Secularism has tried to take Jesus out of Christmas.
You know, like the Senegalese, oh, we want the commercial stuff.
Cause you know, people make money.
Oh, we want the gift giving and the decorations and the fun,
but we don't want no Jesus.
Well, the problem is, is secularism is the idea that you can take all the
good stuff that came from something.
And then like religion, in this particular place, or faith, divorced
them or separate them and then maintain the wonder of the good stuff.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Salty Pastor Podcast, a podcast
dedicated to helping you find the greater strength within yourself.
When you discover who you are, it's your discovery, your epiphany,
your journey that you must go through, but you can't do it alone.
We can only discover who we truly are.
When we meet Jesus, this is the purpose of the Salty Pastor,
a podcast designed to help you discover who you truly are in Jesus.
And we are here to help you discover what God's doing in you along the way.
My name is Jesse Maher.
I'll be your host and let's welcome the Salty Pastor himself, Dr.
Douglas
Peake.
Well, welcome everybody to the podcast today.
And it's a very exciting time of the year.
It's one of my favorite times of the year.
I love December, because of everything that it's about family and friends,
and most importantly, what our Lord and savior Christ did, coming into
this world in order to save us.
And our goal here at the Salty Pastor, to help you know him better
to know what you believe about him, why you believe it, because I
really agree with your statement.
And that is, is that we cannot find strength.
We cannot find our courage.
We cannot find meaning we cannot find peace, all the
things that our soul longs for.
Cannot be found until we meet Jesus.
So I'm pretty excited about that.
And I'm pretty excited about this time of the year when we
get to talk about Jesus a whole
lot.
Well, I know our new series is titled Jesus Is Christmas.
Um, which is great because I mean, I think Christmas is.
One of the most widely celebrated holidays in the world.
People who don't believe in, in God loves the Christmas spirit, but it's
kind of been like you surfed, right?
Like Christmas doesn't have anything to do with Jesus for a lot of people.
It's just this holiday that has a lot of toy buying involved in scratch
this year supply chain issues.
So, um, it is, uh, celebrated all across the globe.
And in, in one case what's really interesting is Senegal,
which is a Muslim country.
They can't get enough for Christmas.
They love celebrating, uh, Christmas.
Now they want to keep it secular and commercial.
But, uh, it's really kind of interesting in that regard.
So yes, it's very true about people love Christmas.
And I think the thing about the thing we need to talk about more than anything
else about the Christmas spirit is to show how Jesus is the source of everything
that people love about Christmas.
So if you take away Jesus, everything you love about the holiday is gone.
And in fact, the holiday itself would cease to exist.
So even though the Senegalese, I believe I pronounced that properly.
The Senegalese is a Muslim country that wants to celebrate Christmas
and make it secular and commercial.
In the end, if you take away Christ, there will be no Christmas.
And so I think that's really important to understand is that
you cannot separate the two.
Absolutely our society, I think not just the Senegalese, but you know, society as
a whole Western civilization
really taken the Christmas holiday for granted.
I mean, it's, it's taken all the feel-good things, food decorations,
the music, being generous, and it's kind of separated them from their
origination, right.
Like where they came from.
We can't forget that we do all this stuff.
Like, um, you know, we have so many traditions and things and all this
stuff, that's all wrapped up in Christmas, but a lot of people don't
even know why we do most of them.
Right.
They're like, they're, there are surface level interaction.
Yeah.
Why do you put lights on your house?
Why do you get Christmas trees?
Why do we give gifts?
Right?
Do we celebrate Saint Nicholas?
Why do we, uh, eat?
Why do we, uh, take the time to get our family together?
Why, what was all this music originate from and why it is it always talk
about all of these feel good things.
And I mean, all their traditions.
All of the ceremonies, all of the decorations, all of the habits
and traditions that we have, where do all these things come from?
That's the question we need to answer.
Absolutely, having an idea of what it all means and everything
that we enjoy has an origin.
So let's take some time and talk about we're here for.
Well, we're going to begin our series by going to the announcements
about the birth of Jesus.
And I think in the announcements themselves before Jesus was even born.
Uh, we need to understand a few things that the Bible teach
because the season is Jesus.
It's about him.
It's about who he is, why he came, and what he accomplished when he did come.
