Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / December 24, 2017 | Let There Be Light - Christmas Star

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December 24, 2017 | Let There Be Light - Christmas Star · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Christmas and children.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, they go together great, don't they?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I actually thought about uh grabbing four of those kids or hiring four kids, giving them signs when I knew I was gonna preach on the Christmas Star.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: They mentioned this Christmas series.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: We first did Christmas dawn, then Christmas night light, last week Christmas sunlight, and the fourth light in scripture that's about Christmas is Christmas Star.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought of, you know, I'll give four signs out to four little kids.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: They'd come up and spell, you know, as I preached, star, but I was afraid they'd come up backwards and then my sermon would be called rats.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I couldn't go that route.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: But so stars are a big deal.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Children and stars.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Such a big deal at Christmas.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Stars on top of our trees, stars dangling uh over our malls, at our stoplights, festooning our greeting cards, right?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Stars everywhere.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they all come, our obsession with stars, comes from one star, the most famous star of all time, called the Star of Bethlehem, which we're told appeared, some sort of celestial body appeared to some Magi, wise men or kings, and the answer is right on this test, in Persia, thousands of years ago, and signaled to them that, get this, the king of the Jews had been born.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And now, I don't know about you, but I've watched all those Discovery Channel things and the videos and read, I've got some of the books on the Christmas star.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And the question is always, what was the Christmas star?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Was the Christmas star, I mean, a supernova?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: That supernova, as you know, is a nuclear explosion and a star far away, it explodes, and just super bright.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can see it for a couple of months, generally, here on Earth.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or was it uh planets merging?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Planets are always getting close to each other in 7 BC, 6 BC, 5 BC, 4 BC, Christ was born in 4 BC.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: We know were planets getting close to each other.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Jupiter was always one of those planets, sometimes Mars, sometimes Saturn.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: They never got right on top of each other, but was it planets merging?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: That certainly was one video I saw and believed about 10 years ago.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Or was it a comet, you know, not a not a um uh, you know, a uh what do you call those things that go zoom really fast?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Meteorite, not one of those, that's too fast, but a comet that hangs around for a while in the sky.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it was a miracle, you know, like the pillar of fire that led Israel through the wilderness, God's flashlight of some kind.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to tell you something, I'm gonna admit something right at the start that what I believe for 40 years, or at least 20, 30 years, I've changed my mind on in the last year or so because of a book that was published.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it's changed a lot of people's minds, and I'm gonna share with you.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I always believed it was something supernatural.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: I discounted all the others, and I'll tell you about that.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've only got 15 minutes to do it in, but I'm gonna tell you about that and what difference it makes.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to go to the book of books first because it gives us a lot of hints about this.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: The story is carried in the first gospel, second chapter, Matthew chapter 2, and it goes like this in the Christian Standard Bible.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: After Jesus was born in Bethlehem, little village, six miles south of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, of Judea, southern part of Israel, Judea, in the days of King Herod, after I say the word Herod, you're supposed to go, boo.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: He was a horrible guy.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is the last year of King Herod's life.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's super freaking paranoid.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's so afraid, even the last year of his life, that someone is going to steal his throne.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: He kills not one, not two, but three of his own sons and one of his wives.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he's just left instructions before the wise men get there.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Instructions to kill the most popular noblemen, businessmen in all of Rome, so that on the day he dies, so that there will be people crying on the day he dies.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's how bad a guy he is, King Herod.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, boo.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's try it again.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: After Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod, thank you.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, wise men from the east, Magi, from the east, meaning Persia, 500 miles to the east, Babylon, arrived in Jerusalem, saying, Where is he who's been born of king of the Jews?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly expecting everybody's gonna know.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is the capital city, the royal baby's been born, where is he, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then they say, For we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are two hints in these two verses about that that guide us toward what that star really was.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: The first hand is their question, where is he who has been born king of the Jews?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Notice it's not what we often hear, not where is he who will be born king of the Jews?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Their, and this is my own invented word, astrological biblical research of the dramatic star rising has told them, quote, the Messiah, king of the Jews, has been born.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the other hint here in the verse is, for we saw his star at its rising and have come to worship him.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that tells us that this all happened a year or a year and a half before, and the star has vanished.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And now they've made the long months' journey from Persia to Jerusalem, where they assumed the royal child will be, and everybody could hear them coming because they sang in three-part harmony.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We three kings of Orient are.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, guide us to thy perfect light.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that song implies that the star led them from Babylon or Persia, two or three miles an hour, one month's trip westward to Jerusalem, but it didn't.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: None of that is true.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So, but they do come to Jerusalem.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: They come to Jerusalem after the star has vanished, and they ask, where is the king of the Jews?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Which freaks everybody out.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: All of Jerusalem gets upset.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Herod hears about it, he gets upset.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, the question, why would they even care?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why would pagans, astrologers, Babylonians even care about the king of the Jews?
