426: The Star of Bethlehem | Tim Henderson

Introduction

You guys, thanks for coming on a yucky day. I'm glad you're here. I woke up this morning and I heard what sounded like ice, and I thought, oh, man, nobody's coming to church. But you did, so that's good news. So Merry Christmas. It's our pleasure to be with you always at all times, but I'm really looking forward to this morning because I think this is gonna be a fun half hour or so.

So in celebration of Christmas, we are gonna look at this passage that Sloop just read. Where'd Sloop go? There he is. Thanks for reading it, dude. Matthew 2. Matthew 2 is all about the Magi, the Messiah, and his mysterious star. And so using some software, astronomy software, I want to show you what I think it was that the Magi saw that night, you know, two thousand years ago, that compelled them to go on a 700-mile-long journey. We've done this here before, but it's been — I looked it up — it's been eight years since we've done this. So some of you might be familiar with it, you might be familiar with it, but others maybe are new since then.

We're gonna be looking at Matthew 2, that passage that Dave just read. And throughout history, people have wondered, like, what the heck was that? Like, first of all, when we say they followed a star, was it literally a star? You know, was it a burning ball, a 100,000,000,000 miles away? Or was it something supernatural? Was it an angel? Was it a supernova or a comet? Like, what was it? Like, how are we to make sense of it? What did these guys see that was so compelling and meaningful to them that they thought it's worth going on a 700-mile journey by foot and by camel?

And in any case, is this astrology and is the Bible okay with astrology? What in the world is going on with Matthew chapter 2? So we're gonna try to unpack all that. Four things. We're gonna first, I want to differentiate between astrology and reading God-given signs in the heavens. They're not the same thing. So we're gonna draw a distinction between those two things.

I do want to discover what I think they saw. We're gonna use this $70 piece of software called Starry Night. I'll explain to you how that works. Then we wanna try to decipher the message. If it's a meaning, if it conveys information, how do we – what's the decoder ring? How do we make sense of it? And then finally, just the last couple of minutes, I want to dwell with you together on the implications of all of it, which I think is really where the payoff lies. I think there's some pretty, pretty amazing things we're gonna see.

Differentiating Astrology from God’s Signs

Okay? So let's start to differentiate between astrology and what we're about to do. Astrology is defined as, quote, the study that assumes and attempts to interpret the influence of the heavenly bodies on human affairs.

Some of you perhaps are or grew up at some point in your life have been interested in horoscopes and astrologies and the newspaper column and you're a Virgo or you're a Cancer or a Capricorn and all stuff. I would suggest to you that none of that's a good idea. Okay? In fact, the Bible strongly condemns that. I do not want to say anything this morning that suggests that horoscopes or astrologies are good or helpful.

Here's how Deuteronomy four comments on this:

When you look up to the sky and you see the sun and the moon and the stars and all the heavenly array, do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping. — Deuteronomy 4:19

So the only thing in the heavens that directs your life, that blesses you, that influences you, that is in fact sovereign over the affairs of men and nations is God himself. And to attribute his influence to the stars is to give credit to them that is only due to God. It is the creator, not the creation, that we want to worship. And to worship those stars, to give them credit for the things that only He does, is forbidden to us.

Stars do not love you, and it doesn't matter at all the position of the stars in the sky on the day that you were born. So they have no power. Do not look to them for comfort. Do not expect them to give you direction. It's all silly and nonsense. Do not worship them.

What we are doing here this morning is something different than that. The Magi believed that God created the stars, and not only the stars, but the constellations, which is to say He placed the stars where He placed them, and He did so meaningfully. And in that, the Magi are actually in agreement with the Bible. The Bible teaches that God created not only the stars, but the constellations, He arranged them.

Job 9:— God is the maker of the bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the constellations of the South.

Do you guys know what the bear is? Is that meaningful to you? What do we call that? Big Dipper, which is part of the broader constellation called Ursa Major, the big bear, and the little bear. That's — you can kind of see it, in fact, it might be harder to see it. So the Big Dipper is this part right here. Right? There's the dip. You can spill out, and then the bear kind of comes out of it.

Orion, you probably know. Orion is probably, like, the most recognizable thing in the winter. It's super bright, very distinct. Looks like it's got this three-belt-star thing, big old Betelgeuse up there. These are things that we know. Pleiades, my friend calls it the little tiny dipper. If you've seen Pleiades, the seven sisters, their little tiny cluster.

