NO. LIVERMORE — The North Livermore Baptist Church congregation was welcomed in Dec. 8, by Pastor Bonnie Higgins at 9:30 a.m. to begin the service. The Call to Worship, Invocation/Lord’s Prayer were recited. The hymns that were sung were “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You”, “Angels, We Have Heard on High” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”. The service ended with “Go Now in Peace”. Linda Lyman is the organist and Lew Lyman leads the music for the congregation each week.
The sermon, “The Promise in Christmas” using the scriptures from Isaiah 59:1-3, 15-21. Pastor Bonnie began by saying that we all look for hope in all the wrong places instead of looking above for the hope that God has promised us though His Son, Jesus Christ. In our scriptures from Isaiah, we find four things that we can hold onto the hope that God has given us.
The first thing is that the Christmas story is a story of hope that was created, the hope that was lost, and the hope that was restored for us. The second thing is that to find true hope, we need to be hopeless, the only way to find hope is not to have it. The third thing is that hope can fix things that are broken in our lives. And lastly, hope is not a situation, not a location, and not an experience. Hope is a person, and that hope is Jesus Christ.
God asks us to trust in Him, in all things, because when you don’t trust in Him, you don’t find the hope in Him. Because why would you go to someone that you don’t trust in? Going through God’s Word, you will find many promises that God told the people and He has delivered on them. You can trust God in what He says. Many times, we stop running towards God in our difficult times because we don’t think He is there with us. God says to us that His hands are not too short to reach out to us if we ask Him to help us.
Too many times we blame God for our situations, or that we think He is not there, but actually it is our problem because we don’t trust in Him enough to let go of our situations and let Him work through us and He works it out for His glory. Some times we forget God’s promise to always be with us and doubt starts up in our minds and hearts. We live in this hopeless world, but we know that God is hope to bring us through it. That is His promise.
God brought salvation to this world through His Son, Jesus Christ. God had promised the people that there was hope and a new beginning if they trusted in Him. This is the Christmas story. The story of hope coming, hope came and invaded the earth through Jesus. Hope that had been lost and destroyed, and was promised by God to return, through His Son.
God has said He will take care of the evil in this world and we can be assured of that promise will happened. Jesus conquered death and sin during His death and resurrection so today we can live in that promise of eternal life with Him.
In the messiness of our lives, remember that God has given us hope through the promise of His Son, Jesus. As the promise goes, Jesus will enter our lives when we accept Him as our personal Savior, and will be with us through this life on earth and into our lives in eternity with Him. God has promised us His grace and love here on earth, and into eternal life. That is God’s promise, the promise of hope in Jesus.
Announcements:
Collecting Peanut Butter for the Food Pantry in Dec.
Bible Study – Tuesday at 1 p.m.
Christmas Program – Dec. 22 in the morning worship service
Christmas Eve service – Dec. 24 at 4 p.m.