What up crossing family, It is so good to be with you.
I want to welcome all of our different locations, those of
you watching online and those of you who are a part of our inside
family. We are so excited about enjoying
this Christmas season with you and as we get ready for
Christmas, there are four things that I would love for you to
deeply consider. The first one is who are you
going to bring to our Christmas services?
Our Christmas Eve experiences are our second largest attended
services for the entire year. Now, statistics or survey show
that nearly half of Americans don't attend church at
Christmas. And if we're going to try to
make this the hardest place on planet earth to get the hell
from, we got to do something about it.
The good news is surveys also show that 80% of non churchgoers
would go if they were invited by a friend.
So this is just simple math. If 80% of the people that you
invite will say yes. To make sure that you're going
to bring someone to Christmas Eve services this year, you need
to invite at least two people and there's a chance that they
will come, they will hear the gospel message and they could
start a spiritual journey. We're going to have 42 physical
services at our different locations and I guarantee that
there is one time slot that will work for you.
Now to get more about our service times, you can leverage
the QR code on the seat in front of you or if you want, you can
go to thecrossing.net/christmas and it'll give you some insight
into what which campus, which service is going to be the best
one for you and your family and your squad and the people you're
inviting to attend. The second question that I'd
love for you to deeply consider is how are you going to serve
during this Christmas season? I know that it is a crazy busy
time and you're trying to pull off not just all the services
but things with your family. But hear me, as a church, we
simply cannot do it without you. I would love it if you would
raise your hand at your campus to the team that works there and
say, put me in coach. I'm here to help and you can
help in 1000 ways. You can help by where you park.
You can help by which service you attend.
Like you might be looking at some of those service times and
go on that no one's going to come to that service time, and
that might be your sign from God that that's the one that you're
supposed to go to so that there's room for other people
with the other ones. How you greet people, being a
smiling Christian is a big deal. Everything that you do to reach
people is going to be important over this Christmas season
because we want to take as much ground for the Kingdom as we
possibly can. Third thing I would love for you
to deeply consider, how will you focus your family on the real
reason for the season? In the middle of all the
presents and all the shopping and in the middle of all the
Christmas parties, there will be a temptation for this season to
get away from us. So here's what I'm doing.
And a lot of the other high leaders at our church, we are
going to be dedicating 30 to 45 minutes a week to spend time
with our families focusing on Jesus and the true power of
Christmas. And we built out a great way for
you to go on the spiritual journey this Christmas season
through a Christmas Discovery Bible study.
And no matter where you are on your spiritual journey, you can
lead a Discovery Bible study. I want to talk specifically to
the men, fellas. I would love it if your big step
of faith is to make the commitment to say, you know
what, once a week for the next four or five weeks, I'm going to
spend time with my family opening the word of God and
letting him do what only he can do.
And you're going to want a little bit of help with that.
We've got all the help set aside for you.
All you have to do, click on the QR code in front of you and sign
up and we will send you more information.
I'm hoping that 250 men or 250 families in our church will go
on this journey with us. Last thing #4 how will you
participate in our In Your Corner Year End Giving?
Every year here at our church, we give people who are committed
to the vision and the mission of the crossing to partner
financially through Year end giving.
And this year we have two big goals with our year end giving.
The first one is we want to complete the funding for the new
multi site project that we're undertaking.
This undertaking will benefit all of our locations and it is
going to position us to digitally reach kids and our
grandkids through the production house that will be in the
basement. Additionally, over time it is
going to save us money and create greater efficiency and
effectiveness for both our multi site staff and our 48th St.
staff here in Quincy. We have already raised and set
aside over 80% necessary to complete the project and this
project's going to be going on for the next 18 months.
So over the next 18 months, we would love to have you jump in
and help us jump start the completion of the project with a
year end gift. But in addition to that, we
decided that we want to bless all of our mission partners.
So we sent an e-mail out the kind of e-mail that every
mission partner likes to receive.
This is what the e-mail said. We would love to fund all of
your capital projects. And so would you list all the
capital projects that you have that would Fast forward your
ministry effectiveness in your part of the world.
And our goal is to say yes to every single one of their major
initiatives over the next 18 months.
And we're going to be able to do that through your generosity.
Now there might be some of you. Well, this will be your first
time giving awesome others of you.