According to the Bible, God created those things. Right? He put them. The Bible also suggests in a number of places that God can speak through the stars, that He can convey information. They serve Him. They are His messengers. They have no influence, but He can use them as signs. So for instance, the passage Brian read, Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day, they pour forth speech. Night after night, they display knowledge.

And in Luke 21, speaking about His return, Jesus said this: there will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars. And then, of course, there's Matthew 2 itself, the passage we're gonna unpack.

You gotta think about this, you guys. Either the Magi just got super lucky, just randomly assigning meaning to what was gibberish and nonsense, and it just so happened to line up precisely with the birth of the Messiah, or the things that they were reading were actually written. Right? They weren't making it up. It was actually real.

So I do think there's a strong case that the stars can convey a message if you know how to read it. They have no influence. We should not worship them. But it is possible for God to communicate a message through them.

What Did the Magi See?

Now, if we're going to decipher what it means, we have to first discover what they saw. The Magi would have been knowledgeable about the stars, and honestly, everyone would have known more about the stars than we do because they could see them better than we can see them. We live in a world flooded with light pollution, billboards, highways, and all the light, all the electrical light, we've kind of turned the night into a big polluted scene.

But they were able to read the stars; they could see them, and they saw something. It wasn't just one night, but it would have been over a series of many nights as they watched the way the stars interacted. They saw something so stunning that they were compelled to go on a 700-mile journey.

Based on Matthew 2:2, part of what we just read, what they saw told them something about a king of Israel being born.

“Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw His star in the East and have come to worship Him.” — Matthew 2:2

So whatever we're gonna look for is, like, how could that possibly have been in the stars? What could they have seen? I want to try to recreate for you what I think it is that they saw using this software.

Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the East and have come to worship him.

Now, if we're gonna do this, I'm gonna give you just a really quick — this won't get too technical and boring. I think it'll be actually pretty interesting. But a quick primer on, like, observational astronomy. Okay?

So let's return this. This is the sun and I am the earth. Okay? And here's how things — that's about right. Here's how things work. Okay? If I'm the earth and my face is North America and this is the sun, when we're turned this way, we don't see any stars. It's just sun, and everything's daytime and you can't see it, right?

But when we come around to about right here, now it's — what do we call this? Dusk. Right? It's just the evening. The sun is setting, and it's beginning to be dark, and we can begin to see the stars over here.

And as the night goes through, the earth turns counterclockwise as viewed from above, like the north. As I turn this way, more of my field of vision begins to change. Right? And I begin to pick up more of these stars, and I see more until morning time, and now I can't see anything again. Okay?

So when I'm over here, I'm here, but I'm not actually looking here. I'm kind of leaning back because the Earth's 23 degrees off its axis. Right? Or the axis is 23 degrees off the plane of its orbit. So we can always see the North Pole. We can always see the stuff that's up here.

When I'm here, I can see all of this, and I see all of this. And then, like, three months later, we're living over here, and I can see the same stuff up here and all of this. And three months later, I'm here. So every day, what's happening is I'm standing here, and I'm gonna do one; it takes me twenty-four hours to do one full revolution, and I'm catching these stars.

Then, as I'm spinning around myself, I move basically one degree, one three hundred and sixty-fifth of the way around the circle. And now, I pick up a little bit more of that and a little less of that, and I just edge my way around. So what I can see here in the wintertime, I can see Orion's over here. And when it's over here in the summertime, I can't see Orion. It's out in the daytime and I can't see it, and this is now what I'm looking at.

Groovy? Does that make sense? Okay. People have known this for centuries. This is easy. This is super, super easy. It's also really boring because nothing changes. If we're standing here, if we're the Earth and I'm North American, we're looking up, we're what we're all — what we're gonna see, what is this? December what is today? Fifteenth. What we're gonna see tonight, on December 15, in the sky, is exactly what we're gonna see in 2025 on December 15. It's exactly the same. Nothing interesting. Never changes. It's boring. Okay?

So they're not gonna see something and be like, hey, this is going a long trip. Okay? There's gonna have to be an X factor, and there is an X factor. Because even though all of these things are identical every year, in ten years, in a hundred years, in a thousand years, it's be exactly the same, there is this band in the sky where stuff doesn't follow the rules.

