Christmas Chaos with Pastor Tony Albano

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

My name is Tony.

If you guys are new here, I am so glad that you're here at the start of this brand new series, Christmas Chaos.

Me and Tori, we took a little bit of a hiatus.

Um, rightfully so.

We've just had our son Sonny born about three months ago.

So it's been very cool to spend some time.

Yeah.

It's been really cool to see how that dynamic has changed our life.

Uh, my son, the cutest kid in the world, but he does not sleep.

I don't know what it is.

Uh he's got FOMO, and it's like, dude, we won't do anything, I promise.

We're just gonna go to bed, nothing's gonna happen.

But that fool does not sleep.

God bless Tori.

Uh, she gave me a good night's rest yesterday.

She had uh she was basically up all night with him last night.

And uh she might be on the other side of the camera, just like so many others who are online.

If you are online watching this right now, welcome, or maybe in the future, maybe this is July, because you're like, you know, it's Christmas in July.

You wanna catch some of those feelings, some of that hope in our world, then what is going on?

So glad you are here today.

Uh, like Pastor Clayton shared, we are starting a brand new series today called Christmas Chaos.

And I think that kind of resonates with a lot of us when we think about the Christmas season.

Things get to speed up quick, right?

I'm talking shopping for gifts, I'm talking family gatherings, cooking, meeting up with that cousin who you don't ever want to meet up with again in your life, but it's Christmas, so you gotta get together, right?

And this happens, and there's this chaos, this feeling, and this messiness that's associated with Christmas.

But there's also a beautiful part about Christmas that's decorations, right?

Uh, I love the decorations of Christmas.

I love the lights and the tree.

Uh, who there was actually a person in every service who had not put their tree up.

Has anyone not put their tree up yet?

You don't you don't count, bro.

I'm just kidding.

He's youth.

It was a joke.

He counts as a person.

You've never put your tree up yet?

That's crazy.

Are you gonna put one up?

You're gonna put one up.

I think it's a waste of time.

You only got like two, three weeks left.

I don't know.

I don't know if it's worth Yeah, that's exactly all through January.

That's cool.

I love that.

Growing up, my family, like my dad, like there was a Halloween tree, there was a Thanksgiving tree, there was a Christmas tree.

Like, my dude loved putting up trees.

Uh, we're me and McTori, we've been here about two years now, and uh, this is the first time we're having like Christmas in our own home.

Uh so like this is the first time we've owned a tree.

So we're like, you know what?

Is it the fake tree, the real tree?

I don't know.

So we ended up going to that whole debate, and we found in Pipe Creek a tree farm.

So we went and we cut down our own tree.

That was a fun experience.

If you guys don't know that, I'm new here, I found it, you should find it.

It's a really good experience.

Um, there was a year though in my family where we had our tree up, right?

We all put these Christmas trees up.

Sometimes it feels like, is there even enough time?

Should it go up?

She says she's gonna keep it up till January.

But there's a time in my life where that Christmas tree never came down.

I'm talking the whole entire year went by.

For 12 months, no one put up the tree.

And that sounds funny, that sounds crazy, and it was crazy because like I have had friends coming over, and like my house was the house.

Like, if you didn't want supervision, Anthony's house is the house.

And people would come over, my friends, I have plenty of people coming through the doors of my house, and like everyone has the same reaction.

Like, bro, it's May.

Why is your Christmas tree up?

And I remember month after month, this tree started to get neglected and dusty.

And you see, it was a sad part of time in my history of my family where that was actually the moment, that was the year where my parents were on the end of their relationship.

Um, my mom was basically depressed.

She was present in the home, but she wasn't present with us.

Uh, my dad was in and out of the house.

When they were home, when we were together, there was nothing but fighting and screaming, and we couldn't get to the point where we could even come conclusively together and say, you know what, we should probably wrap up Christmas this year, you know?

It's time to probably put that thing.

We had a main tree, and then we had like three small little trees just sitting, and they get moved around just because of life.

And we had these neglected, sad-looking trees.

And then you know what happens 12 months after Christmas?

Christmas comes back around.

How do you find joy?

How do you actually feel excited and anticipate the season of Christmas when all year you've been doing nothing but looking at this sad, neglected tree?

This thing that shapes our vision of what Christmas should look like, the decorations, the fun, the family.