So let's talk about how his birth actually came about how he entered into this world.
So I'll read from Luke chapter one, beginning with verse 26,
and it says in the six month of Elisabeth's pregnancy now, Elizabeth.
Was Mary's older cousin.
So she using probably your mid thirties at this time.
People believe Mary was maybe 15, 16 years of age, you know, maybe 17,
but more likely about 16 years old.
So she wasn't very old.
And she had an older cousin named Elizabeth.
Who'd been married for quite some time.
And Elizabeth became pregnant.
Okay.
And she became pregnant with John the Baptist.
So there is a relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist.
And John the Baptist was about six, seven months older than Jesus.
And so Jesus then, uh, or John, the Baptist then grows up in
the wilderness then comes and announces the coming Messiah.
And he practiced what was known as the baptism of repentance.
And so he asked the Jews to return back to God.
So.
What happened is in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy.
John sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth.
So God sent the angel to a town in Galilee to a Virgin pledged to
be married to a man named Joseph.
He was a descendant of David.
So he is of the seed of David, which is really important for all you Old
Testament, covenant buffs, because there's a prophecy in the Old Testament that the
Messiah would come from David's seed.
So the Virgin's name was Mary and the angel went to her and said,
greetings you who are highly favored.
The Lord is with you.
And Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wonder what
kind of greeting this might be.
But the angel said to her, do not be afraid, Mary.
You have found favor with God, you will conceive and give birth to a
son and you were to call him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called the son of the most high.
So the Lord, God will give him the throne of his father, David.
And he will reign over Jacob's descendants forever.
His kingdom will never end.
And how can this be?
Mary asked the angel since I am a Virgin.
And the Angel answered the Holy Spirit will come upon you.
And the power of the most high will overshadow you.
So the holy one to be born will be called the son of God.
Even Elizabeth, your relative is going to have a child in her old age.
And she, who was said to be unable to conceive is under six months.
For no word from God will ever fail.
So here's really interesting is the Angel says.
She says I'm a Virgin.
And so in her worldview of where she's at.
Being pregnant outside of wedlock is not an option.
There's zero social network.
There's zero family support.
There's zero.
There's zero anything.
So, if you were born, uh, if you were found to be pregnant outside of wedlock,
and then you're displaced, right.
And no one will marry you and you can't go to your father's house,
and there's no reference to her father's house as a possibility.
Then you basically are condemned to a life of extreme poverty begging in
the streets that your life expectancy is cut in half and so forth.
So it's really interesting because she says, how can this.
I am a Virgin.
And so there's a lot of implications to this question.
Is she asking whether or not a , it's going to happen through
Joseph after she gets married.
Is that what she's asking?
She doesn't know.
And so the answer, and this is why verse 35, um, is so important because
the angel basically says, well, as a Virgin, you're going to get pregnant.
And in her mind, it's like, okay, this is going to completely displace me.
I mean, who's going to believe that, right?
Nobody's going to believe that it had never happened ever.
And it hasn't happened since.
So who's going to believe that.
And so she sees immediately the implications, I think, and her response
in verse 38 is I am the Lord's servant.
My Mary answered may your word to me be fulfilled.
And then the angel left her.
So I find this really interesting because you've, you've kind of laid out.
She's kind of in a dire circumstances, she chooses to
believe that this is going to happen.
Correct.
Um, in her culture, she's basically like, well, if this happens and I am
to become pregnant, then I'm done.
I'm done.
But she takes kind of a view that I think most people would really struggle
with, which is I am your servant.
Right?
Like that's an attitude we don't, I mean, I don't even know that I would have.
Do with me as you will.
Yeah.
And so talk to me, talk to me about that attitude.
Do we, does she, is she known to be like a very, I guess like, Does she
just have an internal peace about it?
What are, where are we thinking she is at?
Where she just trusts this fact?
Obviously it would have been overwhelmingly obvious to her
that this is going to place her in a very vulnerable position.
It's going to, it could, you know, it will ruin her life.
And yet her there's no question about that.
And, uh, she'd be humiliated.
She would be, uh, You know, excised or, you know, ex-communicated from her
community and your family and she's in she's betrothed to be married, which
basically means she she's married.
Right.
Uh, so she's ready to, she's been given away and the dowery has been
paid and all of this kind of stuff.
