How To Find Christmas Joy Outside of the Ideal (Christmas Vacation) | Crossroads Church

That's a real nasty prize. Yes, we have the cult of Christmas vacation fans in here. And other people go, what? I don't understand. Well, hopefully you'll be able to understand by the end of our time today. Christmas Vacation is a classic movie, and it's a conundrum that illustrates so many of our desire for a perfect Christmas, just like Clark Griswold is trying to give his family. So let's pray before I get any further into this. Okay, God, thanks for just giving us a mind to grasp with, gosh, things that are on opposite sides of the spectrum. On one side, we all want a great Christmas. The other side is, man, I don't want to be too stressful. On one side, we want to have great memories. On the other side, I believe we're here today. We could be on any number of different places because we want to know more about you. We don't really want to know more about Christmas. We want to know more about you. And so I pray that you'd help me to facilitate the process of us being more like you. And I pray these things according to the character identity of Jesus. Amen. Well, the movie Christmas Vacation came out in the 80s, and it's all about Clark Griswold, who wants his family to have a perfect Christmas, just like he remembers when he grew up. The idea for the movie comes in part from John Hughes, who's one of the producers, who is part of National Lampoon. That's why it's called National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. And John Hughes talks about his own childhood and how the memories of what he saw on film and what we see in media aren't really what happens in real life in any of our lives. Here's what he says. All in all, it was a pretty exciting Christmas, what with the relatives and the presents and the fun and the cops and Aunt Hazel's dog blowing up in our living room. Mom and Aunt Martha wanted to have one of those fun, old-fashioned Christmases that people on TV have, where everybody wears ties and sweaters and sits by the fireplace and makes Christmas tree ornaments out of food. But as Dad said, the only reason those people have fun is they're getting paid for it. Most of us have stressed lives. Most of us wouldn't say we have a lot of room to breathe. Then the holidays come and put more expectations and more stress on us. And it can be really, really, really rough. Clark Griswold has an unattainable ideal, and I think many of us do here today. This is the first idea. I want to give you three of them today. Perfection leads to tension. The higher your expectations are for Christmas, the greater the amount of tension you're going to have in your life and in everybody else's life. Perfection is an

unbelievably high standard. And here's one of the tension points I want to hit today. If you put just a fraction of the energy that you put into Christmas, what to buy, what to decorate, what to wear, what cards to send, thank you notes, the lights. If you put just a fraction of the effort you put into Christmas every year into your spiritual formation and development, you will be astounded by your level of spiritual growth. Utterly astounded. The problem isn't that we want our Christmas to be perfect. The problem is we put more energy into a perfect Christmas than we do a perfect faith. The problem is we're so fascinated and passionate with having all the right stuff on and looking good and buying all the right things. Do we have that same level of passion and innovation the rest of the year to come closer to God? The big idea I've been on for a while, I'll hit it to you again. The main thing God wants is for you to be like Him. That's what He wants more than anything. Everything is orchestrated in your life. You'll use everything in your life to do that, which is why Romans chapter 8 verse 28 says, God causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose. All things, including He'll even use your quest for a perfect Christmas or your anger over having horrible Christmases after horrible Christmases. He'll use that for your spiritual formation to become more like Him. Jesus says in Matthew 5 48, Jesus says, you therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Wow. This is the greatest teacher of all time telling us what God wants for you, what Jesus wants is for you to be perfect. He doesn't want you to have a perfect holiday. He doesn't want you to have a Perfect family, I want you to be perfect. Now, this can be stressed. This is more of an aspirational statement than the way you have to be. I mean, our understanding of perfection is not God's understanding of perfection, but I'm just gonna let this sit here for a while and just say this again. What kind of energy do you have in your life going towards becoming like Christ, going towards becoming perfect?

