Christmas Lights with Pastor Noel Laws

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.

Well, hey MetaCurch.

I'm so glad all of you could join us for today's service.

I want to welcome you, everybody in Helotus, and everybody watching online today.

And I also want to wish you a very Merry Christmas.

If you're new to MetaCurch, my name is Noel and I'm the worship pastor here at Meta, and I can't tell you how honored I feel and how privileged I am to be able to share a message with you that God has placed on my heart.

It's that time of year again.

Thanksgiving has ended and we're entering into that Christmas rush.

And if you've been at MetaCurch for a few years, then you probably know that this means for one month and one month only, you may call me Noel.

It started on November 26th, whether you knew it or not, and it's gonna go all the way to December 26th.

But let me tell you that on December 26th, I will not answer to Noel anymore until 2021.

So please get it out of your system.

And of course I'm joking, you can call me whatever you want to call me.

But all joking aside, Christmas is a polarizing time of year.

And I have to imagine that with the way that 2020 went down, it's going to be especially true this year.

For a lot of you, Christmas is a time of reflection on years past.

It's a time that you spend reflecting on cherished memories that you made with family and friends of loved ones in your life.

It's a time to celebrate old traditions and maybe a time to start new traditions.

Christmas for you can be a great source of light in your life.

And for others of us, it's a time that makes us feel like we're in the dark.

It can cause us to feel utterly alone, with no hope of anything changing in our future.

Sometimes it can be both light and darkness for us.

But no matter where you find yourself today, I believe that everyone wants to live in the light.

If you have that light in your life already, you want to know how to keep it.

And if you don't have that light in your life, you want to know how to find it.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, I'm so grateful for the season.

I'm thankful for what it represents, the coming of our Lord Jesus, the hope that it gives us of a future with you, relationship and fellowship with you.

So, Holy Spirit, I pray that you would guide our thoughts today, that you would help us understand your scripture today.

We love you, Jesus, and we pray it all in your precious and holy name.

Amen.

Now, I celebrate Christmas hard.

I mean, I go hard.

The day after Thanksgiving, all of my Christmas decorations come out of storage.

I play Christmas music almost incessantly.

I watch all the Christmas classics.

All of you watching online, go ahead and comment in the comment section your favorite Christmas movie that you like to watch.

For me and my son Jack, we love watching Home Alone.

And we have a little tradition.

We get cheese pizza from Pizza Hut, and we get Pepsi Cola, and we eat and drink, and we watch Home Alone because that's all Kevin McAllister wanted before it all went so wrong for him.

Now, I believe that MetaCurch is a very diverse place.

We literally have people from all walks of life that call Medichurch home, and I have to think that the same is true for you when it comes to Christmas decorations.

It seems like inevitably when I have a discussion about Christmas decorations, everybody has a different opinion on when the proper time to take down Christmas decorations is.

Like I have friends like Pastor Clayton who believes you should keep those decorations up until the New Year.

You bring in the new year with your Christmas decorations.

If you're like me, you take your decorations down the day after Christmas.

Or maybe a very few of you are like our worship leader, Celeste, who keeps her Christmas tree up 365 days a year.

I don't understand.

Maybe she really loves Christmas or she hates packing things up.

No matter where you fall, you have an opinion about decorations.

I love Christmas and I come by that almost genetically.

When I was growing up, my mom would decorate our house so thoroughly that it was only surpassed by a Christmas story.

We had every type of decoration that you could think of.

We had a huge Christmas tree that was filled with literally hundreds of lights, dozens upon dozens of ornaments that had been collected through the decades.

We had garland on our fireplace, we had stockings hung with care.

We even had an aerosol spray that smelled like a real Christmas tree because while we did have a big Christmas tree, we did not have a big real Christmas tree.

I guess my mom just wanted the smell and not the needles.

And decorating was an event for the Laws family.

I mean, we did it up hard on Sunday afternoon after church.

While my mom was decorating the inside of our house, my dad and my brothers and myself would go and decorate the outside of our house.

And this started off pretty innocently when I was young.

We would have one strand of Christmas lights across the front of our roof line.

By the time I was in my teenage years, we had so many Christmas lights.

They were all over the roof of our house.

It looked like a gingerbread house.

We would wrap up the chimney, we would wrap up our trees.

We had candy canes lining our sidewalk.