And yet, uh, she simply said, I am the Lord's servant.
And this is what I think makes her so special.
Is that, uh, not that she was so young and not that she was a female.
But that she had an attitude
very few people have.
Even people who believe strongly in Jesus.
Uh, she actually possessed the attitude of complete submission to the will of God.
Uh, it kinda, it kind of reminds me of, uh, father Damien.
He was a Catholic priest.
He was a Belgian priest and he went, he felt called and there was a
government forced, a colony of lepers.
They were quarantined.
Call on the island of Molokai in Hawaii.
And this is when it was the kingdom of Hawaii.
It wasn't quite a, it wasn't a state yet.
Okay.
And so, he went there to minister, to the people of Molokai this colony.
And so he went there and he built hospitals and roads and houses, you
know, they were living in squalor and they'd given up on life and he
shows up and he starts educating them.
And so forth.
And what's really interesting is that leprosy is a bacterial infection
that just gets inside of you.
And it just stays for a very, very long time.
And it's incurable.
It is technology.
Yeah.
They have a, it's a cocktail of antibiotics that they give you.
You have to be on them for awhile, but they can cure it in a sense now.
But what it does is it attacks the, you know, this, uh, bacteria attacks,
your nerve endings and so forth.
And what happens is you stop, it can create skin lesion.
But it also kills the nerves and so endings.
And so the biggest problem in leprosy is if you get cut, you know, on your
extremity and you don't know it.
Okay.
And so you can get infected and you think prior to modern medicine, which is only
been around for about a hundred years.
And so, antibiotics before that, you know, if you get infected or you get sepsis or
gangrene, you get all this kind of stuff.
It's not a good thing.
Right.
But he went and what he did is his father, Damon went to this, he felt called, he
went there, he built an entire community.
And what's interesting about, uh, the bacteria and bacterial infection,
is that it's not passed through sexual contact and it's not passed
onto the children through birth.
Okay.
It's usually passed on by being directly exposed to the mucus
of somebody who's infected.
So if they sneeze on you or their snot or whatever, their mucus from their
sinuses is generally how you get it.
So he was there for a very, very long time.
He lived among them for probably, I don't know, seven, eight years, nine years.
And then he got it and then eventually it killed him, you know?
And so.
It's really interesting because here's a guy who just said, Hey, I'm going
to go and I'm going to minister these people and you know, um, I'm going
to die from it and I'm going anyway.
And I think what's really interesting is that we don't see this level of
conviction about anything in our world today, anymore, you know?
Um, and so, that shocks people.
And I think that this is, this is something that's so inspiring about Mary.
Is that here's a young lady who's showing me that I can rise to the occasion.
I can step up and do things that I never imagined that I would be able to do.
You know, sometimes things are put in our path and we get news it's really bad.
Or there's things that.
Our minds run forward.
It's like, you know, well, if the Lord's prompting me to do this and I
do this, the ramifications of it could just be wow, really detrimental to me.
And so we try to talk our way out of it, you know, whatever it might be.
And so not Mary, she just said, you know, do unto me for, I am your servant.
And so I think that is really.
You know, Mary is so inspirational because she gets this news and
she doesn't even question it.
And then she just says, let it happen.
You know, she has no idea.
This what's really interesting about the text.
She has no idea what her parents are going to say, or, and most
importantly, she has no idea what's going on in Joseph's life at all.
Well, let's talk about Joseph, cause again, like she's made peace with this,
but it's like trying to explain that to your husband and be that it's like,
well, I didn't really know really.
It was an angel who told me this was going to happen and I'm really a Virgin.
I promise in that point in time, obviously there's a lot of.
I mean, he, I mean, there's, there's a lot probably going through his head.
There is a lot probably going through his head.
What does the text tell us about Joseph?
Matthew chapter one.
Yeah.
Matthew chapter one.
It talks about what happened to Joseph.
And what's really interesting is in Matthew's account and in Luke's
account, it doesn't say in Luke's account when he talks about.
That Joseph had any idea what the angel had told Mary.
Right.
So Luke doesn't make any reference to that at all.
Then we jump over to Matthew in Matthew doesn't have any accounting of Joseph's
knowledge of what the angel told Mary.
So it's interesting.
