Pastoral Greeting:
Dear Ones,
I pray that you are enjoying this long Thanksgiving holiday weekend with your family and friends.
It offers us the perfect time to praise Him because He loves us with such a wonderful love and always keeps His Word to us. This holiday weekend also offers us the perfect time to reflect upon His goodness and grace that He pours out upon us each day and to thank Him for this.
I have been thinking this week. It is a sad commentary that, as a society, our focus during Thanksgiving week has been upon things like a dead turkey and early Christmas shopping rather than the living God, the Creator and Sustainer of heaven and earth and all that He does for all of mankind. O, how this must grieve Him when He looks down upon our country He has blessed so much. As He looks upon us, I pray He will see people whose focus is upon Him first…before anyone or anything else. I pray we will His children will purpose to please Him in all ways rather than grieve Him in any way.
Tomorrow we enter the month-long Christmas season. And as we do, I want to mention two things here.
One. For the month of December we will suspend our current study of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to focus our attention on His advent…the wonderful picture of the love of God, the wisdom of God and the grace of God as Jesus took upon Himself human flesh to come and save us from our sins and be able to enjoy all the present and future blessings of our great salvation He provided for us.
But second, I also want to mention to you this morning that our Choir’s Christmas Musical and Dessert Buffet will take place this year on Sunday Evening, December 14th here in our sanctuary. I want to ask you to be in prayer for all those involved in preparing to present this evening of ministry to us…including some special guests we will have with us!
Furthermore, let me encourage you, before you get too far into the busyness of the season that you pray about who the LORD would like you to invite to come. And let me encourage you to ‘extend your invitation’ soon, even this week before their calendars get so full they wouldn’t be able to come. The musical and dessert buffet is just two weeks away!
And now, today, let’s take these last few moments before our meeting for worship begins to prepare our minds and hearts to glorify the LORD.
Your servant for Christ,
Pastor John | 