When really the last 12 months of my life, there's been nothing remotely close to that.

You and I, we go through life, we go through seasons of our life, and every year it comes around Christmas season, the chaos of Christmas.

How do we actually get over these things or overshadow these ideas of neglect or frustration and stress in our life that seems to be amplified every Christmas season?

You see, we have this idea of Christmas, how it's supposed to feel, right?

Like the decorations, we talked about that.

Uh, how about the vacations, right?

Like where you're actually supposed to be on Christmas, right?

Like if it ain't international, why even go?

El Paso, Grandma House, it sounded great years ago, but if I'm not in the Swiss Alps, if I'm not in the winter wonderland, what's even the purpose?

We have these expectations of what Christmas is supposed to look like and feel like, what our family gatherings are supposed to look like.

Maybe you guys are like me, and you remember on the holidays where um there was one specific time, which was a terrible idea, where we decided to take a family picture, but like go somewhere to get it done.

Like, I'm not talking like, you know, you're messing around in your living room.

Like, no, we got it done in public, and all you can hear, and I'm sure you do this every time you take a picture, gather around, start.

You gotta smile, smile.

Hey, stop fighting your sister, stop punching your sister.

Hey, look good.

Let's all look like we're one big happy family, and click.

You have this perfect Christmas picture.

Then what do we do?

We post to Facebook, right?

It's the first thing we do.

We post it up to Facebook, post it up to Instagram, and now I have this perfect family picture that everyone else is scrolling through and comparing their life to this picture.

Why don't I have that kind of family?

Why don't I have a family that loves me, that can gather around me in the seasons?

Why don't I have that joy like they have?

Look at all their smiles in the background.

I'm punching my sister in the face.

And what happens is we continue to scroll, and then we look outside our window, and Karen's got a G-Wagon with a ribbon on it right in the driveway, and we're like, oh, look what she got for Christmas.

That's awesome.

My car just got repoed last week.

I haven't been able to make a payment for three months.

How in the world am I gonna afford Christmas gifts?

How am I gonna give my kids the Christmas that I believe they deserve?

And year after year, our expectations fall short.

Year after year, the chaos of Christmas, we allow it to just take over and we sit in this weight that was never supposed to be.

And we bought into the lie, these ideas of what Christmas is supposed to look like that we forgot about the story of Christmas, the backstory of Christmas.

You see, we find ourselves in a time in an era where basically we've bought into this idea basically because of short, you know, YouTube shorts, TikTok, uh, Facebook videos.

We've bought into this idea where we're all we're doing is consuming short, concise clips where the user error has already formulated an opinion, they've already come to a conclusion, or they've already succeeded, or they're faking success, and they're showing you their success online, or they're showing you this picture of their perfect family, and that is conditioning us to not think about what goes on in the background, what's actually happening in the backstory of what happened in their life.

We're not seeing the failure, we're not seeing the stress, we're not seeing the heartache, we're not seeing the work they put in, we're not seeing the fighting that goes on behind these pictures.

We're not seeing the dad who's actually not at home, but comes around and takes a picture once in a while.

And you think it's one big, merry, happy family.

And this is conditioning us.

This is conditioning us to compare ourselves constantly.

And today I'm not actually claiming that I have a fix to this, that I have this cultural moment we find ourselves in.

Like I know how to fix the problem.

But what I want to do is look today is what do we actually do with this chaos, with these broken expectations, with this frustration, frustration and anger that we find ourselves in?

At some point, all of us have felt this tension of the Christmas season.

What do we do with it?

The better question is what's the source of this Christmas chaos in our culture?

How do we deal with it?

How do we find hope in one of the most important holidays ever in history?

The most important event happened on Christmas, the start of the better narrative, a better story, and we waste our time worrying about the backstory, the short story, the short game.

And we don't actually dive in and look at the actual frustration that was going on, the things that people had to overcome in the backstory, how Christmas came to be.

See, our hope for this is found 2,000 years ago lying in a major, in a place where you and I, we wouldn't pull out our iPhone and take a picture and post it to the world.

You know why?

Because it's a reminder that the first Christmas was actually very chaotic.

It was a time of frustration, unknown.

You see, Jesus and Mary were on their way to a sense, actually onto Joseph's hometown.

There was a census happening, the government was telling them they needed to go back to be, you know, put in the census counted.