This might be the first time you give in addition to your regular
giving fantastic others of you might join Jennifer and I and
try to make this upcoming year the greatest year in the area of
generosity for you. No matter what you do, I believe
that if we all do something, we could be a part of something
very, very special. With that being said, I am
excited to introduce you to our brand new sermon series.
We've been in First Corinthians for 17 weeks and can I just say
something to all the people on our team who helped to make the
First Corinthian Series A reality from putting stuff
together from the book, from all the content, the DeVos, would
you guys just give them a huge round of applause?
I, I loved it. I if you hated it, I'm sorry
because I absolutely loved it. I, I told there's a guy named
Walt who used to work at multiple of different of our
locations. He's now semi retired and lives
in southern Missouri. Walt wrote every single one of
those DeVos. He wrote all of the content
inside of that book. And when I when he was done,
when I was done with it, I was like, there is not a book of the
Bible that I know better now than first Corinthians.
And so I'm goes going on the journey with you and I was just
so thankful for that. But today we're launching
through a series that's going to take us all the way past
Christmas. And this series is called
Behold. What happens when you claim the
promises of God? The word behold means look, turn
to your neighbor and say, behold, turn to your other
neighbor and say, I meant look. All right, ladies, just ladies,
come here, Come here ready. I want you to say look or behold
in just a second, but I want you to say behold.
Like you're in the car with your husband and you see a deer and
you're convinced he doesn't. OK, ladies, 123.
Yeah, OK. That's what the Bible's doing.
The Bible's going. Hey now, sometimes when you are
listening to Christmas carols or Christmas songs as you're
shopping, you'll hear A Christmas Carol with the word
low in it. LO, guess what that word means
means Behold. It means look.
We say look when we see a shooting star in the night sky.
We say look when a baby begins to take their first steps.
We say look when we know that there is something meaningful
and we would hate for you to miss it.
That is why I am so excited about the sermon series, because
here at the Crossing we believe that there are tremendous
promises in the Word of God for you that we would hate for you
to miss. But in order for you to get it,
we got to go back in time. Like way, way, way back in time,
all the way to the beginning of time to the book of Genesis.
In Genesis, God speaks the world into existence.
He creates Adam and Eve, and a couple generations later he
comes across and he's, when he's talking to Adam and Eve, he
makes a promise to them. Here's the promise that he makes
that one of their descendants would crush the head of Satan.
Later on, God makes a a promise to an old man named Abram and
his wife named Sarai, who were barren people, they had no
children, that their descendants would become a great nation.
God changed Abraham's name to Abraham and Sarai's name to
Sarah. And God also promised that
through their offspring all nations would be blessed.
They had a son named Isaac. Isaac had a son named Jacob.
God told Jacob that all the people of the earth would be
blessed through his offspring. God changed his name from Jacob
to Israel, as in that Israel. After this Jacob's son Joseph is
sold into slavery in Egypt. Eventually the the Israelites,
the descendants of Jacob Israel, eventually end up in slavery in
Egypt and Moses shows up and leads the people out of slavery
and then Joshua shows up and leads them into the promised
Land. Where's this promised land,
Israel. Israel.
That Israel once in the promised land, you have made your way
through the 1st 5 books of the Bible, actually 6.
You've been through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers,
Deuteronomy, and the book of Joshua.
And then you come to the book of Judges and the key line in the
book of Judges is found in the 21st chapter, the 25th verse.
It reads like this. In those days Israel had no
king. Because Israel had no king,
everyone did as they saw fit. So what did God do?
God would raise up judges, leaders who would serve the
people of Israel and deliver them from their enemies, and he
would guide them back to God. But eventually the people began
to cry out for a ruler, a king. So then you find yourself, if
you're reading your Bible in First and Second Samuel, 1st and
2nd Kings, and 1st and Second Chronicles.
Here we are introduced to the very first king of Israel.
His name is Saul. Saul is eventually replaced
because he is unwilling to do what God has called him to do.
And a new king ascends to the throne.
This new king who ascends to the throne, His name is David.
You know, the one who killed Goliath.
David has a son named Solomon. Eventually, David dies.
Solomon steps in to rule. Solomon's the one who wrote most
of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs.
