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NO. LIVERMORE — The congregation was welcomed in Dec. 15, by Pastor Bonnie Higgins at 9:30 a.m. to begin the service.  The Call to Worship, Invocation/Lord’s Prayer were recited. The hymns that were sung were “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing”, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” “How Great our Joy!”. The service ended with “Go Now in Peace”.   Linda Lyman is the organist and Lew Lyman leads the music for the congregation each week.

The sermon, “The Christmas Lamb” using the scriptures from Isaiah 53:6-12. Pastor Bonnie started out by saying that the book of Isaiah is a book that is the narrative of God’s plan for redemption and Isaiah 53 shows the narrative with God’s explanations of the Christmas story.

It is written many times in the New Testament that Jesus is the Shepherd, and if He is the Shepherd, we are His sheep. Sheep are followers and will usually following the voice of the shepherd. But there are times when we don’t follow His voice and we go out on our own. God has set boundaries for His children and sometimes we decide to see what is beyond the boundaries.  That is when the Shepherd comes looking for us.

We all wander away from God in our lives, because we are flawed people and we want to do things our way. When God sees us moving away, He comes and gets us and brings us back to Him. We are all built with two parts, an inside, which holds the heart (spiritual side), and the outside, which hold the world (physical side). Too many times we allow the world take over our heart. God brings the Shepherd to help us stay strong in Him. God is always guiding us to Him.

The Christmas story is all about God sending us the Light to eternity with Him. We can’t get there unless there is a Savior that would come and save the world, not to condemn the world, but to save it. God will do the condemning on Judgement Day.  God gives us everything, He gave us a perfect world to live in and we messed it up, He opens up ways for us to succeed in this world and then we think we can do better than Him.

But because of His grace, He is always there to guide us and take us back when we go out on our own. Through God’s grace, He sent Jesus to us. Jesus the perfect lamb. Jesus came as a baby to show us how to live a life like Him, humbly, and then He went to the cross to die and took all the sins of the world on Himself. As a Shepherd, He took care of His sheep.

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As we come closer to the manger, we need to ask ourselves, what do we see when we look into the manger? We can see the King of Kings, the Messiah, but we must also see an infant Lamb. Because of our sins, the only solutions for us are that a Lamb would come, bear our sin, and die and raise for our deliverance of that sin. We should be acknowledging that it was our sins that God felt

He needed to send us Savior, who came to be born to die once and for all to overcome sin and Satan and to purchase our forgiveness that only God can give us. Because of all that God did for us, we can celebrate the perfect Lamb in the manger.

Announcements:

Collecting Peanut Butter for the Food Pantry in Dec..

Bible Study – Tuesday at 1 p.m.

Christmas Program- Dec. 22 in the morning worship service

Family Christmas Eve service – Dec. 24 at 4 p.m.