On a dark night in a tiny town God himself entered the world. Using apparently insignificant and powerless people, the world’s true King made his appearance. The humble carpenter and his young wife sheltered among the farm animals. The shepherds made their midnight way to see the child. No one in the world who mattered even knew it happened. But our God was working everything according to his plan. Things are actually not the way the world shouts at us. The dominators are merely bullies pretending they know. For God was up to something that first Christmas. He still is. Quiet. Under the nose of Caesar. Away from the listening devices of a surveillance society. Where none of the powerful are looking. God slips into the world with a life transforming agenda.
God Is Not Dead Nor Doth He Sleep
December 27, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson
This Christmas, hear the news: you are more important than you may ever know. Someone needs you to have Christmas courage. Someone needs you to have faith when theirs is failing. Someone needs you to offer prayers that are both broken-hearted for the suffering, but also defiantly hopeful in the face of despair, loss, illness, and anguish. God is not dead, nor doth he sleep. The wrong shall fail, the right prevail.
Telling a Better Story
December 20, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson
Now display thy saving power
Ruined nature now restore.
This is the astounding hope in the Christian view of the world. We have a story of what is old being made new, of what is broken getting fixed, of what is ruined being made more glorious than it had ever been even in the beginning.
Swaddling Clothes About Him
December 13, 2020 • Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson
Unfold for us the mystery of grace
And make a womb of all this wounded world.
O heart of heaven, beating in the earth,
O tiny hope within our hopelessness,
Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,
To touch a dying world with new-made hands
And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.
Yes, Lord Jesus, you came from the heart of the Father to the crude cratch of our flesh. Now make these rags of time to be but swaddling bands of everlasting life in you.
His Sacred Face
Rev. Dr. Gerrit Dawson
O that birth forever blessed, when the Virgin, full of grace,
By the Holy Ghost conceiving, bore the Savior of our race,
And the babe, the world’s Redeemer, first revealed his sacred face.
O Little Town of Bethlehem
November 29, 2020 • Rev. Jim Solomon
Accept where God wants you.
Believe what God tells you.
Celebrate what God gives you.
