I am just so happy to be here with you all today. There is nowhere else I'd rather be on Christmas Eve than with the family of God, coming together to worship Him and to honor Him and to give the King all the honor that He is due. For there was a time He didn't receive that honor. There was a time He didn't get recognized and that He didn't get the welcome that He deserved. But I thank God to be here with you tonight on this Christmas Eve, that we can welcome the King as the King deserves to be welcomed.

I've been driving around a lot in the last week, and I've been looking at all the lights and all the scenes. There's some really, really good ones in Barnegat. But I've just been seeing more and more of these beautiful lit-up manger scenes all over town. They're gorgeous. We have one in front of the church. You kind of look at it, and it's just so nice to see. It's so encouraging, and it's so uplifting to see it. I've been listening to the radio and hearing all the Christmas songs that I absolutely love come on the radio, and they talk all about the birth of Jesus Christ: the birth, the birth. And I see the manger scene, it's the birth.

And as I was driving around this week, it brought me back to the birth of my own son, and going through that whole experience and what that entails from the time that you find out that you're going to have a child and then raising them all the way until nine years old now. You know, I look at everything that it takes and everything that's taken up until this point, and I got to tell you, when you're younger, it's kind of romanticized. There's this picture of what you have when you're going to have your son come forth, or your child come forth. And when you actually go through it, if you ask any parent here, it's very different than probably what you envisioned.

As a young man, you talk about the birth of your child and it's almost a fairy tale experience. But when you go through it, you realize how much hard work, toiling, perseverance, worry, and prayer go into having a child. There's really so much more to it. But when that child comes forth, it's all truly worth it. You realize it was all worth it when you received that child, but that's not to say that it is an easy road. It takes a large amount of toiling. It takes a large amount of determination. It takes a large amount of perseverance to bring forth what God had intended.

And I look at what Mary and Joseph went through. When you really look at the Scripture. It’s not just like - my son loves it - that Star movie with the cartoons and you kind of watch it. My niece loves it, right? But when you actually get into the Scriptures and read about what Mary and Joseph went through, they did not have an easy road. It's very easy to look at the manger scenes, and it's lit up and it's beautiful. It's easy to romanticize it, or even I would say dehumanize it, when you look at what it is, how beautiful it is today. But when you read the Scriptures, you see it did not come easy. Mary and Joseph had to persevere through all sorts of trials, all sorts of hardships. Their experience was not an easy road, but it took determination to bring forth what God intended.

Let's talk about some of the things that they went through. Mary and Joseph, they found out—Mary found out she was pregnant out of wedlock. She's looked down upon, probably talked about in the town. This isn't the United States in 2025. This is a very strict religious culture that looks down upon these things. So here she is in that isolation. Joseph is brokenhearted before the angel came. He's brokenhearted, looking and not knowing what he's going to do. He loves this girl Mary so much, but he has to call off the wedding. And he's going to do it privately and not publicly because he doesn't want to shame her. So you can imagine the emotional confusion that he was going through before the angel appeared. The angel appears and they kind of know what’s going on. But they're both poor, and yet they're dealing with the emotional isolation of a virgin conception.

You can imagine how that experience was so unique that they must have been so confused and so unsure of what was going to come next. And then, all of a sudden, they get a letter in the mail that says they have to present themselves, to go to the census, and they have to travel. And imagine the worry upon Joseph and the worry upon Mary—people who have no access to medical care—and they now have to walk all the way to another town. Ninety miles they had to walk. Ninety miles! I don't want to get up and go to the mailbox sometimes, right? Ninety miles they had to go and walk, worried about what was to come.

They get there, and just as they arrive, they realize that the baby is coming. And Joseph's running around like a frantic father would, and he's trying to find a place. “What am I going to do? How is this going to happen?” We can jump in the car and go to the hospital—they couldn't do that. So he's looking for a place to deliver this baby, but everywhere he looks, they shut the door in his face. Imagine what he was going through in that moment, that the woman he loves and the child that's going to come forth have nowhere to deliver except a cave where animals dwell. He goes and takes the feeding trough and kind of wipes it out and puts some hay in it, just to try to have somewhere clean to put this newborn baby.

The story didn't stop there. Shortly after, Joseph was warned in a dream that Herod was going to try to kill his son, so he had to flee into Egypt. So here they go again. They just had this baby. Now they have to travel an additional anywhere between 100 to 400 miles into Egypt to try to flee, worried about their lives and the life of their newborn son. And it wasn't until years later that they could return to Nazareth. But again, it wasn't a joyful return. They were having to avoid all of Herod's relatives, knowing that they could be killed at any moment, as God was warning them what to do.

