for the season?

That's a question that we have to ask ourselves.

If we're going to move out of the holidays and the false expectations and the false versions of peace that we might hold, we've got to move into embracing God's plan rather than solely looking at our plans instead.

And so there's three takeaways I think that we can take away from the story of Joseph's this morning.

The first thing is this is that your interruption might just simply be God's plan.

And we got to hold on to that.

And for some of you, knowing some of your stories and just hearing some of the things that you've had to walk through recently and even just over the course of your life, things that you never thought was going to happen.

Maybe that's God's interruption, which might be simply his plan for your life.

And that he's using those situations, he's using those events and those circumstances as horrible and as difficult as they might be.

And so God's interruption might be God's plan.

And so for us, when I was reading through this story, I thought about a lady that goes to our social circle campus.

Her and her husband and family have been coming for uh probably eight years or more now, and they've been a very active part in our church.

Um her name's Wendy, Wendy Ollygood, and she actually works at Youth Elementary School up here.

And uh about three or four, uh I guess it's probably been about two months ago now, um, she uh sent me a text and uh just really out of the blue, she kind of felt this little bump on the back of her neck um right up blind behind her ear.

Uh about four or five months ago, she went to the doctor, didn't think a whole lot about it, and then about two months ago um they got news uh that the biopsy that they did turned out to be cancer.

Stage three, super rare uh form of cancer.

They actually had to send it off to the Mayo clinic to do the testing because they had no idea kind of how to uh know what was truly what she was facing.

And so she sends me this text, which is never a good text to get that you have some of you're sending a text that you have cancer, but um she called or she sends me this text, and this is what her text says.

She said, I have an appointment at Emory on next Thursday.

I I know I'll know more then, but I know it's a very rare form of cancer.

It's stage three.

Surgery and then maybe radiation alone or with chemotherapy, but I'm not worried.

I mean, I understand it is very serious, but I'm calm.

I'm honestly totally at peace, and I vow to praise the Lord, good or bad, on earth or in heaven.

He's got this.

All of that to say that I know the Lord is in control, and he must have a reason for this timing.

Right now, the only reason I can fathom is that he will make me totally dependent upon him.

I always thought that I was, but now I find I can be even more so close enough to touch his garment.

And you read that story and you hear her story and her testimony, and yes, she's at the very beginning stages of what might be a terrible and rough, rough battle.

And some of you guys have walked through that.

But to see the faith of someone that in the middle of her life, when everything seemed to be playing out the way that she thought that it would, she's interrupted, but it's in the middle of the interruption that God is intervening and working out his plan and his purpose in his life, in her life.

And that's what God does in your life and in my life.

He takes our interruptions, he takes the chaos, he takes the confusion, and he turns it into something that works out for our good and for his glory.

Romans 8 28, we know that all things are working for the good of those that love him and are called according to his purposes.

And so we can hold on to that truth.

And so we ask ourselves the question, Lord, what are you trying to teach me through my turmoil?

What are you trying to teach me through the trials that I'm facing?

What are you trying to teach me through the disappointment that I'm facing?

Because God is in the middle of that.

He has not deserted you, he has not left you, which leads us to the second thing that we see in this story is that we have to stop complaining about our circumstances and start declaring God's character and promises over the chaos.

Listen to what happens in Matthew chapter 1, verse 22.

Matthew 1:22

It says, All of this occurred to fulfill the Lord's message through the prop through his prophet.

Look, the virgin will conceive a child, and she will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God is with us.

When Joseph woke up, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded and took Mary to be his wife.

But he did not have sexual relations with her until her son was born, and Joseph named him Jesus.

So Joseph had a lot to complain about, right?

This is not how his life was going to go.

This is not what he anticipated.

This is not what he expected.

This is not what he wanted.

He wanted the simple life.

He wanted to have kind of the perfect family and have kids and work the family trade and be a carpenter.

This is what Joseph wanted for his life.

And it's super easy for him to complain about his situation and complain about the chaotic events that he's facing.

But Joseph doesn't do that instead.

He declares the promises of God that were predicted way back in the Old Testament, and he ultimately names Jesus, which means the Savior, which means the one who saves, or salvation is in his name.

That he would be called Emmanuel, which is God is with us, that even in the midst of the chaos and confusion of his life, that God was there.