If you're in your Old Testament, after King Solomon, the Kingdom
of Israel divides. There's a northern Kingdom and a
southern Kingdom. This is technically like what
would have happened in during the civil war if the South had
won. We would have become a divided
nation. And in both the northern Kingdom
and the southern Kingdom, there were good kings and there were
bad kings. And when there was a good king,
the people would prosper. And when there was a bad king,
the people would turn from God and suffer because of it.
It is during this time that God starts to use prophets to come
and would call out to the people and call out to the kings for
them to return to God. And sometimes the people would
listen and sometimes they would not.
If you were reading your Old Testament and you were to look
to the table of contents at all the different books, all the
names that you can't pronounce, those are the prophets of the
northern and southern Kingdom. And they were the ones who were
showing up and trying with everything in their power to get
people to return to God. And by the time the Old
Testament ends, the people have lost their homelands.
They've been taken captive. Some of them have been allowed
to return, but they are no longer in control.
They're living in their neighborhood, but their
neighborhood is under foreign occupation.
So the cry at the end of the Old Testament is for the promised
king to come to sit on the throne of David and to rule a
king who would set things right. And from the time you read the
last word in the Old Testament in Malachi until you read the
first word in the New Testament, there is 400 years of silence.
To put that in perspective, next year on July 4th, as a country,
we will celebrate 250 years of independence from tea drinkers.
That's 250. For 400 years there was silence.
The problem at the end of the Old Testament were five fold.
When will we be delivered from our oppression we need saved?
When will the promises to Abraham and Jacob finally be
fulfilled and the offspring show up who will bless every nation?
When will we finally have a word from God again?
When will we finally get a good king who will sit on the throne
and rule? And how long will his Kingdom
last? Because when you had a good
king, the Kingdom was fine, but when he died or lost his place,
the people fell away. They needed a king who would
last forever. Then in Luke chapter one verse
11, an Angel of God breaks into the 400 years of silence.
He appears to a priest named Zechariah and he tells him that
he and his wife, although they are old and childless, that they
will give birth to a son. They are to give him the name
John. We will come to know him as John
the Baptist and the call on John the Baptist's life, this would
be a great life. First for some of you is to make
ready a people prepared for the Lord, to get people's hearts
ready for an encounter with the Lord.
Then 11 verses and six months later an Angel shows up and this
time it speaks to a virgin girl named Mary engaged to a
Carpenter named Joseph. And the Angel has this to say.
Luke chapter 131 through 33. You will conceive and give birth
to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.
The Lord God will give him the throne of David, and he will
reign over Jacob's descendants forever.
His Kingdom will never end. Remember the five problems at
the end of the Old Testament. We need a Savior.
You will call him Jesus, which means God is salvation or the
Lord saves. What kind of king is he going to
be? He's going to be Son of the Most
High, possessing the nature of God.
Hebrews chapter one verse 3 says Jesus is the radiance of God's
glory, the exact representation of his being.
And what's he coming to do? He is coming to sit on the
throne of David. The one you've been waiting for
has arrived. He will be the promised blessing
of the offspring of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and all nations
will be blessed through him. And how long will his Kingdom
last? His Kingdom will not end.
And all of this seems great, except for one gigantic, messy
problem. The throne that this king was
going to sit on was not the throne that they were willing to
give. They wanted a king to overthrow
their Roman oppressors and reestablish the nation of
Israel. They wanted an earthly king to
sit on an earthly throne and reign over an earthly Kingdom,
but that throne was too small because Jesus came to sit on the
throne of hearts for a heavenly Kingdom.
You see, His Kingdom is beyond governments and beyond countries
and beyond borders. For it is through the human
heart that he transforms every government, every country, and
crosses every border. And it's so easy when you're
watching this unfold in the text and through human history to
look at them and go, how dumb can you be?
But we got to be careful because we make the exact same mistake.
Be careful because this might hurt for a bit.
We do the same thing that they do.
We have no problem with Jesus sitting on a throne as long as
it's the throne of our choosing. For instance, we will let Jesus
be the king of our problems. Everybody does that.
That's why half of us pray. We got a problem, Jesus.
You're in charge of it now. But we don't want him to sit on
the throne of our successes. We'll let Jesus be the king of
our trials, just not our victories.
We'll let Jesus be the king of our poverty, just not our
riches. We'll let Jesus be the King of
our Sunday, but just leave me alone on Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
You can sit on the throne of my prayer life, Jesus.
You just can't have the throne of my real life, Jesus.
