"God's Gifts: Peace Like the Angels"

Merry Christmas! 

Personally, I would prefer a white Christmas, but I know how much so many of you are appreciating our beautiful Autumn weather now that it’s officially turned to Winter, and I’ll just leave it at “Merry Christmas!”

In our service this week, the Warren family (minus Gary, who’s home sick) lit our fourth Advent candle, focusing on peace -- reminding all of us that peace is less about looking calm from the outside, but about feeling God’s peace on the inside, knowing that He has given us a completeness that this world could never provide.

We discussed that in our message this week, as we continued looking at how God’s gifts to us can come from the strangest places.  I mean, how strange is it that it was the angels who preached “peace to earth” that night to the shepherds?  Angels are the scariest, least peaceful creatures that God ever designed -- it’s angels who guard the gates of Eden with a flaming sword, an angel who reached out his hand to kill 70,000 Israelites, an angel who killed 185,000 Assyrians overnight, etc.  The first words out of any angel’s mouth always needs to be “don’t be afraid” because whenever people see one, they are automatically rightly terrified.

But the peace that was preached that night wasn’t a passive one that just settles on all of humanity every year around this time -- it was the message of victory given by the armies of Heaven, the message that today, in the town of David, has been born the One who would finally crush Satan’s head, as God had promised.  It was a peace that defeats all war, and leaves only the total completeness that God has given to us.

Who can you preach that to this week?