Embrace Podcast

New Year's resolutions are hard! And though there can be a lot of good to setting goals for the new year, there's also a lot of guilt that comes along with those goals when we don't accomplish them how we imagined. To really make 2019 our best year yet we have to give ourselves some grace, trusting in God's plan even when we fail, and not quitting when things don't work out like we planned.

Welcome to Christmas Eve at Embrace! We all have things in life that are threatening to extinguish our light: the chaos of the season, hurtful people, bad choices, just to name a few. But while the light in our hearts can so easily be put out, Jesus' light never will! His light came to Earth as a baby 2,000 years ago. This Christmas let's celebrate and embrace the light of the world!

What do you adore in life? Is it money, status, relationships, getting ahead? The song "Oh Come all Ye Faithful" calls us to come let us adore HIM ... Jesus! But what if we don't feel like we adore Jesus? How can we make him a bigger part of our lives and as a result, love him more? We must dwell in Jesus' house, see his beauty, and seek him with expectation. When we do those three things we can't help but come and adore Jesus! 

Like the classic song says, God calls us to bring our finest gifts to Him. Are you bringing the best of your time, talent, and treasure to God? But God also wants our worst—the messy, imperfect, far from polished parts of our lives. We're asked to bring our worst and our best, because God's best gift, Jesus, came to redeem the worst of us.

We're all weary in some way. We're tired. The world can be a sad place, even at Christmastime. But there is still hope—a hope not found in circumstances or other people, but an unending hope found in Jesus. What are you placing your hope in this Christmas?

"Let every heart prepare Him room" is one of the most famous lines from Joy to the World, but what does it actually mean to prepare room for Jesus in our hearts and lives this Christmas? There's a lot of practical things we can do to make more room in our lives, but why should we do that in the first place? Because more room leads to more Jesus and more Jesus leads to more joy! Couldn't we all use more joy this Christmas? Let's prepare Him room. 

Fear will keep us from a lot of things in life, but most importantly it will keep us from fostering and growing our relationships with others, and with God. We deal with fear in many ways: through courage, logic, faith, forgetting, and addictions, but the only solution to fear is love. True love centered on Jesus will conquer fear, completing our relationships instead of killing them.

We've all been given a race to run in life, but what will kill that race and our relationships faster than anything? Comparison. Looking around at what other people have been blessed with will kill anything special in our lives. So how do we kill comparison? Simply stop looking around! Run your race, and cheer others on in their races. Let's celebrate, rather than compare. 

How do you find your calling, and once you find it, how do you live it out? Author and speaker Ken Costa of the Alpha organization talks purpose and passion no matter what season of life you're in. 

We all like to be right, don't we? But when liking to be right becomes a need to be right all the time we begin to hurt our relationships with others and God. How can we fix that? Stop defending ourselves. Realize that it's okay to be wrong. And learn God's rightness. When we put these three things into practice, though easier said than done, we'll begin to crave God's rightness in our relationships, instead of our own.