We even had wooden cutouts that had painted scenes of Christmas stories on them for everyone to see as they drove by.

My dad, who's an electrician, made a custom wiring schematic so that everything could be seen.

Now, if you're not accustomed to putting up Christmas lights, you should know that in the span of a year, from the time you pack away Christmas lights to the time you take them back out the following year, something very mysterious happens without fail when you take these Christmas lights back out.

One bulb, multiple bulbs, whole strands of lights for some reason won't work.

It's like, what happened?

Last year, they all worked perfectly, and we took them down so carefully.

We rolled them up neatly, we would zip tie them together so they wouldn't get tangled on themselves.

We would wrap them in bubble wrap, put them in padded cases, and I'm exaggerating, of course, but we were very careful on how we packed away the Christmas lights, and as if by magic, over the course of their year-long hibernation, Christmas lights would quit working.

It happened every single year.

So much so that I'm convinced that that Christmas classic, a Christmas vacation, was based on a true story.

And so some lucky person, usually me, because I was the youngest in my family, had to go through each strand and see why the light bulbs weren't working.

One by one, I'd have to go and see if somehow these light bulbs had worked their way loose from their light socket.

Some of the bulbs had just broken and didn't work anymore and they needed to be replaced.

And as I was preparing for today's message and thinking about Christmas lights, I wondered does your life ever feel that way?

Does it ever feel like you have everything in your life for your world to be filled with light?

And yet there's a few loose connections in your life, and it has you living in the dark.

And so what do you do?

Maybe you do what I did.

You start going bulb by bulb in your life and checking to see why the lights aren't coming on.

Maybe you start with something like your career and you go to that bulb and you start checking the connection and you ask yourself questions like, did I choose the right career?

Am I even fulfilled by the work that I do every single day?

Surely, sure it pays well.

Maybe it doesn't pay well, but am I happy?

Do I enjoy what I do and who I'm around while I'm doing it?

Once you check that bulb, maybe move.

Okay, maybe it's not my career.

Maybe it's my marriage.

We just need to work through some things.

Our connection isn't what it used to be.

But we can work on that.

And for some of us, working on the connection isn't enough.

And so we actually get out of that marriage and decide what we need is an entirely new light bulb.

We convince ourselves that this bulb, this marriage, is just broken and it'll never work again.

And so we plug in this new marriage, only to find out that we have the same problem that we did with the old one.

You know, it's not my marriage.

I know what it is, it's my relationships.

I just haven't had any time for my friends.

I've been working so hard at my career and my family, and I've been dealing with my kids that I haven't made time for my friends.

What I need is a night out.

I just need to go out with the girls, I need to go out with the guys, and then I'll feel like myself.

Then surely the lights will come back on.

And so we go on down the line, checking each bulb one by one, trying to figure out desperately why the lights in our lives aren't working.

Maybe we even do some really positive things.

Maybe we go, like on a diet, we skip the Big Mac and we go to the Lord's fast food Chick-fil-A and get a salad because their food is delicious.

Maybe you even start exercising every day and you post pictures of your workout routine and you get lots of positive affirmation that you're doing well, and that's a great thing.

Maybe you start journaling or you get a hobby.

You do everything you can to get the lights back on, but for some reason, you still find yourself in the dark.

And many of us, if we were to be honest today, have found ourselves at the end of 2020 and we're in the dark.

Nobody likes to be in the dark.

But there's great news.

Jesus tells us how we can be in the light.

If you go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, one of the first things that we read in what we would call the creation account is that the earth was formless without form, and it was void, without anything in it or on it, and that darkness was over the surface of the deep.

And it's at this point that we read God's very first command in verse 3.

It says, Then God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.

After God took care of the darkness issue that this world that was formless and void had, he started creating everything else.

He created land, it came up from the waters and it separated the waters.

That's how we got oceans and rivers and seas.

We created, he created vegetation, plants, all types of fruits and vegetables.

He created animals that lived on the earth and lived in the waters and flew in the sky.

And then, right before he rested on the seventh day, God created his greatest creation, man.

And I say it was his greatest creation because out of all the amazing things that God had created, out of all the amazing things that God had done, man was created in God's own image.

In fact, up to this point, literally everything was created to support man in one way or another.

He had water to drink and food to eat.

He even had purpose, he had good work to do on earth.