All this work, all this determination, all this perseverance, to bring forth what God intended. It didn't fall into their laps. It was not something they could just sit back and let happen and be passive about and just see what comes next. They toiled and they suffered to bring forth what God had planned. Why? Because they believed. Because they believed. It's really that simple. Because they believed God's Word, they were willing to go through it. Because they believed that God's Word was true, they were willing to push and go and not give up and persevere through all hardship, all because they believed God's Word to be true. They believed so strongly that they could not give up. They could not stop until what God said was going to happen, happened.

The question for us today is, do we have that type of faith? Do we have the type of faith that causes us to persevere in the same way that Mary and Joseph did? If you have your Bibles, I'm going to be reading from Matthew 2.

And before we get into it, I'm going to talk, firstly, about how growing anything, doesn't matter what it is, requires toiling. It requires perseverance. It requires determination. Anything in this world that is worth having requires those things. Easy things that come with no perseverance, with no determination, with no work—easy things are not worth having. The things that are worth having, you have to work for.

Let's think about it. Easy things like the internet, flicking on the TV, or playing a video game—are those things really worth having? They're nice, you know, they burn time sometimes, but are they worth having? Are they worth it? No, probably not. Things that are worth having they take work—marriages, raising your children, achieving your goals, displaying the powers of Christ in your life—these are the things that you have to work for. You have to push for. You have to be determined to achieve. You can't sit back and just let it happen to you.

We need to understand that all the easy things in this world are designed to be easy for a reason. It's all a plan in this world, right? And what does it do to us? It makes us sit back. It isolates us. It takes away our focus from our families, and from prayer, and from Christ. It makes us move away. And for our children, it's a direct pipeline into their brain to tell them by social media what they should believe, how they should think, what they should value, how they should see the world, how they should think about things. It's a direct pipeline into their brains. Why? It's easy. It's easy to be delivered, but is that worth having?

But the things that are worth having—marriages, families, life, the Bible, godliness, hope, peace, joy—you see, those are the things that need to be pursued. To understand why this toiling exists, we have to go back to the beginning. Adam and Eve didn't have to toil in the beginning. They had things all in the garden with them. Whatever they wanted was there. But what happened? Sin came in and it broke that. It broke that peace. And what did God say to Adam and Eve? He said, “You're going to have to work for it.”

To Adam, He said, “You're going to have to work the ground to get the fruit to come out. There's going to be some toiling that takes place on that ground.” He said to the woman, “You're going to have to toil, right? There's going to be some pushing. There's going to be some determination for the same reason, to have the fruit come forth.” To get the fruit, you have to be willing to work for it.

"But now everything worth having requires you to go and to push and to believe God's Word and to say, “God, Your Word is true, and I believe it."

Before that, it was like heaven. Everything was there growing on the trees, ready for them. But now everything worth having requires you to go and to push and to believe God's Word and to say, “God, Your Word is true, and I believe it.” And that belief is going to make me get up and move toward it. That belief can't just be here. And this is the lie of Christianity that we have today that says, “Oh, you only have to believe in your head. You only have to believe here.”

But let me tell you, as long as you believe something here, it'll never make your feet move. It'll never make your hands move. It'll never get you up off the couch. The belief has to go from here to here. When it hits the heart, when you believe with your heart, as Mary and Joseph did with all of their heart, when the angel appeared to them and said, “You will have a son, and He will be named Emmanuel, and God's favor is upon you,” they believed it so much that in the midst of getting persecuted, in the midst of their lives being threatened, in the midst of walking all of those miles, in the midst of having to give birth to a child in a cave, in the midst of all of that, they said, “God, You said I was highly favored, and I believe it. You said it, God, so it must be true.”

To believe it in your heart makes you move. It makes you push. It makes you go further, try harder, not give up, and persevere. Otherwise, do we really believe what God said? Do we really believe what God said?

And the older and older that I get, the more and more I realize that the things that come easy are easy for a reason. They are poison, for the most part, to the soul. But everything that God is calling for us must be pushed through, must be persevered through, must be obtained by getting up and going for it and moving. And I tell you, the Holy Spirit will come and empower you, but the Holy Spirit is not going to drop it in your lap. He is calling us to move, be empowered, and to go forward and achieve what God said to be true.

"Everything that is good, wholesome, beneficial, and worth protecting must be fought for."