And what happened was they're on their way to his hometown, and Mary goes into labor, and there's this inn that's completely full, and the savior of the world, Jesus, is born in a major, in a chaotic environment.

Maybe they didn't know the area, but they can definitely did not know that they would be there that night.

They had no idea that she was going to give birth in this major.

And that's what we actually read about in scripture.

But the problem, like I said, we're conditioning ourselves not to see the backstory.

And a lot of times in scripture, you can read all throughout the stories of scripture, we know the ending.

And like Christmas, it comes around every single year.

We know the stories, we know how they end, but we forget that there's a lens that you and I have to look through.

Mary, Joseph, and so many other people throughout history in the Bible, these stories we read about, they're living it.

They're in the thick of it, they're feeling the frustration, they're feeling the chaos.

And you see, the thing is, if you and I want to change the narrative, we have to see the backstory for what it is.

We have to allow the backstory to show us and reveal things about God, about ourselves in them.

Today, what I want to do is look at two parallel stories about two women, Elizabeth and Mary.

We read about them in Luke's gospel, where we're seeing these two parallel stories break out, and Elizabeth is the cousin of Mary.

Elizabeth is far older than Mary is, younger, and Mary is a young girl.

And what happens is these two women are going through life with their script in mind.

Like you and I, we have this idea for what our life is supposed to look like.

We have this idea for where we should be in life.

Maybe you're here today and you are coming into the holiday season, and there's a divorce happening right now, and you're dealing with the idea of what is it gonna look like for my kids?

What is the holidays gonna look like?

My little sister Amory, my great my parents, they divorced when I was like in high school, and Amory was late to the party.

She's about 10 years younger than me, so she's in grade school right now, and um, she splits the holidays between my parents.

It's a lot of stress on her.

I'm sure a lot of us understand that idea.

And as parents, I'm sure it's even worse where you're thinking about the weight that that's putting on them.

Maybe this is the year you thought he'd propose.

You thought, you know, he's probably at K right now, and he came to the Thanksgiving party and he didn't propose, and now your Christmas is over.

Or you've had that you caught the Thanksgiving fever, the Christmas fever, and you know you guys broke up.

You know he's not good for you, no, she's not good for you, but we've broke up 10, 15 times.

He still lives in his mom's basement, he still has no job, but you invited him to the Christmas party anyway, thinking the result is gonna be any different.

Maybe you're dealing with a brokenness coming into a season right now, this holiday season where maybe the loss of a loved one, the brokenness of maybe not ever being able to say goodbye.

You know, Tor and I, uh I knew I'd be preaching this Sunday.

Uh, it was basically last week, Saturday, got the call.

My grandpa flatlined four times.

We just had Sunny.

I wanted Sonny, obviously, to meet my grandfather, and so we jumped on the very next plane the next morning, the red eye out on Sunday, and we got there and we got to meet, and Sonny got to meet his grandfather.

We actually named Sonny after my grandfather, his nickname is Sonny, and uh it was something really important to me.

But it was a broken expectation that was shattered.

It was something that I thought it'd be different.

I thought that he would grow up and maybe be able to see his personality, maybe be able to see the little quarks that he has.

I didn't think that Christmas season was gonna feel like this.

You see, what the gospel of Luke shows for us, this backstory, is that there's a deep lesson of broken expectations.

The things that you and I, the script that you and I write, there's this idea, this script that we are so bought into that God should be bought into this timeline as well.

He should want these things for us.

And we're gonna read about two parallel stories about two women in scripture: Mary, the mother of Jesus, Elizabeth, the one who gave birth to John the Baptist.

And we're gonna see here, starting out in Luke, chapter in Luke 1, chapter 6, it says, Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous in God's eyes, careful to obey all the Lord's commandments and regulations.

They had no children because Elizabeth was unable to conceive, and they were both very old.

So, right here, we're actually seeing a godly marriage, Zachariah and Elizabeth.

And what we learn about them is they're following the commandments, the decrees of the Lord.

And what we see here in Scripture is that Elizabeth is old.

She's way past childbearing.

She was unable to conceive until this point.

And this looked like a broken expectation, a permanent broken expectation in her life.

And Mary's on the other side of this.

Mary's a young girl with a future ahead of her.

I'm sure she had dreams and ideas of what her life was gonna look like.

Scripture tells us that she was betrothed to be married.