Now, I grew up in church, and I'm convinced at times that that's a disadvantage.

And here's why I think it's a disadvantage because I've heard the creation account, I've heard the creation story maybe a hundred times, and I've probably read it a hundred more times throughout the course of my life.

And what it does is it causes me to quit asking questions.

And let me encourage you, when you're reading the Bible, when you're hearing someone teach or preach, it's a good thing to ask questions because questions will often lead us to a deeper understanding of what scripture is trying to tell us, and it will give us new application that we can apply to our life.

I know when I was reading this scripture, I had a question pop up in my head.

And I wish I could say that it was a deep question, but it was more of a curiosity, and it comes from verse 3, when God commanded there to be light.

The question was this why?

Like, why did God create light?

He could have created anything he wanted, any way he wanted.

Why was the first thing that he created light?

Like everything up to this point had been created to support man, right?

So light must have been there for man, but he could have made us with night vision.

He could have made our bodies in a way that we could live without heat if we needed to.

Why was the very first thing he spoke into existence light?

It must have been important.

We learn in the creation account that even though man and woman lived in literal perfection, they broke the one rule that God had given them.

And it may seem odd that God would create everything perfectly and still give man the ability to sin, but here's why that happened.

God desires our love.

He desires your love.

He wants us to choose to love him.

And you can't choose to love him unless you have the choice not to love him.

Like that's true in our relationships.

No one wants to be forced into a relationship.

We want to choose to be in that relationship.

And it's the same for us and God.

Adam and Eve made the choice to disobey God, and because of this, a new darkness was created, a spiritual darkness, the darkness of sin, and God had already taken care of the physical darkness that existed in the world before anything else existed.

He had commanded there to be light.

But now we had this new darkness, and with that darkness came a separation from God.

Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden.

They were kicked out.

Perfection was no longer their reality.

They had to toil with the land to get food.

Before this, all the land gave them everything they needed.

They had a bountiful supply of food and they experienced pain for the first time in their lives.

And for generation after generation, humans who were created to live in the light lived in a spiritual darkness.

That is, until Jesus came to earth.

We're in the Christmas season, and most of us know the Christmas story.

We know how God sent an angel to Mary, and that angel let Mary know she was going to conceive and give birth to the Savior of the world, the Messiah that everyone had been waiting for.

We know about the journey that her and Joseph had to make to Bethlehem and how when they got there there was no place for them to stay, and so they had to sleep in a barn, and it was there that Jesus was born in a manger.

You can find the Christmas story in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.

But my favorite place to read about Jesus coming into the world is in the Gospel of John.

John doesn't tell us what happened at Christmas from the world's perspective.

You know, Mary and Joseph, the wise man, the manger.

Instead, he tells us the story from God's perspective.

And here's what John says in the very first chapter of his gospel.

John 1, verse 1 says, In the beginning was a word.

John 1:1

And the word was with God, and the word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

John starts exactly where we started today.

Sounds very familiar, doesn't it?

In the beginning, just like it does in Genesis.

And John, instead of talking about what happens in creation, says that there was a thing, it was a he, the word.

And this word was with God, meaning it was there at the same time, but separate.

And the word was God, meaning he's the same.

And when John says he, spoiler alert, he's talking about Jesus.

Jesus was there at the very beginning.

John goes on to say that all things came into being through him.

All things came into being through Jesus.

And apart from him, not even one thing came into being that has come into being.

It was through this word, it was through Jesus that everything came into being.

Through this word, everything was created.

I like to think of this group of verses through the lens of an artist.

Artists by nature are very creative people, but without some kind of medium to express their art, all they have are ideas and their mind.

Like a painter would need paints in order to show you what he or she was envisioning.

A sculptor needs clay.

A graphic design artist would need like a computer program.

God, the artist, the ultimate creator, used Jesus to get his creation to be seen by everyone.

And then John says in verse 4, in him was life.

And the life was the light of mankind.

In Jesus was life.

And the life was the light of mankind.

And Jesus was the life.

And he still is life.

And of course he is.

Because everything that lives was created through him.

He would have to be life.

But it's more than just life, it's light.

The two are connected, life and light.

And you are created to live in the light.

But we've been living in spiritual darkness, and there's a hope that comes in verse 5.

It says that this light, Jesus, shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

It cannot overcome it.