If you've ever heard the term, “It's more energy to create than destroy,” well, that law remains the same today. Things that are effortless are that way for a reason because they are meant to degrade, dull, and dim our sensibilities. Everything that is good, wholesome, beneficial, and worth protecting must be fought for.

So let's open up our Bibles in Matthew 2. Took me a while to get here, but I knew I'd make it. Verse 13, “When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Take the child and His mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill Him.’ So he got up and took the child and His mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through His prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called My Son.’ When Herod realized that he had been outwitted, he was furious and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time that he had learned from the Magi.”

When you look at this and you read about it, it's primarily through Joseph's perspective. And I feel like most fathers, Joseph doesn't get enough credit, right? He doesn't get enough credit for the role. You never hear Joseph talked about, right? Mary gets all sorts of shrines and everything. Joseph, he doesn't get nothing, right? So I'm going to help him out today.

Joseph played a humongous part in bringing about what God said. I love what it says in the Scripture: “Take the child and His mother.” He doesn't say, “Take your child,” right? He says, “Take the child and His mother,” almost acknowledging that this baby was not from Joseph. Yet Joseph steps up and begins to take responsibility over Mary and over Jesus. Why? Is he just a good guy? Is he just willing to take it on? No, because he believed God. Because he believed when that angel appeared to him and said what was going to happen was going to happen.

He believed, and he was willing to throw his whole life to the side and pick up this responsibility because he believed. This belief caused him to upheave his entire life, the future that he had pictured for himself, and put his life in danger to protect what God had spoken to him about in a dream. That belief caused him to endure through extreme pressure, to persevere through persecution, all because he believed that God's Word was true.

And God takes notice of this mantle of responsibility over Mary and over Jesus. God recognizes and kind of acknowledges that he has that heart, and He begins to speak to Joseph, not even to Mary! He begins to speak to Joseph about where to bring the family, about where to go, about how to avoid the trouble, about where he should go to find safety. And this image of a man taking up responsibility over something he did not create, but yet receiving it as his own and protecting it with his whole heart—you see, this is the exact image that I think about when a man comes into the church.

"But I'll tell you, when a man receives the Word of God inside of his heart, he walks into the church and he begins to protect the Spirit that exists inside of the bride of Christ. "

He may not have built it. He might not have been there when they signed the papers to found it. But I'll tell you, when a man receives the Word of God inside of his heart, he walks into the church and he begins to protect the Spirit that exists inside of the bride of Christ. He begins to take that responsibility on himself and begins to move and say, “No, I will stand in the gap. I will help protect it. This is becoming mine.” And that is a man coming into the church. It could be a man or a woman coming into the church and God doing something inside of their heart, and then adopting the Spirit of God that exists in this place as their own and willing to protect it with their very life. Amen.

We as Christians sometimes like to take the easy route. I'm not saying that God doesn't give gifts to His people, because He absolutely does. He does give gifts to His people where it just kind of happens, but they are exactly what I said they are: they're gifts. They're not the norm, right? They're not the things that happen every single day.

Christians like to sit back and say, “Well, I'll just let the Holy Spirit do it.” Or, “If it doesn't happen, it must not be God's will.” Or, “Ah, you know, that person just is what it is.” And they take such a passive way of living out their Christian faith. They take a passive, backseat way. But let me tell you, the Holy Spirit is not going to do it. The Holy Spirit is going to do it through you. The Holy Spirit is going to empower you when you can't go any further. The Holy Spirit is going to come upon a man when he can't give anymore and says, “God, I know what Your Word says is true, but Lord, I have nothing left in the tank.” And the Holy Spirit comes upon a man and empowers him that God's Word is true. And the Word says in James 2:17, “Faith by itself, if not accompanied by action, is dead.”

Today, if you believe this message, if you believe that Jesus Christ, the King, came into this world, that He was born among men, that they might be redeemed and that they might be saved, to believe that message is to believe like Joseph did. It's not to believe here, it's to believe here. It's to believe inside of your heart and for that heart-belief to result in action. It's to not give up, it's to push through, it's to persevere through this world to bring about the fruit that God has for your life.

What is it that you need to persevere through? It could be different for each one of you. We've seen people persevere through addiction, through hardships, through their past, through their pain, through that old life that haunts them, through the religious denouncing the truth of the Word of God. We've had to persevere through all sorts of nonsense in these years that we've been here. But I tell you that when God comes upon a man and transforms his heart, that belief, that faith, that thing inside of the heart cannot give up. It must persevere until what God said to be true comes true.