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very interesting question.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the answer is that they were like the muckety muck astronomers of the whole world.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: They were legitimate astronomers and astrologers, and in those days before electric lights, everybody looked at the night sky, but these guys lived in Babylon, which was a combination of a huge observatory and Nash.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: It had a library with records stretching back a thousand years of what the stars had done every single day.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there was this huge Jewish population in Babylon back then of the descendants of people who didn't go back to the land of Jerusalem when King Cyrus set them free, 600 years before.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: So they knew all about the Jews.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And not only that, there were two people mentioned in the Jewish Bible who were their ancient heroes, one dating from about 1,400 years before, named Balaam.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Balaam was a soothsayer, astrologer, Magus, a magi guy, who'd been hired to come all the way from the Euphrates to curse Israel as they went through the wilderness.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: But God wouldn't let him.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when he opened his mouth to curse Israel, all that came out was a remarkable prophetic blessing that went like this.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: I see him, but not now.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: I behold him, but not near.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: A star shall come out of Jacob, a scepter, meaning a king, shall come out of Israel.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: A prophecy that there would be a star who would be a king, a king who would be a star who one day would be born in Israel.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they had that prophecy, the wise men did.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they had another hero from much more recent, 600 years before, and his name was Daniel, and he was a dream interpreter, who, because he was so great at interpreting dreams, had been named chief of the wise men of all of Babylon, and then later of Persia, and who had said in his book of Daniel, chapter 9, that everyone should expect the Messiah, king of the Jews, to come in about 500 years.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the whole of the ancient Near East is holding its breath.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's about time.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the wise men saw something in the sky, something that alerted them to the fact that that birth had happened.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: What was it?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what happens is they go to Jerusalem and King Herod hears this and he's deeply disturbed, and all Jerusalem.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: King Herod heard this.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: King Herod, thank you.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he assembled all the chief priests and scribes of the people and asked them where the Christ would be born.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the embarrassing thing.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Astrologers coming from hundreds of miles away who don't know the details.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And here, these people know the details about their king, but can't be bothered.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: They knew because they had the book of Micah, chapter 5, 2, that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem of Judea because of the prophecy, and you, Bethlehem, and the land of Judah are by no means least among all the tribes of Judah, or the rulers, for out of you will come a ruler who'll shepherd my people Israel.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And Matthew wants us to know that it's really crazy that sometimes people from far away who weren't raised in a church, shall we say, or raised religious, sometimes they can care more about the truth than even the people who've been raised religiously, right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: So then Herod secretly summons the wise men.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try again.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then Herod secretly summoned the wise men, and he asked them and he uh asked them the exact time.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting question.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: What was the exact time that star first appeared?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, Go and search carefully for the child, and when you find him, report back to me so I can go worship him too.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Was he telling the truth?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: He's lying.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's awful, but he had two plans.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Those words, the exact time, revealed to us he had a plan A and a plan B.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Plan A was the Magi returned and they tell me exactly where the baby is.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: I send my thugs and I kill the thing.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I eliminate my rival.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Plan B is I better ask them when the star appeared.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because if the magi don't discover where the baby is or don't return, then I need to kill all the babies that fit that time period.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Which plan did King Herod put into practice?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Plan B.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how 20 to 40 babies is the best uh estimate.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: 20 to 40 babies in the Bethlehem area were slaughtered by soldiers.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's how bad a guy he was, King Herod.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: He was a vicious monster.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, after hearing the king, the wise men leave the palace and go on their way.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And in Greek, it's one word, it's like Shazam, it's behold, it's oh my goodness, the star has returned, which we haven't seen for a month or two.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: There it was, the star they had seen at its rising.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And listen to this remarkable verse 9.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: It led them.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: How can a star lead somebody?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: It led them until it came and stopped above the place where the child was.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when they saw the star, they were overwhelmed with joy.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother, and falling to their knees, they became, for Matthew, the very first believers in the baby Jesus.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: They worshiped him, they gave up their astrology and their paganism, and we will see them in heaven.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yea, for that one.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: But now the question is all of this evidence, some celestial body that rises and stays visible for quite a while and then disappears and then suddenly reappears and then takes people south six miles from Bethlehem to Bethlehem when we know visibly stars never go south or north, it's always east to west.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then it seems to stop over the very house that the baby is.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: What in the world could that be?