It will not overcome it.

When it's in your life, darkness cannot exist.

And the creation account that we read in Genesis, there were two things that were created or that existed, but God did not create.

The first was darkness.

Darkness already existed.

Darkness was the default, but his first command was for light.

And that light overcame the physical darkness.

The second thing that existed but wasn't created is sin.

Sin existed and exists because we have the free will to either choose to show our love by God by following his commands or to miss a mark, which is what it means to sin and go against what he says is right.

And when sin entered into the world, a new darkness was created.

And we weren't created to live in darkness.

We were created to live in the light.

And so a new light came to us straight from God.

So that we would not have to live in the spiritual darkness that our sin has created.

That's why there's a Christmas season to celebrate.

A light came into the world to overcome the darkness.

And yet, so many of us, myself included, choose to stumble through the darkness when we were made to walk in the light.

I think it goes without saying, we've said it several times from this stage that 2020 has been a crazy year.

Maybe you've just been feeling that.

I'd like to affirm that in you.

It has been a crazy year.

We literally have never experienced anything like this.

It's something we will all be talking about at some level for the rest of our lives.

And it's funny because we entered this year believing the best about it.

Pastor Ryan talked about that last week with us.

We set goals, we made resolutions, we had good forward motion, we had clear vision in 2020.

And then the pandemic hit, and then quarantine hit.

And then we took all those resolutions, we took all those goals, we took all that forward momentum, and we boxed them away, just like we do with Christmas lights every year until it was time to pull it out again.

Until it was safe to pull it out again.

In the meantime, we lost jobs, people lost entire careers.

They lost their means to live.

We lost loved ones, family, and friends.

And in our effort to run from the pain of pandemic, we lost our purpose.

And now we're here.

We're at the end of the year, and some things, not all things, but some things are beginning to normalize.

We may be licking our wounds a bit, but we're ready to move.

We're ready to take those goals and ambitions, our resolutions.

We're ready to take them out of the box and plug them back in.

But it's just like those Christmas lights.

They've been stored away.

And now that you've plugged them in, some of those bulbs, some of those strands of lights in your life that should bring you light just aren't working.

You have a job, you have a family, you have a relationship, you have goals.

All of the things that should create a nice glow in your life, they're all right there in front of you.

But they're just not turning on.

As a kid, I knew what to do when the lights weren't working.

I would sit on my front porch and I go bulb by bulb, checking each one to make sure that it was nice and connected or that it worked at all.

And I can remember one year taking a lot of time on one strand of lights, and I thought it was so odd that none of the lights were working.

And my dad, noticing that I had been taking a while, came up to me and asked me what was wrong.

And I told him, no matter what I do, these lights won't work.

Not even the new bulbs that I'm plugging in, they're not working.

And my dad asked me a crazy question, which he already knew the answer to.

He said, Noel, did you plug the lights in?

What are you talking about?

Of course I plugged the lights in.

I wouldn't go light by light just to have not plugged the lights in.

I traced the line all the way back right in front of my dad and came up with an unplugged end of the light.

It's a funny thing about lights, they don't work if you don't plug them in to the source that gives them power to work.

If you're in the dark right now and you can't figure out why, the first place you should look is the source.

If you want the things in your life to shine, then you have to be connected to the one who has the power to make them shine.

Have to be plugged in to Jesus.

John said that in Jesus was the life, and that the life was the light of mankind.

He's the source, and you were created through him.

It's no wonder why the lights in your life aren't on if you're not plugged in to the light.

Now, maybe you already know Jesus.

Maybe you've put your faith in him.

Maybe you've even been baptized to show that decision publicly.

Still, you see some darkness surrounding you this season.

After I plugged in that strand of lights that I had been working on, I noticed that there were still some lights that weren't working.

So I had to go bowl by bowl and check them again now that they were connected to the power source.

Some bulbs that weren't working just had this loose connection.

They just had to be tightened up a little bit.

And I found a few that were completely broken that I had to change out.

Being connected to the source of power didn't necessarily mean that these lights would work.

It just meant that they had the potential to work.

And in our lives, the same is true.

Because we live under the truth of who Christ is, everything in our lives, everything in your life has the ability, the potential to shine.

But sometimes that takes some work.

We have to go through our lives and test things to make sure that we have a good connection with the source.

Listen, if you've believed in Jesus, I want to be really clear about this.