You can have the throne of my sickness, you just can't have
the throne of my health. You can sit on the throne of my
joblessness, but you can't sit on the throne of my finances.
You can sit on the throne of my marriage problems, but you can't
sit on the throne on how I act in my marriage.
In short, if you and I are not very very careful.
We can make Jesus the king of the situations that we got
ourselves into, but not make him the Lord and ruler of our lives.
We want him to be the savior of our sins, just not the Lord of
our lives. We want him to save us, we just
don't want him to rule over us. But that's the problem with
kings. Kings come to rule.
We see this in other ways. This one is a little bit more
innocent, but it's equally as dangerous.
People will choose to not necessarily see Jesus as the
savior of their sins. I don't need saved.
And they'll say he's not the Lord of their lives because they
don't want a ruler. But they will at least
acknowledge that he's a really good teacher.
There's something about his teachings that are at least good
and profound that are worth pondering.
Skeptics all across the spectrum will have to acknowledge that
Jesus was, at the very, very least, a great teacher.
Some would say one of the greatest teachers of all.
I would say, of course he's the greatest teacher of all.
He's the Son of God. However, I need to remind you,
Jesus did not come just to teach.
He came to save and he came to rule.
And if you reduce Jesus to just a teacher, if you're saying no
to making him the Savior of your life and no to him being the
Lord over your life, you are reduced to at best, making him a
teacher. But the problem with teachers is
teachers can be changed out. Teachers can be disagreed with,
teachers can be ignored. But not kings.
Kings are to be obeyed, Lords are to be followed.
What happens if you make Jesus your teacher is we implement the
teachings of Jesus that we agree with and we pass over the
teachings of Jesus that are too hard for us.
That's why Jesus makes obedience one of the marks of his
followers. We are to be more than just
hearers of the great teaching. We are to be followers of the
teaching because the teaching comes from our King and King's
rule. Which means that you and I are
under obligation through the power of the Holy Spirit to obey
the teachings of God that are hard and uncomfortable.
And to the people, maybe some of you are here at one of our
locations who have accidentally or intentionally limited to
Jesus to merely a teacher. Can I tell you a cautionary
tale? In Matthew chapter 26, verses 20
through 22, Jesus is having his final meal with his disciples.
And in verse 20 the story picks up.
When the evening came, Jesus was reclining at the table with the
12 and while they were eating he said, Truly I tell you, one of
you will betray me. And they were very sad and began
to say to him, one after the other, Surely you don't mean me,
Lord. One by one each person went,
Surely you don't mean me, Lord? Surely you don't mean me Lord.
Surely you don't mean me, Lord. 11 times they went, Surely you
don't mean me Lord. They're acknowledging that he's
the king and the ruler over their lives.
And the 11 people who called him Lord went on to spend the rest
of their lives advancing the Kingdom of King Jesus.
And the fact that you are in this room or wherever you are
gathered at hearing about the name of Jesus can be traced all
the way back to those 11 dudes who said, surely you don't mean
me, Lord. But if you keep reading and
verse 25, look what it has to say, then Judas, the one who
would betray him, said, surely you don't mean me, Rabbi.
Do you know what the word for rabbi is?
It's teacher. If you're picking A-Team to be
on, the people who called him Lord went on to change the
world, and the people who call Jesus simply a good teacher went
on to betray him. Pick your team carefully.
The good news is that today you can make Jesus the Lord of your
life. You can acknowledge Him as King.
And that means that when he is your King, you are in His
Kingdom, which means that you are under his protection.
And hear me, I can testify to this truth, that He will supply
every single one of your needs. He will hear every single one of
your prayers. He is so close that He knows the
number of hairs on your head. And He is so close enough that
all you have to do is whisper His name and He is on His way.
When you are in the Kingdom of King Jesus and King Jesus is
your King, when you mention His name, demons flee.
And in the darkest of valleys, the Word promises that He will
be right by your side. You see, King Jesus is already
ruling. He is already victorious.
The question is whether or not you will be under his rule and
experience his victory. The question is whether or not
you will make him a your king. Today we're moving to a time of
decision. To those of you here or online
who have not yet started an intimate personal relationship
with Jesus Christ, I mean this. I have really good news for you.
You can actually experience something that happened in the
Old Testament and you can experience it today.
