December 17, 2025

Several thank-you’s are in order:

THANK-YOU to the choir, orchestra, tech crew, and drama team for such an excellent evening of song, message and worship this past Sunday night. Thank-you to all of you who invited so many people to come. Please pray with me, “God, please arrest the hearts of those who came this past Sunday evening with the gospel and bring them to faith in Christ.”

Thank-you for your flexibility this past Sunday morning as we were adjusting to the temporary power outage.

Thank-you to the valet team who helped park many cars through this recent batch of cold air.

Thank-you for your faithful, financial support of the church. The Finance Team along with the Elders try to carefully prepare a budget every year that we vote on and then seek to support. If you have a regular paycheck, you can create a personal budget based on that. If, however, you are in sales, or have an irregular income stream, then you know that creating a budget is a bit trickier. Such is the case with the church budget. We really do not know what we are going to receive from week to week much less from year to year. But you have been faithful and generous and through you, the Lord has provided for his church. But…

When you put a budget together, you have things that you have to pay for, which you prioritize then come things that you would like to do, if you had some funds left over. The same thing is true for our church. We prioritize the most important things, but we also have some other things that we would like to do, if we could.

Here is one of the things I love about our financial process: If at the end of the year, our expenses were not as big as we anticipated or our giving was more than we anticipated and we have a surplus, then the congregation gets to vote on how that surplus is used.

For most of the year our giving has been behind our anticipated budgeted needs. In the past few weeks, our giving has caught up. Praise God! I certainly do not know if this will continue, but I want you to know that if there is a surplus, we get to discuss what would be a good use of it and then vote on it. It really is a blast to be generous. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why God is so delighted as God and so joyful to be generous with us.

Grace and peace,

Bob

Sunday’s Text: Luke 2:29-32