It doesn't talk about that.
So the angels came separately to each one of them.
And then in what it says in Matthew chapter one, verse 18, it says,
this is how the birth of Jesus.
The Messiah came about.
His mother, Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before
they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy
Spirit.
Because Joseph, her husband was faithful to the law and yet he did not want to
expose her to the public disgrace he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
So he doesn't have it.
He's going to divorce her, but he's going to do it in a nice way.
Right.
Going it's like, yeah.
Okay.
But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream
and said, Joseph son of David do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife,
because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit, she will give birth to
a son, and you were to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people
from their sins.
And this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said to the prophet.
The Virgin will conceive and give birth to a son and they will call him
Emmanuel, which means God with us.
So when Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded
him and took Mary home as his wife.
But he did not consummate their marriage until she gave birth to
a son and he gave him the name.
Jesus.
So we.
We see this weird kind of terminology that Matthew uses any, any says the
angel, he took it as a command, right?
Like what angel said to him.
Don't be afraid.
But he took it as a command.
Right.
You know, which is really interesting because I think there's
some basic applications to that.
You know, first and foremost, what it tells us about Joseph is that his faith
and his belief was extremely strong.
Right.
It's very powerful.
Um, I remember a debate between a really respected theologian and an
atheist, who wasn't prepared, for the debate, um, which most atheists don't.
Uh, because they are just so smart that they do, they think they're super smart.
Uh, they have a false hood of, uh, intelligence, and then what they do is
they talk in an echo chamber, right.
They talk about the only two people who agree with them and, and, uh,
and they talk to sick offense.
People who just think anything they say is good, no matter what.
So the arguments get really, really lame.
So I remember a debate between a respected theologian and an unprepared
atheist, and the atheist was trying to argue that signs, wonders,
all of these things, are simply natural occurring phenomenon
that people misinterpret.
So the theologian asked him, okay, what signs or phenomena would have to
occur in order for you to believe, or to be convinced that there was a God.
And so the atheist not thinking about the implications of what he was about
to say, I said, well, if there was, you know, lightening in the sky and
I had visions, uh, things I'd never see before then I would believe.
And so then the theologian responded well, based on your own criteria, you
would just excuse those as natural phenomenon that are being misinterpreted.
See in, in the, the, the atheist obviously lost that, uh, debate in,
in an incredible way, because the theologian pointed out an extremely clear
way that it's your choice of belief.
Your frame of reference IE: or faith, is what determines how
you interpret those events.
There's no abstract scientific way.
It causes you to interpret these events as purely meaningless natural
phenomena that people misinterpret.
And so he's saying what you're doing is you're is exactly what you're accusing
other people doing is as a falsehood.
So the theologian points this out.
And so.
Uh, it was his way of saying that scientists are actually participating
in a faith based system of inquiry.
You really are.
And this is what is so pernicious in the world today.
And this is why I did the series on faith and science.
Is that without faith, there was no would be no science.
You see, and science in and of itself.
Is a personification of a faith based inquiry, right?
You start with a hypothesis and to come up with a hypothesis, requires
creativity, challenging the things.
And that requires faith, right?
Faith on what?
Before has been established, faith that it could logically be rationalized,
or reasoned out to this conclusion.
So let's try that and see what happens.
So, uh, Joseph's faith was super strong.
His frame of reference was clear.
Therefore, when the angel said, don't be afraid to take Mary as your
wife, he just took it as a command.
So what that tells me is that his faith was really, really strong.
I mean, there's no question is mine.
Uh, this is an angel telling me this.
Okay.
It's command.
No worries.
I'm going to do on it.
I'm on it.
The second thing it did is it speaks to the strength of his will.
He not only knew what he was going to do, but he went out,
followed through and did it.
Even though the point, uh, even to the point where he didn't consummate his
marriage until after Jesus was born.
So he goes, he marries her.
And he can't even, he can't, he doesn't even consummate the marriage right.
Until after Jesus was born.
To me, that just really speaks of a strength of will, that he had.
Um, I see Joseph because of this as a very strong man.
You know, and I think early on, this was probably very indelible upon Jesus.
Because you look at Jesus and you look at his life.
He was a very strong person.
Right, right.
He's super strong, super courageous, super focused.
