Announcements
SYMPATHY: to Donald Hilbourn at the passing of his uncle, Earl Brown, Jr., on Wednesday, December 18, in North Carolina. There are no arrangements at this time.
POINSETTIAS: Thank you to those who purchased a poinsettia to help us decorate the Auditorium during the Christmas season. Please be sure to pick up your plants today, as we will be removing all of our decorations by the end of this week.
GRIEFSHARE: The next session begins on Tuesday, January 7, at 6:30 p.m. Come be part of our next session that helps individuals find comfort, healing, and hope after the loss of a loved one. Please sign up at the Welcome Desk, or see Kathy Reed for more information.
From My Heart
Good News
By: D. L. Moody
Now, you can take God’s gift before you go out of this house, and it is worth more than all the Christmas gifts that you will get, worth more than all the gifts the world can give. Think of eternal life, a life without end! Think of God offering that! Yet He just comes down and offers it to everyone who will take it. Don’t say that you can’t take it. God does not offer a man a gift, then not give him the power to take it. That would be an unjust God. But with the gift comes power, and when God commands you to believe on His Son and receive Him as His gift to you, He gives you the power to take Him, and you can take Him if you will. Christ says, “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.” It is not because men can’t come, but because they won’t! It is this “will.” The battle is fought on that one word – “will.” “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.”
Now, take Him; as you sit in that pew say, “Lord Jesus, I take thee as God’s gift to me.” Paul says, ‘He gave him up freely for us all.’ God gave Christ to me as much as to Paul. He gave him freely for us all. It is a universal Christ to a universal world. It is Christ offered freely to the whole world, and we have either to receive or to reject.
Take the gift of God as you take other gifts, and as you receive gifts and give them to others, rejoice that you have that gift, the only gift God has – the gift of His Son; a gift as free as the air, an unspeakable gift.
Bear in mind that it was all He could do when He gave up Jesus Christ. He gave up the richest jewel Heaven had. He gave liberally all He had. And what an insult for you not to take God’s gift. What an insult for you to spurn the gift of God. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
This was excerpted from a Christmas sermon preached by D. L. Moody