The Message of Christmas… It seems like with every passing year that Christmas is becoming more and more secular (worldly)… I thought it was because I was getting older… or maybe because I’m a Pastor. The Truth is that it IS becoming more and more worldy, materialistic. It’s more about “Consumerism” than Christ! Less and less people are reading the Bible and concerned about God today… much less following the Bibleand following Jesus. Latest PEW Research: • 90% of Americans and 95% of Christians Celebrate Christmas, but only 46% of Americans say they celebrate Christmas as a Religious Holiday… down from 51% in 2014. • Only 57% of people believe in the Virgin Birth, that Jesus was born in a manger (stable), Angels revealed His birth, and that Wise Men visited Jesus guided by a star. Even Evangelical Christians who were surveyed only 76% believed in all four of those elements of Jesus birth. (Down from 81% in 2014) Christmas has become more about Culture than Christ. How do you even celebrate the birth of Christ without Christ?! What a great time for us, for Followers of Jesus Christ to educate, encourage and remind people of the REAL MESSAGE of Christmas! Christmas is God making good on a promise He made to Adam and Eve in Gen. 3:15. Satan had just deceived both Adam and Eve… their disobedience would separate them from God and the Relationship they had with Him and the Abundant Life they had in Him! In Gen. 3:15, God talking to the serpent… I will make you and the woman enemies to each other. Your descendants and her descendants will be enemies. One of her descendants will crush your head, and you will bite his heel.” Jesus is that descendant. Satan bit or bruised His heel (Jesus gave up His life on the cross), however, Jesus crushed his head through his death and resurrection! Listen to these Scriptures for the Message of Christmas… John 3:16-17 NLT – 16 “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.17 God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. The Message Bible: 16-18 “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him. John 15:13 – Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. Psalm 86:15 – But you, O Lord, are a God of compassion and mercy, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love and faithfulness. Psalm 136:26 – Give thanks to the God of heaven. His faithful love endures forever. Ephesians 2:4-5 – 4 But God is so rich in mercy, and he loved us so much, 5 that even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!) 1 John 4:9-10 – 9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacr...
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