And so I think, uh, you know, early on this strength of will, the strength
of character was something that Joseph was able to model for him.
Third.
I think that, uh, Matthew doesn't say anything about, the angel
giving him the details of the plan.
Right.
All he says is don't be afraid to marry her.
He doesn't even say, the angel doesn't say, wait until she gives
birth to consummate the marriage.
He comes up with that on his own.
Well, I don't know about you, but when God tells me to do something particularly
something that's like way out of the norm.
I want all the details.
Right.
What is the plan here?
What's the plan?
Where does this end?
Uh, how does it work out?
Uh, God, how are you going to deal with this implication and five years from now?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
How am I going to deal with that?
How am I going to do with that?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I went to all the details, but Joseph didn't ask didn't
get any and he did it anyway.
And so I think that that's what we're under the powerful things
that so inspirational about Joseph is that he heard this, he
took it as a command and then he followed through, without question.
Not even knowing.
And as we know from the New Testament is that he and Mary went
on to have a number of other sons.
And what's really fascinating.
And I, I wish it wasn't this way, but I know why it's this way is I wish they
would have talked about Joseph more.
It's like, well, what happened to Joseph?
Why, why is it why isn't Joseph around when Jesus was doing his ministry?
You know, he was, he had passed away.
We don't know how, we don't know when, we don't know what for.
All we really know is this, is that he took Jesus to Egypt
to flee the Herodians massacre and then he comes back to Nazareth.
Right.
And then the last thing we hear about Joseph is when Jesus is 12 years old
and they go to Jerusalem to the temple.
Right.
And then they leave and they can't find him.
And he's like, well, where are you?
I'm in my father's house.
So, um, that's really the last time we ever see or hear any reference
to Joseph, we just don't know.
And I wish, I wish there was more in it.
Cause I'm, you know, Um, I'm annoyingly curious about those things.
But I think what's so interesting about Joseph though is just this
little interaction with Gabriel tells us so much about him.
His, his frame of reference, you know, was not, uh, was not one that
was confused or lost or wishy-washy he knew exactly what he believed.
He knew why he believed it and he was faithful to it.
Well, I think we see so much of that in, like you said, this modeling
of like, I don't ask questions.
I just do what God tells me to do.
We see so much of that from his parents that in Mary and Joseph, that it's no
wonder that Jesus and I mean, obviously he's part got too, so it's like,
there's a mixture of nature, nurture, literal Godly nature, versus nurture of
parents.
Mary and Joseph.
Right, and he probably picked the correct parents, right?
And he
did it for a reason.
He selected the correct parents.
So, yeah, and I think that what all this tells us is that from the very beginning,
this is what Christmas was all about.
And if before Jesus was even born, God selected Mary and Joseph
and Mary, uh, a woman of great faith and great, uh, obedience.
And obedience, not from the standpoint of, well, I'm just going to do
whatever I'm told, just from a sense of
such peace and such a devotion that there wasn't any question.
I mean, she just walked in the fullness of being God's servant, you
know, she, I just want to be God's servant, you know, I just want that.
And so, and then you have Joseph, right?
A man of character, a man of strength, a man of conviction.
And even though he didn't have
all the details.
He takes what the Lord said to him through the angel is a command and
then he just goes out and does it.
Well.
And they, they fight with that initial fear, both of them obviously, but then
they come to accept it and find joy in it.
Right?
Yeah.
Absolute joy.
And I, and I think that's what the, you know, the, this is just the prelude
to what, why Jesus is Christmas.
And what I mean by that is you take every feeling, every emotion, every experience.
Regardless of whether a person believes in God or not.
About the season of Christmas, and then realize that all of that
happens, all of that occurs because something happened 2000 years ago.
And that's something is that God emptied himself and took
the form of a bond servant.
He was, he humbled himself, by being born as a vulnerable baby to
a young girl by the name of Mary.
To a stepfather by the name of Joseph.
And that's where Christmas begins.
Without Jesus without this, there is no Christmas.
And I think that's really important because secularism has tried
to take Jesus out of Christmas.
You know, like the Senegalese, oh, we want the commercial stuff
because you know, people make money.
Oh, we want the gift giving and the decorations and the fun,
but we don't want no Jesus.
Well, the problem is, is secularism is the idea that you can take all the
good stuff that came from something.