Call it the ecliptic. There's this particular band where some of the stars, okay? Well, if I'm looking up here and I'm seeing, and it's not just they're in the same place, but they're in the same place relative to each other. So the Big Dipper is always the Big Dipper. In a billion years, the Big Dipper is always the Big Dipper. It just doesn't ever look any different.

But there are these couple of stars that don't follow the rules. In this band of the sky, there are things that move sometimes faster than everything else, sometimes they stop, and they revert, and they go in the wrong direction, and it's just a crazy maker. These wandering stars have another name. What do we call them? Planets.

This is why we figured out, long ago, that we're not the only thing orbiting the sun. In fact, it's one of the things that helped us figure out that we are orbiting the sun. Because when you start doing the math on this, people are like, how in the world? And why is this moving? Why is it going backward? A guy named Kepler really, really, is the one who cracked the code in 1609. He figured out the math behind this whole thing that we have a sun and that we have an elliptical orbit, and our — you know, one of the foci of that ellipse is the sun, and we're coming around it.

And then there's other things that also have elliptical orbits of different sizes. And he basically did all the math. And from Kepler on, if you're willing to do, like, a crazy amount of math, you can calculate the exact position of every planet in the sky, just down to the — down to the millisecond. You can get exactly where it is. But it'd be a pain in the butt. It'd be a lot of arithmetic to do.

You guys live in 2024, where computers do all the work for us, and so you can, for about $70, you guys, buy software that will not only tell you the position of every star, which is simple, but for about five dollars, you can get a little card that'll show you the positions of the stars in the sky. But for about $70, you can throw the planets in, and we can pick any place on the surface of the earth at any time in history or future and say, what exactly would the sky look like, including the planets, including all the other weird stuff. And it's all math. It's all perfectly derived, and we can do that. And so that's exactly what we are gonna do in just a second.

And what we're gonna look for — oh, and I didn't make this clear — so these planets, they're all because everything's on a plane, like, got the sun and, you know, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and all of that. Whatever, like, we're all on a plane. That's why we call them planets. Like, all of these things orbiting the sun are basically in the same little disk. And if you're standing here on the Earth and you're looking out the disk, that's where all the star — that's where all the planets are gonna be. And then beyond that disk just happen to be, it's constellations everywhere. But the ones that exist along the edge of the solar system that are outside that, those are the ones that you would recognize as your horoscope. Okay?

So Virgo and Cancer and Gemini, whatever, they're all on this path that the planets and the sun, for that matter, if you could see it, are all traveling through. So if anything fascinating is gonna happen in the sky, it's gonna happen there because that's the only place where anything is moving relative to the others.

Have I lost you? You with me? We got it? Is it clear as a bell? Super good? Okay. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna dial it up, and I wanna show you what they saw, what Kepler's math helps us to see.

In fact, throw the first video up, Terry. Oh, Terry, I don't — perfect. Nothing is moving right. Good. Okay. Excellent. Okay. So I want you to see this.

So, can we nuke these lights, bro? What we're looking at here is up here. This is Jupiter. Okay? And Jupiter is, well, tell me this. Do you know who Jupiter was named after? Jupiter? I mean, if you name something, then it's named after the thing that you've named it. Okay? Jupiter was named after Jupiter. Jupiter has another name though. What's the name that we know Jupiter as better? Zeus. Right? And the reason we go to Zeus is because Jupiter is the king planet.

Jupiter is massive. It's like 86,000 mile — no, 90,000 miles in diameter. Earth is 8,000 miles in diameter. This thing is huge. It's really, really, really big, and it's super bright in the sky. It is broadly understood. It's Jupiter. It's Zeus. It is the king of the planets.

And what it's about to do is, when we animate this thing, it is gonna move. Now, you can't see because the screen's too small, but up here, let me tell you what you're seeing. This says Baghdad, Iraq. We're in Babylon. That's Baghdad. And the year is March, and it's August 25. So it's the end of the summer of 3 BC. And it's one in the morning. Okay? So we're in Babylon, March, August, 01:00.

The reason we're going here is all of human history is a very long time. The sky is very, very big, but we know that Jesus — we know Jesus' birth; we can date it basically relative to Herod's death. We know he was born before Herod died. We know Herod died in January. And so we've gone back to look at the sky in this period of time before this.

