{"id":1480,"date":"2009-09-27T23:46:16","date_gmt":"2009-09-28T07:46:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2009\/09\/27\/christmas-sermons\/"},"modified":"2009-09-27T23:46:16","modified_gmt":"2009-09-28T07:46:16","slug":"christmas-sermons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/2009\/09\/27\/christmas-sermons\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas sermons"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many pastors find Special Occasions like Christmas a difficult time for preaching. The reason is that we are so familiar with the Christmas story that it can seem a chore to find something fresh each year.<\/p>\n

I think one reason for this is we think of preaching only one sermon for Christmas. We fail to make much of the incarnation, a vital part of our redemption, by only taking one sermon in December and telling the same story year after year.<\/p>\n

Since at least 1994 I have almost always made the month of December a month to emphasize the incarnation by a whole series of messages from all over the Scripture highlighting various threads or themes connected with the Christmas story.<\/p>\n

We have done many different themes: the \u201cLos Angeles\u201d Christmas \u2013 all about angels; the Barren Woman theme from Isaiah 54, tying in with the barren woman theme in the Bible and culminating with Mary; the \u201cRoots\u201d Christmas, where I preached from the genealogies and taught the descent of Christ from Adam; and last year \u201cThe Bright and Morning Star\u201d where we looked at Balaam\u2019s prophecy and traced the theme of the star through the Scriptures (and taught some church history of the Moravian missions movement, using their Moravian star ornament as a tie-in). There have been many other themes as well.<\/p>\n

Well, a friend was bemoaning the common problem recently and I took a look at my summary file of our past Christmas series. I found I hadn\u2019t updated it for a few years. Tonight I took the time to catch it up and send it to him. This has an added benefit: it is getting me fired up for this coming December!<\/p>\n

Our theme this year will be \u201cThe Word became Flesh\u201d with messages from Psalm 19 as a prelude on the Word\u2019s value to men, culminating with the Jn 1 passage and concluding with a New Years message on the \u2018engrafted word\u2019 from Jas 1.21.<\/p>\n

You can find a copy of my updated file here<\/a>. Perhaps this file might be an inspiration to some other preacher. Feel free to use as you see fit!<\/p>\n

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Many pastors find Special Occasions like Christmas a difficult time for preaching. The reason is that we are so familiar with the Christmas story that it can seem a chore to find something fresh each year. I think one reason for this is we think of preaching only one sermon for Christmas. We fail to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-nS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}