And we've all been around people that complain, right, about their situation and their circumstances.

I had dinner uh last week with uh with somebody, and we're sitting across the table from one another, and uh they just start talking about their life, and I'm asking them questions, just trying to catch up with them.

It's been a while since I had seen them, and we're talking, and uh they're sharing about their their story and their life, and it was just like everything was negative.

Like everything was just a disappointment, everything was wrong.

Like even when you're trying to find the positive in their in their life and in their situation, they always brought it back to a negative.

And it's super frustrating just to be around those types of people.

And I'm not saying that we just kind of throw uh caution to the wind and we just kind of act like we're always happy and joyful.

That's not what I'm saying.

We can be realistic, but there's this tendency that we all have in life to complain about the circumstances rather than to see that God is using those circumstances to accomplish his divine purpose and plan in our lives.

It says in James chapter one, consider it pure joy when we face trials of many kind, because we know that the testing of our faith develops perseverance.

And so the Bible literally tells us that we should be joyful in the midst of our circumstances, even when they're challenging, because we know that God is working, God is moving in the midst of those situations, and we can hold on to that.

We can trust that God is a faithful God, that he is with us, that he said he would never leave us or forsake us, but that he is going to be with us to the very end, and that he is working out his plan and his purposes for our lives.

And so for some of us, we have to stop complaining about the circumstances that we face.

And again, that's not trying to be insensitive to what you might have gone through, but we have to stop complaining about our circumstances and start declaring that God's character and his promises over our lives.

And so we ask ourselves this question, Lord, how can I focus on truth of God's word rather than on the trial?

We have to get our eyes off of our circumstances and look upwards to the one that is in control of our circumstances and our lives.

So, Lord, what can I do?

What do I need to focus on?

How can I focus on your truth rather than the trial?

And then finally, this is the third kind of takeaway from this passage is that God promises his presence, not separation from the chaos.

Oftentimes, God does not deliver us from chaos, but instead, he brings his presence in the midst of chaos.

God is present with us.

Joseph's knee-jerk reaction is to leave and to remove himself from the chaotic situation, but there's clarity.

God brings clarity in his presence in the middle of that.

Listen to what it says in Matthew 1 23.

It says, Look, the virgin will conceive a child, and she will give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us.

And those are some of the most beautiful words that are written in Scripture.

That ever since the very beginning, when sin entered the world, there was the separation.

And for generation after generation after generation, people were longing to be back into the presence of God once again, but they never could get there.

And so what does God do?

God sends his one and only Son down to take on the human flesh, to empty himself of divinity, to choose not to exercise his divine power.

And he takes on the form of a man.

And he says, That I am with you.

That God is with us, that God is for us.

And that's the beautiful story of Christmas is that we don't have a God that's just distant and just somewhere magically up in the sky, but God is with us, that he loves us enough that he came down from heaven, left perfection to dwell with us, that he moved into the neighborhood, and that he now dwells among us.

Like this is the beautiful story of Christmas, that he has Emmanuel, which means God is with us.

And so, in whatever you're facing, in death, in financial issues, in job situations, in divorce, in relational mishaps, in uh your kids going astray, and you don't know how to handle and how to parent, man, God is in the middle of that.

And we have the opportunity to look and to understand and to feel and to see his presence in the middle of whatever we are facing.

And so the question we can ask ourselves is, Lord, where is your presence seen in the midst of my pain?

Lord, where is your presence seen in the midst of my pain?

If we're gonna be sucked out of our pity party, if we're going to leave the failed plans, if we're gonna be able to get away from the holiday days that we might feel, we have to choose joy and throw off the shackles of discouragement and trust that God is in the middle of our pain, that he is working, that he is moving.

And we might not understand it, we might not know how he's going to play this whole situation out, but we trust.

Because that's ultimately what our faith is all about.

It's about trust.

That we trust that he is a good God that loves us and that cares for us.

And so we trust in his provision, we trust in his hand at work within our lives, and we live in that.

And so maybe you're here this morning, and maybe you're someone that has never fully trusted Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

Maybe you're someone that's filled a seat on a Sunday morning, or maybe you come to church for the very first time in a long, long while.

And this morning, maybe the response that you need to take, the next step that you need to take in your faith journey is simply saying, Lord, I'm I want to surrender.