And when I say we, let me be very clear. I don't mean me. Okay? Everything I'm telling you today, I stole from other people. Okay? That's virtually the case at all times. This is — there's a guy named Rick Larson, and Rick Larson has a website, I think it's called bethlehemstar.net. If this stuff is interesting to you, you can go take a look at his stuff. He did the heavy lifting. I'm just totally parroting the things that I've learned from him. All we ever do is pass on the things that somebody else taught us. So Rick Larson, give full credit to Rick.

Okay? So what we're gonna see here is Jupiter is gonna come in, and it's gonna have a conjunction with this star right here. That star is called Regulus. Now, Regulus, you might hear in the word Regulus the root of it, which is regal. Regulus is the king star. Okay? Now, if this is a funny — this is an interesting thing of history, but basically, like, every culture calls Regulus king. Right? The Greeks, they called that star Rex, which means king. The Babylonians called it Sheru, and I doubt anyone in here speaks Babylonian, but you wanna guess what Sharu means? You're so smart. Okay? So for whatever reason, this is the king star, and what's about to happen is that the king planet is gonna have a conjunction with the king star, which frankly isn't that weird. It's not that impressive because these stars, they're always traveling the same band. And it's like, if I — if this thing, this blue-green light thing, if I happen to cross that star, you're like, well, yeah. I mean, of course it did, because you're gonna just keep going back by it. But what it's gonna do is after it has a conjunction with it, it stops, and then it goes back, and it has a second conjunction with it, and then it stops, and it goes back, and it has basically an unheard-of triple conjunction. The king planet with the king star, with this triple conjunction. That's what's weird.

Coming through, things come through all the time, and they're just kind of haphazard. But when the star would stop and go back and go back, that's what I think would have been noteworthy to the Magi who paid attention to such things. So, Tara, go ahead and throw that, let that clip play. We'll let this move. So Jupiter's gonna move, and it's gonna dance with this one. And this is a day-by-day advancement. I just have it set to jump up one day at a time. So every night at one in the morning, it's just moving. Boom, boom, boom. There's the first conjunction, stops, turns around.

This is why they’re weird. They wander. It goes back as a second conjunction, goes back up, and it stops. Now, this right here, this triple conjunction is noteworthy, and it is probably the thing that would have gotten their attention in the first place.

As Rick Larsen says, the king planet is dancing a coronation crown about the king star. In all likelihood, this is what caught their attention. And it would explain why they began to think that the stars were giving a message about a king.

But there's two other pieces. Why the king of the Jews? Now this is a little bit speculative, but I think it's pretty reasonable that these Babylonian wise men would have been fluent in prophecies about the Messiah. Why is that a reasonable conjecture, do you think? Daniel. Right? Because 700 years earlier, five hundred years earlier, more like, Daniel was the chief. He was the prime minister of Babylon. He was the chief of the wise men. And the dude was on point when it comes to messianic prophecy.

I think it is very likely that he left within the culture an understanding, maybe even a reverence, for the Jewish scriptures. They would have known Genesis 49. Genesis 49 is one of the earliest and most impressive prophecies about the Messiah. It's the passage where Jacob is speaking to his sons and he says,

"You are a lion's cub, oh Judah. You return from the prey, my son. Like a lion, he crouches and lies down, like a lioness who dares to rouse him." — Genesis 49:9

This is the prediction that all of the kings, the little kings of Israel, would come from the tribe of Judah until the real king came. And when the real king came and the scepter became his, he would keep it forever. Okay? So, Genesis 49 is why Jesus is known as the lion of Judah.

So, you plug that back into here, all this stuff that's happening here of Jupiter having a conjunction with Regulus, well, it may not be obvious to you, but it might be. But this question mark head right here, and it's kind of got a triangle butt that's a little bit off-screen — this is all happening in the constellation Leo. This is Leo the lion.

So we don't just have language of king, but to these guys, I think it very likely could be that they recognize the significance that this is happening in Leo. It's happening in the lion. That the lion, the king of the lion, has come, probably is what they saw.

Then the next thing that happens is pretty interesting. As soon as this triple conjunction, the king planet, with the king star, boom, boom, boom — as soon as that's over, what happens immediately after that is coming out of the bottom of the screen, we're gonna see it down here. So now, remember, we're still in Baghdad. It's still now it's May. We started in August. What's about to happen is something is gonna race on the screen. Now Jupiter is the king. It's the king planet. It's massive. Venus is what's about to come racing up.