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I tell you that I thought all of the other possibilities had fatal flaws.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: Once I went back to Washburn after I'd been here for a while to take an astronomy course, and the head of the astronomy department, Dr.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Parnell, was a great guy and a Christian man, and we talked about this, and we agreed.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: He said to Jim, I just don't think any of the other possibilities will work.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: They don't explain the evidence of Matthew.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And at that time I agreed.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: I wish Dr.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Parnell was still with us because I would have liked to have had him read the book that I have read recently, a book that's changed a lot of people's minds.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the book is called The Great Christ Comet, which was published in 2015, two years ago, and written by Dr.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Colin Nickel, who got his PhD from Cambridge University, and has taught at Cambridge and some other places.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And has written a book that's basically blowing people's minds, a combination of astronomy and the biblical evidence, that argues that the only celestial thing that can explain the biblical account is actually a long-period retrograde, uh, whatever, uh a certain kind of a comet, a large comet that hangs around in the sky.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the and the comments that are coming from the astronomers and the biblical scholars are overwhelming.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: A stunning book, a convincing case, the definitive treatment, an astonishing triumph of scholarship.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And while I don't have the time to explain everything about this, I will tell you that the Christ comet that he's speaking of is much like the Haley Bop comet that appeared for no less than 18 months in the sky 20 years ago this fall.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some of you'll remember two amateurs, one named Haley, one named Bob.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Haley, a Christian who dedicated his work to the Lord, discovered this tiny faint little uh this little fuzz far off in uh in a constellation.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they reported it, and all of a sudden it kept getting brighter and brighter, and it got relatively close to the earth.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Comets, by the way, are simply icy dirt balls, most of them small, and when they're far away from the sun, they're just little rock bits covered with ice, chemical ice.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: But when they get close to the sun, the ice melts, and that's when you begin to see them glow.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are short period, that is, they circle the sun in about two, every 200 years, like Halley's comet, which is about five miles across.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them are long period, like Haley Bob.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Haley Bob's about 50 miles across.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Circles the sun maybe every 200,000 or 300,000 years, comes from far away in our solar system.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the great Christ comet had to be something like that that hung in the sky so that the wise men could have studied it, and then disappeared behind the sun and then reappeared heading south as it would have, the astronomers say, and it appeared as though it was going south.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And we read in the text, it led them until it came and stopped above the place where the child was.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now, how can anything do that?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the answer is that a comet can, and this comet, as they went south to Bethlehem, the comet would have been seen on the western side toward the Mediterranean, and it would have appeared to stop right above that house.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: If that's true, I mean, maybe that's not true.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's maybe it is something supernatural, but I happen to now be convinced.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I read this kind of southward movement is only possible for an object in the inner solar system, meaning the star had to be a comet, Dr.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Nickel.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Or Craig Keener, one of the most famous biblical scholars in the world, says this there's only one star that can stand over something and be perceived as pinpointing a precise location.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's a comet that is approaching the horizon.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's the end of sort of the college science thing.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in my last four minutes, let me ask and answer the question.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So what?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, okay, maybe it was a comet.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was a pillar of fire, a laser beam from heaven or something.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: But so what?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer is so interesting.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because the answer is that the Bible takes this star, which in Jesus' day led the wise men to Jesus, and the Bible indicates that now Jesus has, in a way, become the star that you and I need to look at and see and follow.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And way back in 1400 BC, that's the way Balaam said it, isn't it?