If you've been uh believed in Jesus, if you've put your faith in Jesus, and you are absolutely 100% guaranteed heaven, there's nothing you can do that can undo the promise of a perfect God.

However, living in his light is a process.

And it's how we begin to see pieces of heaven right here, right now in our lives on earth.

And just like I experience sometimes it takes a little tightening up to get reconnected, like making extra time for that relationship that's a positive force in your life that God has brought to you in your life.

Sometimes it looks like getting up a bit earlier and making sure that you spend time with Jesus through prayer and reading the Bible.

And then there's other times that there are things in our lives that are just broken.

I'm willing to bet that you already know if you're sitting listening to this talk, you already know the things that are broken.

They're the things that don't give you any light in your life.

It can look like the thing that defeats you, that thing that your parent or a teacher or a coach said that you believed that wasn't true.

It's a bad habit.

It's that website that you keep on going to that you swore you would never go to again, or that addiction that you said you would never engage in again.

Maybe it's a worst way that you turn to when the tension of life gets too much for you to handle.

It's a toxic relationship that you know you shouldn't be in any longer.

It's been no good for you.

It's a broken light bulb in your life, and you need to replace it.

Once you've done the hard work of making sure that each bulb in your life is good and connected, you can step back and look at the glow it creates in your life and the lives of those around you.

And scripture tells us how we can get that glow.

It tells us how we can get the lights back on in our lives this year.

John in chapter 1, verse 4 says, In him, in Jesus was life.

And the life was the light of mankind.

And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

If you've been living in the dark this year and you're ready to step into the light, the first thing that you need to do is plug in to the source.

If you don't know Jesus, then I'd like you to tell you how.

Some of you are here just asking questions, and that's okay.

We want you to know that Metachurch is a safe place to ask the hard questions.

You can ask us the hard questions.

We'll answer it to the best of our ability.

This is a place where you can truly belong before you ever believe anything that we believe.

But some of you have realized that you've been living in the dark and you want to live in the light.

And living in the light is as easy as a moment of faith, a moment of belief in Jesus, who he says he is and what he said he did.

Who he says he is is the Son of God, the Savior of the world.

And what he said he did was dying on the cross for your sins, taking that debt upon himself and paying it so that you could have relationship and fellowship with the Father.

If you've already plugged into the source, then maybe the next thing you need to do is secure your connection with that source.

Like if you do know Jesus, but you're trying to live without him, it's time to go back to the basics.

Make sure every area of your life is plugged in properly to his truth.

You've got to read his word.

You have to make it a habit, habit.

Spend time in prayer.

Ask God to search you and show you where you're off-center.

And then you have to do what's possibly the hardest thing to do.

You have to be quiet.

You actually have to listen because we have a God who speaks to us and impresses his truth on our hearts.

I believe that if you do those two things, that this year in the midst of all the chaos, this year could be the year that your life shines the brightest it ever has.

But you have to plug into the source, you have to secure your connection, you have to walk in the light.

Would you guys pray with me?

God, we're so grateful that you've given us a light in our lives, that you've given us Jesus.

Father, we know that on our own we live in darkness.

We're not capable of living in the light like you created us to live in the light, and so we needed help.

That's why we celebrate Christmas, God, because you gave us hope.

You gave us help.

You gave us a future.

God, I pray for everyone who has taken that step of faith today, God, that you had showed them the next right step and the next right step in their journey with you, Father.

I'm grateful for the souls that have entered into relationship with you.

God, I pray for those who already had that relationship with you, Father, but they've lost maybe some of that fellowship with you, God.

I pray, God, that you could also show them the next right step to take, to get back into a good, close fellowship with you, Father.

And I'm most grateful, God, that you never change.

That even when we're faithless, you're faithful, that no matter what we do, once we've entered into relationship with you, God, we will always be in relationship with you.

You're a great God, and we love you.

And we pray all these things in the precious and holy name of Jesus.

Amen.

Well, MetaCurch, again, I want to thank you for joining us today.

I want to remind you to follow us on social media.

We have Facebook and Instagram that you can follow us on.

Also, we want to remind and encourage you to be generous in your giving.

You can go to metachurch.tv and give there, or you can download the MetaCurch app and give on it.

MetaCurch, we love you so much, and we can't wait to see you next week.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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