That means a legal obligation that Joseph had to her.

She was engaged, going through the awesome things of engagement.

If you've ever been through engagement or been married, you know that as a woman, like I'm sure my wife did it, that she was planning everything to the T.

She knew exactly where everything was gonna be, she knew exactly how it was gonna go down, who was gonna be there, who was not gonna be there.

She knew everything.

And then Mary gets hit with this news.

In verse 26, it says, God sent an angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee.

The angel said, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you found favor with God.

You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you're gonna call him Jesus.

How will this be?

Mary asked the angel, since I'm a virgin.

It's hard really to put it into words like what Mary could have felt in this moment, because what she is going through right now, like, how in the world is she actually gonna tell Joseph this?

I'm having a baby, it's not your baby, it's kind of God's baby, he's the one doing it to me, it's innacular conception, there's nothing going on.

How would you think about sharing that news with your soon-to-be spouse or even the world around you?

Obviously, that's something that would be looked down in culture back then and today.

Elizabeth, in the same way, she was looked down in her culture because she was unbarren, she was unable to give birth.

Something where a family was supposed to be the right thing that you did was to raise up this large, powerful family, and she was unable to do that for Zachariah.

These broken expectations that they're dealing with.

That's what Luke is trying to grab at us right now.

He's trying to show us two women who had expectations for their life, and they're broken.

And you and I, we have this in our own life, and it's amplified every Christmas in chaotic ways.

We had this idea for our life, timing-wise, we thought it would paint out like this, and you see there's this tension, and we think of tension as something that's we're only dealing with right now or it's gonna happen in the future, but when you and I look at the destruction, anger, frustration in our lives, what we need to do is look back because it comes from a broken expectation, something that you and I believed would happen, and it's not coming to pass.

Maybe you're like Mary, and things are happening way too quick.

This is a hard season for someone if they're losing a job, right?

I don't know if you've ever been there, maybe in the past season or right now you're dealing with that.

This is not the season you want to lose your job, right?

And you're wondering how in the world are we gonna get through this season?

How are we gonna trust God?

Maybe an accidental pregnancy, you weren't planning for it, and now you're feeling the weight of telling your family, feeling the weight of the price tag on having a child.

Things happen in life that we don't predict, we don't expect to happen.

Not in our timelines most often, not in the way that we believed it to come about.

And the question is in this frustration, can we actually trust God with our broken expectations?

We all have broken expectations.

We all have this script that we write down or we put in our mind, this idea for what our life is supposed to look like.

But can we trust God with these broken expectations?

You know, looking back on life, if you talk to like 13, 14-year-old Tony, like, dude, boy had houses, cars, rental properties.

He was a boss man.

I still boss man, come on.

We all had these things.

I thought I'd be a millionaire, bazillionaire, whatever.

Can I tell you the false reality, the actual reality of that?

I am far closer, a million is a big number.

I am far closer to having zero dollars in my bank account.

My net worth is closer to zero dollars than a million dollars.

That's a lot of us.

That was not my expectation.

That was not the timeline for my life.

That is a shattered, broken expectation in my life.

Now, God has changed things, my wants in my life, and all these things, but that's something that I believed would happen.

There are things in our lives, as funny as that example is, there are things in our life that we believe should have happened.

We believe they should have happened on our timeline.

You see, it wasn't too late for Elizabeth.

It wasn't.

A lot of us, we look at our situations and we find ourselves either too old and barren or too young and pregnant.

But really, when we look at the story of scripture, we look at Elizabeth's life, she was not too young.

And her problem with it was about timing.

All of our things they come down to our expectation of timing.

It's either too late to be realized, or it's way too early, and we don't feel prepared.

Like, why couldn't Elizabeth have been given an opportunity to give birth at a younger age?

She would have missed out on the shame and the frustration from the culture, she would have had a longer life with her son, or Mary.

Why didn't God just have her conceive this immaculate conception right after their engagement?

She would have missed out on the frustration and the stress and the anxiety of having to share this with Joseph, her family's reaction, or his family's reaction.

She would have missed out on all of that.

Why doesn't God just grant our wishes on our timelines?

Another question we have to deal with is what do we do when we face our own broken expectations?

It's easy to see Elizabeth and Mary's story now.

It really is.

