Part of growing up is developing a personal faith on your own. The problem with trying to do it alone, is that you won't be able to grow as fast. We need other people to help us grow to our greatest potential in the faith. If we surround ourselves with the right people, they can help move our faith in the right direction. It all comes down to the point where real faith grows with other people.

As we grow older, we easily grasp on to the faith of someone we look up to. It could be our parents faith, or because our grandma believes. But when you have someone else's faith, it's easy to come to church every week and go through the motions. You may even pay attention to the messages every week. But that is a counterfeit faith that believes because someone else believes. This, in fact, is not wrong, but it is not where God wants to keep you. Real faith is about putting what you learn to practice. Real faith is about doing something about what you know about faith. Real faith allows Jesus to change everything in you.

Whether you have been hurt or you have hurt someone, it takes awhile for the relationship to go back to the way it was. It's all because healing takes time. There is no quick fix. There’s no “feeling better” when you forgive. There’s no immediate reward. There’s no way to get your emotions to follow what you know is true deep down. There’s no way to make it all immediately better—for you or for someone else. Forgiveness takes time. But there is a process that we can go through to make sure we handle the healing process in the right way.

Many times when we get hurt, we want to shove the other person out of our lives...we want to cancel them. But it is important to remember that Jesus canceled our debts when He hung up on that cross. If we can be forgiven of anything, why can't we forgive others who have hurt us? We have to remember that no one is perfect, and we have to offer a little grace to those who hurt us. It's then that we can remember that we can cancel the debt, not the person.

Unforgiveness is like drinking poison and hoping that the person you are not forgiving will be hurt from it. Unforgiveness leads to bitterness in our own hearts which leads us to be the one carrying around the hurt. The only way we can let go of that bitterness and that grudge that we are holding on to is by forgiving the person who hurt us. It's ok to feel hurt, it's ok to feel angry, but forgiveness is the first step towards healing.

We can easily think that "joy" is just better than "happiness". If you are joy filled, then you are always happy. But joy is deeper than that. Joy doesn’t ignore the hard stuff in life, but it doesn’t let the hard stuff determine how you feel. When we look at the Christmas story, we see that Jesus coming was good news for all people. That Good News allows us to experience joy in all areas of our lives because we can trust Jesus with our lives. So if we experience the joy ourselves from Jesus, we need to share that joy with others.

When we look at Christmas, there really is not a lot of peace about it. There is a lot of chaos in our schedules, at the stores, and our packages are coming late in the mail. When we look at the Christmas story, Jesus came to bring peace. Not peace to our circumstances, but peace in our hearts. So when things in your life seem to be crazy around you, bring the peace of Jesus with you to those who need it.

As we start our new Christmas series, we look at the life of the shepherds who heard from the Angels that the Messiah had come. Before that time, there was 400 years of silence from God. People weren't hearing from prophets, they weren't hearing signs from God...nothing. But that special day of Jesus' birth, the noise was turned all the way up and people could now learn what God's character was like...in person. Through Jesus, we can know that God loves us.

When we look at the upside down Kingdom, our lives are supposed to look different. The power that we have is meant to lift others up, not tear them down. We do this by loving others well. Jesus is a prime example for us to use power well. In this message, we look at what it looks like to lead ourselves well and lead others well.

We may have a lot of leaders in our lives who do not use their leadership well. You may not even have respect for them. But in the upside down Kingdom that God wants for us, we are to honor those who we may not respect. We need to honor all of those who are in authority, even if we do not feel like it. In today's message, we learn about how David still was honorable even when he had the chance to take matters into his own hands. Through his story, we learn that honor is greater than power.