Nothing in this world that is easy is worth having. If God has spoken to you, if He has rescued you, then do not give up, but persevere. The Holy Spirit will come upon a man and will empower you to do that very thing: to persevere, to push, to not give up until what God said to be true comes true.

So the second thing I'm going to talk about today is, what is God calling from you, right? What is God calling to come from you? Well, He's calling you to live out that faith with perseverance, with pushing. But the important question is: why? Why? Why can't He just make it easy? Why not just sit back and let it happen?

"Only those who overcome will enter into the kingdom of God."

Well, the Bible tells us why. Because only those who overcome will enter into the kingdom of God. It's very simple. Only those who overcome will enter into the kingdom of God. Listen, He doesn't say it once. He doesn't say it twice. He doesn't say it three times. Let's go over some of the verses.

Revelation 21:7: “He who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be his God and he shall be My son.” Revelation 3:21: “The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with Me on My throne, as I also conquered and sat down with My Father on His throne.” Romans 8:37: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” And 1 John 5:4: “Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith.”

Our faith, our faith! Not passive. Amen. Passive faith does not overcome. Head faith does not overcome. Believing up here that there might be a God, that He's probably real, does not overcome. You can't be passive. You can't be afraid of confronting the evils of this world. Overcoming takes grit and determination to bring about what God has called for in your life. As He did with Mary and Joseph, He said one thing. He gave them one dream and said, “Now go. Now move. Get up. Go.” And they had to do it. They couldn't sit back and be passive. They had to overcome everything that this world was throwing at them.

What is God calling you to overcome? It could be three things. When I was thinking about it, I broke it down into three categories. Number one: your past, your sin, your pain, right? Those things that follow you around, those things that hold us down, right? The things that we have done in our lives that maybe haunt us to this day. We have guilt. We have pain. Maybe you've been abandoned. Maybe you've been abused. Maybe something has happened to you in your life that still follows you around. You have to overcome it. God is calling you to overcome it—not on your own, but by the transformative work of the Holy Spirit inside of a man's heart.

If it's not your past, then maybe it's the present. There are rulers and principalities and things that rule this world. There's a cloud over top of us that sits over us, that tries to cap us from reaching the Spirit of God. But yet God says you must overcome it. That's why we push. I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying what Mary and Joseph went through was easy. But what I'm telling you is that God is calling for us to overcome, to push through. Because you know what's on the other side of those clouds? The Spirit of God. The presence of God. His very glory is on the other side of those clouds.

There are things that tell you how you should raise your kids, how you should live, how you should think. Social media crams it down our kids' throats. “This is what you should value. This is what's important.” And the algorithm just keeps rolling over and over again, spitting more and more of the same nonsense over and over straight into their brains. But God is saying you must overcome.

And finally, maybe it's your destiny, your bloodline, your generations, the things you came from, the sin of your great-great-grandfather that still follows you around, that says, “This is who you're going to be.” I had a destiny of who I was going to be. I'd probably still be at ShopRite, right, like working my way up the ladder or something, or in a computer store, whatever it might be. Not that there's anything wrong with those destinies, but I tell you that God had something greater. He had something different. I was going to be exactly the same way my father and his father before him were. That sin was going to follow me around. Yet God came so that you might overcome even your bloodline, even your destiny, even who the world said that you were going to be. God is calling for you to overcome.

Joseph had to overcome his destiny. And I got to tell you, it wasn't a bad destiny. He had a girl in town that he loved. He might not have had a lot of money, but he was looking forward to it. I can imagine, right? He was going to marry this girl that he loved, that he cared for. Maybe he was going to raise a family, honor God, do a little worship, give his tithe, and support the temple, right? He didn't have a necessarily bad destiny ahead of him. Yet God came in one dream and completely turned his entire life around, and he was willing to throw the whole destiny away and believe God and say, “God, Your way is greater than my way. Your future is greater than my future.”

Let's continue in our verse in Matthew 2:19. “After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. And he said, ‘Get up.’” I love how He talks to Joseph. “Take the child and His mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child's life are dead.”

And Joseph, what do you think he did? He didn't sit around. He didn't wait for the seasons to change. He didn't wait for, you know, the sunny time, the warm season to come. No. What did he do? Verse 21: “He got up, took the child and His mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And again, having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that He would be called a Nazarene.”

We need to understand that at every juncture that this story goes from beginning to end, there are prophecies being fulfilled. These prophecies weren't like five years before. They weren't ten. They were hundreds of years before this happened. And yet at every juncture, a prophecy is being fulfilled.