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: I see him, but not now.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I behold him, a star out of Jacob, a king, a scepter out of Israel.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the star is actually a person that in the darkness of our life we need to look up and see.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Any of you seen the movie The Star that's out for Christmas, a children's movie, The Star?
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of you seen that.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: In that movie, there's a singing group, four girls uh called Fifth Harmony, who sing this remarkable Christian song called Do You See the Star?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, last week they sang it again at the Disney Christmas celebration that stood outside of Disney World and sang, note these amazing words they sang.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: We've all been searching for something, something that's bigger than us to believe in.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Who knew a star was so close it could touch us?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Light up our hearts, lead the way through the dark.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Can you see?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me, can you see the star?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: It lights the way from where we are.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me, can you see?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then they sing, get this, they sing these words.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Son of God, the great I am, meet the King of Kings, come and follow me, tell me.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Can you see the star?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: That star you see is Jesus.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know about you, but I do know that a lot of people have gotten lost in the dark.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know how the rush of life just takes you down the road, and then one day you sort of look up from behind the wheel and you say, How did I get so far away from the stuff I once believed in?
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: How did I get so far away from God?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, does God still love me?
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Is there any way back?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, this text, this story is telling us something.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's telling us that if you've wandered afar, shall we say, then look for the star.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you're lost and don't know where you are, then follow the star.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same thing that survival people tell you.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you get lost on the open sea or in a wilderness, what do you do?
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: You look up and you find the North Star and you follow the star.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this text would tell us: listen, if you're in a dark place in your life, if you're feeling lost, then you need light.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: You need a star.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: You need to look up and find and follow Jesus.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I know something else.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I know that there are some of you in this room who've lost the star of your life this last year and are struggling this Christmas with that.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there was someone in your family or someone close to you that was the star, and that star has gone out.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: I know that because it happened to Melody and me 25 years ago today.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: She was down in Dallas.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was the star of our family, I guess you could say, was her mid-50-year-old father, whose name was Jim Smith.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: He'd founded a counseling center in Dallas, and and and his star had never shone brighter.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: That counseling center uh had far more people come to it in 1992 than it ever had before.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not only that, but Jim Smith had married off his youngest daughter, and he'd published that year a book on marriage and family.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and then he'd been on the cover of Dallas Monthly Magazine, and then he'd been interviewed for newspapers and national magazines.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he was a bright light.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: He was a great friend.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: He was my hunting partner and fishing partner, and he had just an incredible guy.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: But what had happened is that doctors had said is you have a little polyp on your pancreas.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: You need to come in on Christmas Eve, and we'll take that off.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: And while we take that off, we'll we'll check it out and see if there's any cancer in it.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Melody and her mother were down in Dallas at the Presbyterian Hospital, Highland Park.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they said goodbye to him and prayed over and kissed him and went down to the cafeteria to eat lunch and wait four hours for the docs to come back.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Melody says she knew something was wrong when the doctors came down in 20 minutes.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, I'm sorry, we have terrible news for you.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: We opened him up, and when we saw what we saw, we just showed him up again.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the star of that family was gone within two months.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do when your light has gone out?
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: What do you do when you find yourself absolutely lost in the dark?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you do what we did.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: You hug each other and hold each other tight and look for the only light you can find, which was the star, which was the Lord Jesus, and we cried out and said, We trust in you, Lord Jesus.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what's going on.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: We can't understand why you would do this.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: The light seemed to have gone out.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: But we do trust you.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what you need to do.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because the star could rise a thousand times for the wise men, but if it never rises for you in your heart, then friend, you're still lost.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're still in the dark, and that's that's not a place you want to be.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: This Christmas, can you see the star?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: Will you follow the star?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: Pray with me, and then we'll sing Silent Night.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Father, thank you for your Son Jesus Christ and for this incredible miracle in the sky that announced his birth and brought people from far away who weren't believers to see and to worship.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you that Jesus became the star and he's the star for us.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I pray for folks who are really struggling right now and in the dark or lost and ask Heavenly Father that star would shine bright for them this Christmas in Jesus' name.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.