We know that good things came about it, we know the ending of the story, but what do you and I do right now where we're dealing with our stress, our anxiety, our family issues, and we're feeling all of the weight of it this Christmas season.

And it's robbing us of the true story of Christmas.

Especially here in America, we've allowed these ideas and materialism and they and like this era, like we're in all these videos, they're shaping our ideology, they're shaping our religious views, they're shaping our idea, our identity to the core, and we're missing out because we're not focusing on the backstory of how we got here, and we're missing out on the joy and hope that Christmas is supposed to bring every single year.

Well, why don't we look at Mary and Elizabeth's response in these situations?

And maybe we can take something into our Christmas season.

And verse 34 it says, How will this be?

Mary asked the angel, since I'm a virgin.

The angel answered, The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.

So the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God.

In verse 36, it says, Even Elizabeth, your relative, is going to have a child in her old age, and she who has said to be unable to conceive in her si is in her sixth month.

For no word from God will ever fail.

No word of God will ever fail.

I don't know where you are today in your beliefs about Christ.

I don't know what how you believe about the virgin birth.

What if you believe that Elizabeth gave birth at the ripe old age of being a grandma?

I don't know if you believe in that.

I don't know what your wrestle is.

But what I do know is there is significant historical evidence for all of these claims.

And if you believe that, if I believe that, if I trust that these things are true, if I trust that for no word from God will ever fail, then that's good news for us.

That's really good news for us.

And you see, here's what I'm saying: the original Christmas story, God used the most unlikely characters, the broken people, and he allowed them to go through things in their life and rewrite a better narrative.

And you see, the crazy part about believing in this invisible God, this one who came to earth, who died on a cross for your salvation, for you to be saved, when you believe in that, you now allow God to take your broken expectations, the things that you think are too late or too old or too young or you're not prepared for, or did you hurt so much?

How is in the world he's gonna work his way in this situation in your life?

In spite of the broken expectations, God worked through them.

I want you to remember, I want you to look at something that we kind of just went right past in the beginning of the story.

In verse 30, it said, The angel said to her, Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.

Favor?

That doesn't sound like favor, right?

When something in your life happens and it's destroying your future in your eyes, does that seem like favor in your life?

What if that is actually God's favor in your life, God's grace in your life?

The thing that you're dealing with right now, this season, that family member that you thought you would have rekindled that relationship, that relationship that you thought your siblings would have had the same with their kids.

You guys would have grown up together.

Or this expectation you had for your kids, you just made a new move and they're not really adapting in the area.

You thought they'd be excelling in school.

You thought by now you'd be in a different place, in a different job, with a different promotion.

You thought you'd be engaged by now.

You thought something would happen where you can finally see some hope in your future.

Mary's life right here.

God throws her a curveball, and the angel appears to her and tells her that this is a favored woman of God.

He says that she's favored among women.

Two verses earlier.

See, Elizabeth and Mary, their broken expectations, their timeline problem that they had, their script.

See, Elizabeth, she thought she was too old.

She thought it was too late.

But Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist at the perfect time in history for John the Baptist to prepare the way for the coming Messiah.

And the same way Mary, it wasn't too early.

It wasn't because the circumstances were wrong.

Scripture tells us it was the fullness of time.

The perfect time in historical history for Jesus to come on earth.

He came at the perfect time, died, resurrected, overcame death.

And you and I, we find ourselves with broken expectations.

We find ourselves constantly missing the joy of Christmas, missing out on the backstory, missing out on these people who were righteous in their faith, following God.

Do we actually trust God with our broken expectations?

Like, do you really trust God with your broken expectations in your life?

Do you really believe that God could write a better narrative in your story?

Do you really believe that he can do what he says he can do?

Do you really believe that he's the one who raised Jesus from the grave, the one that overcame death, that God can do anything you can imagine?

Do we believe that?

Would you guys stand with me?

If you haven't listened to anything I've said this whole time, and that's why I'm asking you to stand, maybe there's someone falling asleep.

I don't know.

I want you to grab hold to this one thing.

I think it's gonna be a great place for us to start this series.

Christmas chaos.

We've all felt it, we've all had expectations, break off our timelines.

I want us to remember something.

When Mary was going through this, in verse 38, it said, I'm the Lord's servant.

Mary answered, May your word be fulfilled to me.

And the angel left her.

Mary submitted to him.

In other words, he trusted God.

She trusted God with her broken expectations.