What does Venus represent, you guys? Love, fertility, women, motherhood. Have you ever heard, like, men are from Mars, women are from Venus? All that, all that kind of stuff. So Venus is the mother planet, and she is about to race up out of — off the screen here and have a perfect conjunction with Jupiter. So, take a look. Go ahead, Terry, and play this one if you don't mind. Very quickly, it's gonna come tearing up, and boom, boom, boom. There it is. You see Venus coming, and check this out. As soon as here on June 18, bam, right there.

Okay? Perfect conjunction. Now, do you guys happen to know what the brightest thing in the night sky is? It's the moon by a very wide margin. You guys should know that. Okay? But the second brightest thing is Venus. Okay? And the third brightest thing is Jupiter.

This conjunction of Venus and Jupiter would have been super crazy bright. Every once in a while, you guys will go outside, even in our light-polluted world, and you'll see, like, a really bright star and be like, "That's weird." It's probably Venus or Jupiter. Very likely, it's one of the two. If Venus and Jupiter were ever to touch like that, that is totally unheard of. Okay? When they come out, it will be super, super bright.

I'm told that planetariums around the world have shown this because it's such a dramatic moment. When they saw this triple conjunction of the king planet with the king star, boom, boom, boom — and then Venus coming in — the mother comes and kisses the king. That, by the way, is nine months after the conjunction began between Jupiter and Regulus. I think that's what compelled them to go on a trip.

Triple conjunction of the king planet with the king star, followed by this perfect conjunction of the mother planet with the king planet is what I think makes them go on a trip. And ask the question, where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the East and have come to worship him.

The Response of Herod and the Star's Stop

Final thing we gotta do just to kind of close the loop — go up to the next video here, Terry. If this is all correct, and Jupiter is essentially the star, then they would have had to fulfill the last part, the final description, the last part of the story. It's verse 3. Begins in verse 3.

When King Herod heard this, he was disturbed. — Matthew 2:3

That's meaningful because Herod had to be told about this. That's a clue to us. Whatever the Magi saw, it was a big enough deal that they're willing to go on a 700-mile-long trip, but it wasn't such a big deal that everyone in the world would have seen it. It wasn't some supernova that the whole world saw. Herod didn't see it. He heard about it. It had to be explained to them.

So I think that fits. Right? That the Magi were like, they understood it, but they had to explain it to others. And so, here's what happens.

When he had called together all the chief priests and the teachers of the law, he asked them where the Christ was to be born. — Matthew 2:4

In Bethlehem in Judea. They replied, for this is what the prophet has written:

"But you, Bethlehem, Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times." — Micah 5:2

And they go to Bethlehem. They're not following a star to Jerusalem and following us — they're not following the dot. It's information, and then, based on the information, they planned a trip. They went to Jerusalem on purpose because they heard that the king of the Jews was born. And where else are you gonna go except to the capital of Israel? So that's why they go to Jerusalem.

And when they get to Jerusalem, it says here this strange thing that the star was the star that had been seen in the East — that star was the star that had been seen in the East — it went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was.

K? There's a kind of cartoonish vision of this in which the bad guys are just kind of in their oblivion, just like following the dot. Just follow the dot. Okay? That's not what's happening here. They were reading the dots. It was there, there was information, and then, based on the information, they planned a trip. They went to Jerusalem because they heard the king was born.

And when they got to Bethlehem, it says here that the star was stopped over the place where the child was. Now, it's weird to talk about a stopped star because stars are always stopped, or they always appear to be stopped. I mean, stars move at half the speed of the hour hand of a clock. Right? And so, if you see a star that's moving, it's a plane. Okay? They're always stopped, or they’re sitting there, barely moving. So what does it mean to say that a star has stopped?

Well, to these guys, probably means something a little different than it means to us. And we've actually seen it happen twice already this morning. When we say that a star stops, what we're talking about is the motion night to night through the sky. It's going, it's like this. Right? Can you see this? Okay. It's going, and then it stops. And it enters what we call retrograde motion, and then it starts to move backward. Probably, that's what it's talking about because they always look like they're stopped. So, go to this third video.

Okay, here we are. Now, here's what's happened. If you know your horoscopes, and you might know that Leo is this — by the way, this is where the sun is. The sun is in Leo in the month of August, which is why if you're born in August, you're a Leo. What's September? What's the next one? Virgo. Okay? So basically, that's just because of the ways things are arranged in the sky.