And then like religion in this particular place or faith, divorced them or separate
them, and then maintain the wonder of
the good stuff, right?
So they make this judgment.
Well, we don't want the Jesus.
We don't want the religion or the faith, but we want all of the celebration.
We want all of the money and the consumerism, we went, all of the lights.
We want all of that kind of stuff.
And what people don't realize, is that this is an absolute, complete failure.
Because I know p, I know lots of people,
and that is, is, uh, myself included in that is that my father
died on Christmas day in 1987 is when he died of a heart attack.
So I know a lot of people who've lost people on Christmas day.
Right.
And so what do you think the lights mean to them?
What do you think?
The food and the traditions and all of those things mean to them?
Well, if there's no Jesus, right.
There's no healing.
There's no wholeness.
There's no redemption.
There's no generosity.
It's just empty symbols that mean nothing.
Right.
When you take Jesus away from it.
See, so Christmas has maintained for me one of the most joyous
times and I've grown up.
Uh, one of the greatest, uh, disappointments is that
my children never met their biological grandfather on my side.
They know their grandfather on the other side has done a great job with them,
but I, uh, they never met my dad, right?
And part of that is, is that maybe they would understand why
their dad is so weird, you know.
As my mom says, I get it honestly.
Um, but, uh, but really the essence is, is that you cannot,
secularism is a failed idea.
It's absolutely devoid of any rationality.
Uh, you can't divorce the core principles or, uh, the upstream event.
And then divorce it from the downstream effects.
You know, it's really interesting.
There's an atheist out there pendula of the magical duo, a Penn and Teller,
and he was written a number of books, three or four books about atheism.
He's really vocal about it so forth.
And he likes to make the argument that since he is a moral atheists,
all atheist can be, moral.
But this is completely and utterly false.
If there is no God, then there are no objective morals or duties.
And it's a perfect example of someone who appears intelligent,
who makes irrational arguments.
Eh, that's a nice way of saying it's like someone who claims to be
wise, but they're really stupid.
Because they argue in circles and they invalidate their own, argument.
Because the, you know, the way you defeat his argument is saying is that will, on
what basis do you build your morality?
Why build it on myself?
So then the atheist next to you builds his own morality and his own morality says,
I want to kill you and take your stuff.
And it's perfectly fine.
Just because you have that morality as an atheist doesn't mean anybody
else moralities in- validated.
So no matter what, it's just a failed system.
So secularism at its core is a failed ideology.
And we see that we'll talk more about it on Thursday is we're
seeing the applications of it across the board in American today.
You see, because you can't divorce Jesus from Christmas.
And maintain all of the good stuff that Christmas does.
You can't do that.
There's just, no way.
Absolutely.
Well, um, as we wrap up today, I do want to encourage you guys.
If you are wanting to spend this Christmas season focused on Jesus
and why, chris, Jesus Is Christmas.
Um, our Foothill staff has created a really cool advent devotional
series for you, where you're leading reading one chapter of Luke day.
And then you get a video sent to your phone with a two-minute devotional
from one of our staff each day.
Um, you don't have to give your email address.
You don't have to have logins, nothing like that.
It just gets sent to your phone and you get to just spend some time
really focusing on the life of Jesus.
Growing closer to him as we get closer to the celebration of his birth.
So if you're interested in that, we really encourage you to, um, join
in on that, um, advent devotional.
And you can do that by texting FH Advent.
So FH space, advent to 72,000, and you'll get signed up.
They'll send you a little text message.
You just click on the link and you get signed up and it's going to be
really great and it's going to be super fun and it will be great for
our audiences on the salty pastor and the community at Foothills.
Be bonding together over the life of Jesus as we get closer to Christmas.
So we thank you guys so much for joining us today.
I encourage you guys to be doing some sort of advent study, because
I think it's really important for you to stay focused on Jesus.
When the world's trying to tell you that, um, your favorite thing is
not going to be available and all they want to focus on is the gifts.
And we're focused on the thing that actually matters.
So we encourage you guys to do some sort of advent study, whether
it's ours or somebody else's.
And enjoy the season for what it really is.
Thank you so much for joining us.
And we'll see you on Thursday here on the Salty Pastor Podcast.
Goodbye and blessings.