You see, when God showed up to Abraham and Sarai, when He was
done with them, He had changed their name to Abraham and Sarah.
When God showed up to Jacob, when he was done with Jacob, he
had changed His name from Jacob to Israel.
And guess what? You can get a new name today.
It can happen. Colossians chapter one verse 21
states that we were once alienated from God and were
enemies. However, through the saving
power of Jesus when we enter into His Kingdom and by making
Him the Lord and Savior of our lives, the Bible says that we
are given a new name. John chapter 15 says you are my
friends if you do what I command.
I have called you friends. In first John chapter 3 verse
one, it says see what great love the Father has lavished on us,
that we should be called children of God and that is what
we are. God made it possible for us to
have a change in status and with that change in status comes a
new name. We move from being alienated and
enemies to being called friends and children.
And that's a trade I'd make every single day.
That's a lottery ticket you don't have to scratch.
And you might be asking yourself, how good is King Jesus
if I'm going to surrender to his rule?
How good is this king? Let me show you how good this
king is. Romans chapter 5, verse 10 says
while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through
the death of His Son. God did not send His Son for His
friends, He sent His Son for His enemies so His enemies could
become His friends. And that is the offer that is
available for every single one of you today.
Hear me, God moved while you were still an enemy.
If you are thinking that you have to get your entire life
turned around before you can get right with God, you completely
misunderstand the necessity and the power of God.
When you were the enemy, He already moved and already made
the way. You can't fix you because if you
could fix you, He wouldn't have had to send Jesus in the 1st
place. We come to Him all messed up,
all busted up with all kinds of challenges, and He's the one who
makes us new. He moved on our behalf when we
hear His enemies. This good, good King is waiting
for you today and don't leave here until he is your king.
In just a few moments, the people around you are going to
stand and sing. Some of them are going to come
to the steps and pray. And if you don't want to walk
over there next to that, underneath that screen, next to
the baptistery and talk to somebody, make sure you talk to
somebody before you leave today. To the rest of you in the room,
I got a couple of DeVos for you. To those of you who already have
a relationship with Jesus Christ, first one is what area
of your life is not under His control?
What area of your life have you said, listen, you can sit on all
of these Thrones, but you can't sit on this one?
I'll just give you my testimony. All the areas where God is
sitting are going well. All the areas where I have not
allowed Him to sit are where all of my problems are.
His rule is good and righteous and trustworthy and it's
verified. And so if there's an area of
your life where you've said no to King Jesus, I would tell you
God has given you a gift. You should open it.
The gift is repentance. Own what you have done, lay it
down, turn it over to Him, and walk away from it.
And there are others of you right now that you are just in
an incredibly dark season. It's painful, it's frustrating,
and to be honest with you, you're frustrated with God
because it feels like he is not coming through for you the way
that you thought he would come through for you.
And you would make a very good Jew in that.
Because you're going to 400 years of silence.
You're just, you're just leaving me here.
Leave me out to dry. You feel all alone.
You feel all isolated. You're going, God, I'm trying to
do stuff right. I know I haven't got it right
every time, but it feels like you are not coming through.
But the bottom line is, if you were to look at your life, you
would realize that you have been unfaithful over and over and
over and over and over and over again.
But God's faithfulness is not determined by our faithfulness.
So hear me, even though you and I have not been faithful in our
waiting on Jesus, He has been faithful in His coming.
While we've been unfaithful in the waiting, He was faithful in
the coming. First Peter chapter 3 verse 9
says the Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some
understand slowness. Instead, He is patient with you,
not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to
repentance, crossing family. If you're in a season, don't you
dare lose hope, don't you dare walk away.
He is faithful. Second Timothy chapter 2 verse
13 says even if we are faithless, He will remains
faithful. The problem in the equation is
never Him. It is always us, but He doesn't
let the problem of us keep Him from being who He is on our
behalf. And if that doesn't stir your
heart to joy, I don't know what will.
Would you stand with me? Heavenly Father, I'm so thankful
for this moment right here. And I'm believing that You're
going to do a mighty work in every heart that's willing to
surrender to your rule and to your kingship.
So God help us to break down the areas that we've walled off from
you. Help us to turn over the things
that we are afraid of turning over to you.
Be with us in this moment, God. I'm asking that you'd give us
each clarity on what it is that we're supposed to do, and give
us the willingness to do it. Your name I pray.
Amen.