So, this is Leo. No. No. No. Okay? That's fine. But maybe not yet. Hang on. Stay for a second. So right before Virgo, Jupiter has traveled from Leo, which is where we were, down to the next one, which is Virgo, the Virgin. And I'm not sure if you can play that again, Terry, but what we're gonna see is Jupiter up here. That's okay. Stay there for a second. Jupiter is gonna move down. This is basically the virgin. We'll call her Mary. Okay? Gonna move down her arm towards her armpit and then freeze. And when it gets right there, see, it's gonna stop, no longer making any forward motion, and it's gonna turn around, and it's gonna go back up her arm.

Now, if you look up here, you can't see it; that's December 25, which is super weird, totally coincidental. Jesus was not born at Christmas. This all — let's all pretend. We didn't — that part's not true. Jesus was not born on December 25, and the Magi didn't come on His birthday. They came later.

Nevertheless, it is a super weird coincidence that on December 25, is the day that Jupiter enters retrograde over, and if you are in Bethlehem, I'm sorry, if you're in Jerusalem looking towards Bethlehem in the early hours of the morning, you would see that star hanging over Bethlehem. Just crazy. Okay? On December 25. And so, what she, what this star does, it just comes in, it's left Leo to come in. That’s kind of  — that’s Leo's butt right there. Okay? It’s left Virgo, it’s left the virgin, and has come into Virgo, the Virgin, and comes down, and then it stops in the early morning before it turns around and starts working back up. Okay? All of it in the constellation that represents virginity. I think that's what they saw. I'm not sure. I wasn’t there, but it all checks out.

And I think it certainly suggests — it supports why they may have seen something that they thought was worth going on a long trip. The triple conjunction of the king planet with the king star, followed by the conjunction of the king planet with the mother planet, all within the constellation of the lion, and then moving into the virgin, coming to full stop in the southern sky over Bethlehem, the king of the Jews has been born. The promised Messiah had come.

All of which I think is fascinating. But indulge me for ninety more seconds, and just consider some of the implications of this. Okay? All of this, all of these motions of the stars, it was already predetermined. You guys, the earth spins and the planets move in a fixed pattern. This exact series of events, conjunctions, heralding the birth of a king, it was set to occur at a precise moment, and there weren't no do-overs.

God did not move these stars into place when He was ready, rather it was already set up and there was a countdown. This particular moment followed days and months and years and centuries and millennia. The size, the placement, the speed, the direction of every star, and every planet in the universe was planned, choreographed, foreordained, all leading inexorably to this moment.

And what that means is that there's a plan. It means your life, your salvation, was planned the day that God flung the stars into space, and that He flung them with great precision. It confirms the truth of Ephesians 1:4:

For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.

It means that Jesus was not using hyperbole when in Matthew 25 He said:

Then the king will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." — Matthew 25:34

It means that everything has been planned and that God is sovereign. Galatians 4 puts it like this:

In the fullness of time, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, so that we might have the full rights of sons.

You guys, the stars announce the birth of a child who was born to die, and they were set up on the day of creation. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Jesus is the Savior because He came to take the blame for everything you've ever done, to be your scapegoat, and to give you credit for His perfect life. And I hope that this Christmas, if not already, you will bend your knee to the King of kings and Lord of lords. The very stars serve Him, and they proclaim His birth so that you may know Him. His birth and His death were planned before creation and accomplished for you in the fullness of time.

And so, Merry Christmas and be of good cheer — there is a plan.

Prayer

Let's pray.

Father, You exhort us: lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? Who brings out the starry host one by one and calls them each by name? Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.

Father, we worship You. We honor You. We fall before You. You have ordained all so that we might know You. Lord, even before creation, You knew that we would fall, that we would rebel, and You knew the cost that it would take to buy us back — and yet, You did it anyway.

I pray, Lord, that those who don't know You, who are far from You, might come to hope that if You would go to such great lengths, You might be worth knowing. Would You show them how desperately they need You, how sufficiently You meet the need, that they would come to love, worship, and adore You.

And, Lord, I pray for those here who do know You. Would You draw us deeper to discover more of who You are? Would You give us the grace to make You known? For You are the best and the sweetest. You are the King of kings. You are the King on a cross. And love You. Amen.