This One's For You! (A Christmas Sermon)

Did you ever listen to a sermon where you felt as if God was saying "This one's for you"?  I've never looked up Willow Creek sermons before, but for some reason I decided to watch one yesterday.  And you know what?  This one was meant for me.  It really hit me in the heart.  Watch it; it's good.  In fact, I couldn't stop thinking about it all day and into the night.  (Skip to the 35-minute mark to start the sermon.)

"Christmas at the movies: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (December 18, 2022)"

(Willow Creek Huntley YouTube channel)

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

[FYI: I've written before about how I disagree with woman being head pastors.  And it seems that, at Willow, the head pastor is a man but there are several teaching pastors under him, including women.  To me, that's a gray area.  And I'm not sure yet what I think of it.  But since it doesn't break my hardline, definitive "no woman head pastor" rule, I've decided to be okay with Willow Creek for now, to allow God to speak to me through Megan's sermon, to get what good I can from it, until and unless God leads me otherwise.  

(To me, a woman associate pastor is far less of a concern than how Calvinism corrupts the gospel and God's character and truth.  I'd rather have a church with a woman associate pastor who preaches biblical truth than have an all-male-pastors Calvinist church that preaches lies.  And let's face it... these days, since most churches are off-track about something or other, we all have to make a choice about what we're willing to compromise on.  And for me, I'd rather compromise about a lesser issue like women teachers/preachers than compromise the truth of the gospel and who Jesus died for and how people get saved and what God is like.  The first one isn't an attack on God and Truth and the heart of the gospel/Christianity, but the second one - Calvinism - is.)  

And I just gotta say: After coming out of a Calvinist church, it was so good to hear the simple, beautiful truths of the Bible again, the pure gospel message without the embedded, toxic, twisted, hopeless Calvinist spins.  I really needed this.  (Of course, I hear solid biblical truth every week we watch Tony Evans, my favorite and most-trusted pastor, but it was so good to hear it from another church too.)  It was so good to hear "God loves you!  Jesus died for the world, so that whoever believes will be saved."  It was so good to hear that the gospel is for everyone, no matter who you are or where you're at in life, that there's hope for all.  You won't hear things like that in Calvinist churches, where the gospel - eternal healing and hope - is only for "the elect".  

Just for comparison, I decided to look up the Christmas sermons at the Calvinist church we left.  And guess what their Christmas sermons were about?  About why people reject Jesus.  Wow!  Talk about a negative angle, about some discouraging, hopeless messages during Christmas.  It's not a hope-filled "you can be saved" message; it's a depressing "why most people won't be saved" message - and at a time when many people will venture into a church for the first time, willing to give it a try, to see if it's worth coming back, to see if there's any hope for them.  Bah humbug!  And while some of what he said early on in one sermon was biblical, the biblical stuff was really just a cover for the unbiblical stuff at the end, the stuff he really believes: that if you reject Jesus it's because God didn't call you because God didn't choose you to be saved, and that even if most people are predestined to hell, we should just be thankful that God chose to save anyone at all when we all should be in hell.  This is the Christmas message at a Calvinist church!  Disgusting!

I'll take a sermon like this Willow one over a Calvinist one any day.  Watch it.  It's good.