Hi Church! 

I hope you are enjoying this series, Almost Christmas.  We hear these familiar subjects during Advent each year: Peace, Hope, Love and Joy - but this series is teaching us how to live out each one altogether! 

Next week, we are invited to attend the Covenant Preschool Christmas program rehearsal on Tuesday, Dec 16th at 10am. This is a great opportunity to support the preschool, as well as give them a crowd to rehearse in front of!  The actual program will be the next day, Wednesday Dec 17th at 9am, and we’ve been asked to provide refreshments in the form of coffee and hot chocolate.  If anyone can help out with that please let me know. 

Finally, a very special thank you to those who donated money to help provide Christmas gifts for the Burr family!  We had an overwhelming response to that request, along with donations for the building fund.  What a joy it is to be a part of such a loving and caring church - who is living out that power of generosity! 

Merry Christmas!

Pastor Marcy

Devotion This Week: 

Ever been driving and you see a set of skid marks?  You might see those skid marks and try to imagine what may have happened.  You can probably make a good guess as to what happened, especially if the skid marks stop suddenly in the road.  You know they must have hit something.  We can look at these skid marks and come close to describing what may have happened. 

But we don’t know the actual real story.  Because we were not there.   We can make some good guesses, but we can’t know for sure unless we were an eyewitness to what actually happened. 

Eyewitnesses are pretty much gold.  They tell you exactly what they saw, what they heard.  You can’t dispute it because they were there and you were not.   

And one of the most exciting things about the Bible is that it is FULL of eyewitnesses. 

Matthew was an actual person who actually was called by Jesus to follow him. 

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. Matthew 9:9  

John wasn’t just writing a story, he was the “disciple whom Jesus loved” 

One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him. John 13:23

Luke talked to all those eyewitnesses to make sure his account was accurate: 

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Luke 1:1-2

And then the risen Jesus wasn’t just something they heard about.  He appeared to hundreds! 

We don’t have to guess what may have happened.  We can trust the words of the people who actually saw Him - from the time He started His ministry to the time He rose - the Bible has the real and true account because it was from those who saw Him.

As Christians, we live by faith - but the joy of the Bible is that it is filled with those who were there and were witnesses.  And today, we are witnesses.  We share what God has done in our lives, and no one can dispute that - because it is our story.  We become the eyewitnesses to God’s love!  Amen?