Let's go through some of them. Jesus being born in Bethlehem—prophesied about. Jesus being born in the manger. Having to flee into Egypt from Herod. Herod killing all the babies in his fury. Jesus eventually returning to Nazareth. All of these things were prophesied about generations before they occurred!

So my question to you today is, if God intended for these things to happen from the beginning, why did He make it so hard? Why did He make it so difficult? Why couldn't He just make it easy, right? Somebody could have just happened to be coming along and picked them up and brought them where they were supposed to go, and they didn't run into another problem. Why didn't that happen?

Joseph and Mary suffered to fulfill these prophecies. Not that they necessarily knew what they were doing at the time, but they pushed and they persevered through extreme opposition in obedience to God's Word. Why? Because they had real faith. Real faith that caused them to persevere. And if God is going to prophesy about something, if He's going to talk about what is going to be done, it's not just going to poof, happen. No. It's going to happen by the hands and feet of men and women who are willing to believe God's Word and to persevere through all darkness and hell and opposition to make sure, because they believe, and when God says something, it is going to come true. And it's just a matter of me getting there. Amen.

God has plans for your life. He has plans to deliver you, to heal you, to make you holy. He has plans to prosper you and to make you impactful in this wicked generation. But that doesn't mean it's going to fall into your lap. That doesn't mean it's not going to take some perseverance and work. That doesn't mean you can just sit back at home and watch TV and as my wife likes to say, “happen by osmosis,” where you're just going to all of a sudden become more and more holy the longer and longer you watch HGTV. That's not how it works.

God is calling you to push and persevere just as Joseph and Mary did to bring about the plan that God has in your life. Because that is the only true type of faith that exists. That's not talked about in the church, but it is absolutely the truth. The only true type of faith is the type of faith that transforms you, that changes you, that transforms your inmost being and makes you get up and do things you would never do before. Other faith is belief, and belief without action is dead.

"He sent His Holy Spirit down to empower you for one reason: to make you an overcomer. "

Joseph did all these things without the Holy Spirit, but yet God did not leave us as orphans. He sent His Holy Spirit down to empower you for one reason: to make you an overcomer. That you would overcome your sin, that you'd overcome your past, that you'd overcome the rulers and principalities in this world, and that you would overcome your destiny. God came, His Holy Spirit came down to transform men, to change you, that you would be an overcomer.

This Christmas story is truly just the beginning of the redemptive message of Christ. We like to read it, and we like to think that eventually, if we keep reading the story, we're going to come to a last page and the story's going to be over. But let me tell you, the story was not over. Christ, a King, came and was born in a lowly manger. He came to a people supposedly waiting for Him, yet none of them recognized Him. He lived a sinless life, yet died the death of the worst type of sinner. He took our sins on that cross so that we would not have to face the punishment of what we have done. He died and rose again to prove that death had no hold over Him. And today He can offer you eternal life because He lives eternally.

That life starts today. That life is powerful. It is supernatural. It is transformative. It is something that does not exist in physical things. It is not available in pill form. It cannot be achieved. I don't care how much you talk to a counselor about your feelings. It does not matter. The Holy Spirit is the only thing that can transform a man.

The Bible Christmas story started all those years ago, but it does not end there. It didn't end in the manger. It didn't end on the cross. It didn't even end in His resurrection. The Christmas story is still going on today. It is alive inside of every man who lowers down his own will and begins to take on the will of God. The Christmas story is still alive inside of people who are willing to say, “Enough is enough, but Lord, no longer my ways. I am bowing a knee before You and saying, ‘Your ways are higher.’” The Christmas message is still alive inside of people who are willing to submit their lives unto God and say, “God, I have a destiny. I have a picture of how my future is going to go. But God, I trust You and Your ways.”

So the question remains. The Christmas story, it all culminates in you. This message that is going out, the question is, is it going to die with you today? Is it just something that you come and listen to, this handsome guy up on stage come and speak a message to you, but yet it doesn't transform you? Or is something going to change? Is something going to move and stir inside of your heart? Is God going to do something inside of you to say that, “Lord, I'm not going to just continue to do things my own way, or I'm not going to let these things beat me. I'm not going to let these things of the world hold me back. I'm not going to sit back and be passive about my Christianity and my faith anymore. But God, You are calling me to get up, to move, to push.” And I can tell you, amen, this is not a one-day call. This is a hard truth that I had to learn. It's not a one-day call. God is calling you to persevere daily.