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The Christmas You've Always Longed For
How to Recapture the Wonder of the Season
 Do you long to create the perfect Christmas for yourself and those you love? Are you captivated by glossy photos of festive meals in holiday magazines? Do you strive to find practical yet charming presents for everyone on your gift list? Do you carefully plan just the right trimmings to decorate your home?
This December sermon series is much more than a Christmas countdown of what's and how-to's. It's a comprehensive tool for making this the most meaningful, Christ-centered Christmas you've ever experienced. You'll learn how to slow down, make a plan that keeps Christ the center of your activities, follow through on what you've decided, and joyfully celebrate the true meaning of Christmas.
SERMON THEMES
You'll experience the Christmas you've always longed for when you:
1. Slow Down for Reflection
2. Keep a Christ-centered Focus
3. Manage the Inevitable Distractions
4. Celebrate Whatever Your Circumstances
5. Enjoy a God-pleasing Christmas
“The Christmas You've Always Longed For” Sermon Series
There are things that we long for as we journey through life. A young boy may long for a bicycle. A young man may long for a woman. A husband and his wife may long for a child. A widow may long for her lost love. We all long for something.
It doesn’t matter if a person is a Christian or not, most people have a longing for a perfect Christmas. How that “perfect Christmas” looks may be different for different people. For some it may center on a gift they hope to receive. For others it may be more about the delight that they hope to see on the face of a loved one as they see the gifts they have been given. For yet others it may be a day drawn from a Currier & Ives print. For still others, it may be the gathering together of loved ones – and hoping that they can all avoid being dysfunctional for at least a few hours.
Pastor, the Christmas season provides you a special opportunity to address that universal longing, because the longing itself is God-created. It is a longing for the contentment that comes only from a closer and more intimate relationship with Him. Any longing that does not lead to that God-desired fulfillment is, unfortunately a perversion of His creation. When you use Mainstay’s five-week sermon series, “The Christmas You’ve Always Longed For,” you will be able to minister to that longing and get it focused on Jesus where it belongs. You will be able to invite unbelievers to come to know him and believer to know Him better.
The first message encourages people to slow down and reflect, to be still and know that He is God. There is no better place to start, especially when many on that first Sunday of the series will be consumed with the most hectic shopping day of the year. As you go through the ensuing weeks, you will lead them to turn their eyes upon Jesus and put the things of this world – good or bad – in proper perspective so that, on Christmas day, they will be able to have the kind of Christmas that HE longs for them to have.
Each of our sermon series has available advertising collateral and supporting materials. More importantly, they are gift-wrapped in our prayers that you and those to whom you minister will have “The Christmas You’ve Always Longed For.” |
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