She trusted him.

May your will be done in my life.

This doesn't look like what I planned.

This is probably gonna bring about some hurt and some confusion, probably some chaos.

But I trust you.

I trust in your word, I trust in you.

This is where we want to stay, right here.

She submitted, and the angel told her, favored woman, you found favor with the Lord.

I want us to really sit in that.

Could it be that what you're going through right now, the thing that you wish God would take away?

Could it be that that is the very thing in your life that God wants to use in order to push you forward in your story?

To rewrite the better narrative in a way that you never thought was possible, to bring about something in your life that you're missing right now.

See, I had a shattered expectation this Christmas going forward.

Probably lack of time.

Sonny meeting my grandfather for the first time, finally realizing that he's at the later end of his life.

We don't know how many days he has left.

I don't know if I've ever seen him again.

We said goodbye to him.

I thought I'd have more time.

A lot of us can really relate to that.

But you see, the thing is, if we believe that God will use our broken expectations, if we trust in him, if we submit to him, if I truly believe today, preaching you this word, what the word says, in order to that be true, I would have to believe that even though my grandfather is on the last limb of his life, knowing that I'm going to lose out, Sonny's gonna lose out on some of the best memories he would ever have with him.

Then I got to believe that God's gonna do something with it.

As a someone who's pastored people, I'll tell you, one of the things I lack, and Tori will tell you this, is uh a crazy amount of empathy for people.

I'm someone, if you're in your situation, like, let's get you fixed, let's get you on the right thing, put your eyes towards Jesus, but it's hard for me to feel empathetic.

And can I tell you this season of having a son, this season of my grandfather being on his way out of this earth, it's really helped me understand what people really do go through.

In that same lens, you and I have to look through any adversity we have in our life, any problem we have, and believe that God will write a better narrative.

You see, we're in a world with death, we're in a world with sin.

This isn't our home.

Our home is in heaven with our Father.

But I believe that God will use every single thing on this earth if you respond like Mary and believe that you're favored.

He has something for you this Christmas season: something of great joy, a backstory that you and I can dive in and learn and pull out the truth and see what you're missing.

I want to leave us with these words found in 2 Corinthians chapter 4.

2 Corinthians 4 · chapter mention

Chapter verse 15, it says, All this is for your benefit, and as God's grace reaches more and more people, there will be great thanksgiving, and God will receive more and more glory.

And that is why we never give up.

Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day, for our present troubles are small and won't last forever, yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever.

So we don't look at the troubles we see now.

Rather, we fix and gaze our eyes on the things we cannot see.

For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

You're favored.

What you're going with through right now, I'm sorry you're going through it.

I really am.

Your expectation, your timeline, if you would give that to Christ, if you would trust him, that he could write a better narrative.

It's a principle all throughout scripture, him rewriting the narrative of broken people, setting them on the right path for their purpose.

God has something for you in this season, this Christmas season.

And Paul is pleading with us here to not fixate on these small problems, but to fixate on the eternal.

They don't seem so big when we fixate our eyes on the King of Kings, the Lord of Lord, who was born in a major on Christmas, who came down in a chaos, the first chaotic Christmas, with full of broken expectations.

And he wrote the narrative.

He rewrote the greatest narrative of all time.

You thought you weren't worth it.

You thought you couldn't.

He said, forget all that.

I'm coming to you.

That's where we look this Christmas season.

That's where the joy comes from.

No more fixating our eyes on the small things that are happening, playing the short game.

No, we're going to the backstory.

We're going to dive in over these next couple weeks, and we're going to look at what Scripture says and what the promises that Christmas promises us for us to grab hold of.

Would you pray with me?

Father, I pray that you would heal us.

I pray for those who are dealing with circumstances right now that they don't see the end.

They don't know how they're going to get out of it.

They don't know how they're going to make the payment, how they're going to have this joyous Christmas.

I pray they'd be reminded today that that broken expectation is just waiting for a perspective shift for you to come in and use it.

Use everything in our lives.

Those who are called according to your purposes, use everything in our lives, Lord.

We are so thankful for you.

I pray for those who are just gonna have to do some work this season, have to deal with that, Lord, but it's worth the wrestle.

It's worth digging in, investigating your claims so we can find true joy, true happiness, and true peace this Christmas season.

I thank you for the work you're doing in our lives.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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And I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.