I've been going through difficulty, I've been going through pain, I've been going through chaos in my life.

And Lord, I don't understand it, I don't get it, other than maybe you're using the situations in my life to draw me to you.

And today's the day I need to surrender my life fully to you.

And so if that's the step you need to take, we'd love to have a conversation afterwards.

If you're watching online, you can text start to follow to 9700, and we'll follow up with you this week.

But this is an opportunity for you to maybe come to a place of just surrender to Jesus.

For others of us, maybe you're a follower of Jesus, you've believed in Jesus, you've been walking with Jesus for some time, but you're just struggling.

It's a hard year, it's a hard season, and you really don't know where to go or what to do.

And maybe today you just need to say, Lord, I need you to reveal yourself to me in the middle of the pain, in the middle of the struggle, in the middle of the chaos.

I need some clarity in what you're trying to do in my life.

And here's the good God that we have.

I believe that he will come through, that he will reveal himself to you.

He's done it time and time in my life, in the life of so many others.

If we trust him in the middle of our circumstances, so will you do that?

We have a God that is a God that is with us.

We have a God that is for us, that he is a good God, which doesn't mean that bad things don't happen to good people, but it does mean that in the middle of the terrible things of life that we have to face, that he's with us.

And that's what Christmas is really all about, that in the middle of all the chaos, God came and is with us.

Will you pray with me?

Lord Jesus, I thank you so much for who you are and for all that you have done.

And Lord, just meditating and thinking about the power of the Christmas story, Lord, it's so easy for us to kind of miss out on just the chaos that was surrounding Mary and Joseph and so many others.

And so, Lord, let us not miss that.

This Christmas season, Lord, let us not just go through the motions.

Let us not just find ourselves in this daze where we're just kind of there physically, but we're not mentally and emotionally kind of there.

And Lord, help us to see that in the middle of our trials, in the middle of our chaos, in the middle of all the confusion that we face, that you're a God that is with us, that you're a God that is for us, that you're a God that wants to work out whatever situations we might be facing for your glory and ultimately for our good.

And so, Lord, let us trust you this morning.

Lord, I do pray for just uh people in the room that maybe need to take that first step of faith, that today would be the day of salvation.

Today would be the day when they would trust you wholeheartedly, that maybe some of the circumstances of their life have led them to uh devote themselves to you and led them to a place of really desperation where the only thing that they can hold on to is you and your presence.

And so, Lord, if that's someone in the room this morning, Lord, I pray that they would take that step of faith this morning and surrender their life to you.

And for other people in the room this morning or maybe watching online, um, and they're just walking through a difficult season.

Whatever it is, if it's financial, if it's relational, if it's um, you know, a death of a loved one and facing Christmas for the first time without a loved one there, whatever it is, Lord, I pray that you would just give them a special grace and favor and blessing on their lives.

In fact, why don't we do this?

If you're just someone in the room with every head bowed and every eye closed, if there's just kind of a difficulty in this season, if there's just kind of walking through trials and chaos in the midst of your life right now, would you just raise your hand?

I'm not gonna call you out.

I just want to just pray for you.

Anyone in the room?

See some hands.

Lord Jesus, I pray for these.

Lord, I pray for these in whatever they're walking through, Lord, I pray that you would comfort them.

I pray that you would reveal yourself to them.

I pray that you would uh work out uh these trials and these struggles in such a way, Lord, that you're uh not just uh getting them through or removing themselves, removing them from the difficulty, but rather, Lord, that you're revealing yourself and your presence in the midst of those things.

And so, Lord, I pray that you would work and move in their lives, Lord, and that they would see your hand all throughout their life and all throughout their struggles and all throughout their trials.

And Lord, we pray for a great testimony to come from whatever they're walking through where they can trace your hand in the midst of whatever they're facing.

And so, Lord, we just pray for blessing in their lives, for your hand and your presence to be there.

And so, Lord, again, we thank you for being Emmanuel.

We thank you for being God with us.

And Lord, we come to you now, just as we sing one last final song, Lord, just declaring that we should come with uh hearts adoring you, Lord.

And I pray that we would do that, not just today, but that we would do that as we walk through the Christmas season and even then beyond.

Lord, we love you.

We thank you for being a good and gracious God.

It's in your name we pray.

Amen.