Don’t make comfort your goal for this new year. Comfort is nice but it can also be a trap. There is a much better goal for your new year. The better goal is to step into the best life God has for you even if it means following Jesus when you are uncomfortable.

Maybe you feel like you are out of options, out of time, or don’t have anything significant to offer. Great news! God is enough for you and he can use your “nothing” to do something amazing in your life.

Waiting for a promise can be hard. What starts as excitement quickly turns to agitation, pessimism and even disappointment. The stakes go up the more we want what we are waiting for. It can become a physical experience as we try to keep ourselves faithful in the season God has us in right now. It can be an emotional experience as we try to remind our heart of the things God has promised us and it can become a spiritual exercise as we struggle to move past our doubts and live in faith. We can learn a lot from two characters in the Christmas story who don’t get a whole lot of screen time. Learning from Simeon we can find contentment and we wait with expectation that God is still going to do something amazing in our lives. The key to experiencing that kind of joy…complete joy is found in abiding with Jesus.

You can’t understand a moment without understanding the bigger story…the context. Meaning gets lost without the context. Purpose gets lost without the context. But, when you really see the whole context of the Christmas story you can find a bigger context for your story. You find your meaning. You find your purpose. Don’t let the a story that may be a little too familiar to you loose its meaning. It will rewrite your story, no matter who you are, or where you find yourself in this world. There is room enough for you in God’s story.

Gifts are an important part of a lot of our Christmas traditions. A gift can tell you a lot about the person receiving the gift but even more about the gift giver. Unfortunately a lot of the gifts we give have a short shelf life before they are stuck in a drawer somewhere forgot, or unused. Our faith can be like that. We can take this amazing gift God has given us in Jesus and treat it like it is fragile, outdated or cheap. This gift of Jesus is timeless, priceless and strong. Time to pull it out of the junk drawer and put it center stage in our lives.

We all have things we have to get past in life. Maybe it is a heartbreak or wound form your past. Maybe you struggle to forgive someone or you have been holding onto anger. Sometimes we are faced with the reality that life isn’t turning out how we expected it to. Life is less than ideal. A lot of space in life is like that and we need to get past it to move from less than ideal to the blessings God has for us. This message will help you see how you can get past what you need to get past.