I'm not talking about perfect moralism, I'm not talking about having some extreme sense of moralism, you make stuff up, make up stuff in the Bible, like many people who are religious do, make up things that aren't even in the Bible. Like, you know, you can't play cards. Why can't you play cards? Oh, you can't dance, you can't dance. I can't have tobacco, can't, why can't? Oh, you can't, you know. You have any Baptists in here? Any Baptists? One, two. Dual joke, I was struggling with it before, I couldn't remember. Why do Baptists, why are Baptists so upset about premarital sex? Because it leads to dancing. That's, that's, that's an old joke. Someone else told me on one of the last services, why do you want to have two Baptists with you on your fishing trip? Because you have two of them, they won't take any of your beer, you know, because they're watching after each other. I'm not talking about some, from standards, right. Stop hating on the Baptists, man. Real eggnog, too, by the way, Baptists, it's wonderful. I wonder if I'm gonna get hated on for eggnog

the way I get hated on for having a beer on stage. We'll find out, Merry Christmas. God has expectations for you, he really does. One of his expectations is not for you to have a perfect holiday. One of the expectations is not for you to have a perfect family and to fit the American ideal of whatever it is. And that's kind of the cool thing about Christmas Vacation, the movie, is there's stuff that's chaotic that's real life. Like, true story, there's a scene where Snots, the Rottweiler, goes after a squirrel that's accidentally in the family tree. And little known secret is, for a year, an animal trainer was working with the Rottweiler and a trained squirrel to pull off that scene. And the morning, the morning of the shoot, the squirrel died. And the director is all freaked out, like, wait, how could this happen? And he said, squirrels die, it's just, so they went out and captured a squirrel in the wild and they let it loose on the set and all that calamity took place. It was wonderful, it was fun. When God says, be perfect, be perfect like your Heavenly Father's perfect, it's an aspiration. It's not condemnation, if you're not on this aspiration, like, you wanna be like God, you wanna be like Jesus.

And the good news is, there's a bunch of things in your life that can be messy that God doesn't care about at all. Doesn't care how messy your hair is, doesn't care how messy your Christmas is, doesn't care how messy your standard is compared to what your mother, your mother-in-law gave you. In fact, the messier and more imperfect your Christmas is, the more likely you're in line with the OG Christmas, the original. In the book of Matthew, chapter one, verse 18, we'll look at two different accounts of Christmas. Matthew is one of them. And here's what it says. Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. This is an imperfect, messy, stressful Christmas. Mary is pregnant out of wedlock. God comes to her and says, I'm gonna do something unique. I'm gonna place my seed in your womb. It's a pretty crazy, miraculous thing. And this makes for a messy life for Mary, at least the beginning. Because now there's scandal around her. And her friend who she's betrothed to, being betrothed is basically an engagement

on steroids, industrial strength. It's not the same as our engagement, but somewhat similar. And Joseph doesn't believe her. What are you talking about, what? What? This is messy, this is difficult. But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, and he will save his people from their sins. He will save his people from their imperfections. He will save his people from their messy areas. This is who he is, this is what he does. And the whole Christmas story is a mess. It's a mess to give birth in somewhat of a barnyard. It's a mess to give birth in very unsanitary conditions. And yet this is what happens in the very first Christmas. So if your Christmas is unideal, if your Christmas is chaotic, welcome to maybe the true original spirit of Christmas. The home run scene in the Christmas story scenery, according to the directors and producers, the home run scene is a scene where Clark gets trapped up inside of his attic and his family abandons him and he can't get out and he's trying to pass time and he finds an old projector in movies where he's looking at images of Christmases

long, long, long ago, which aren't as good as he remembers them to be, but he gets the feels in this scene. Here's the home run scene, so the directors say, of the Christmas story. Oh. Perfect memories, sometimes the good old days aren't that good, because our memory is really bad. But Clark is all about giving everybody the perfect memories, the perfect family gathering. He wants to buy them the perfect pool. He's waiting for his boss to give him the perfect year-end bonus so he can afford the perfect pool. He is in a quest for perfection. And it doesn't get him anywhere. It actually brings him destruction. Perfection, the thirst for perfection actually will lead to destruction. He's crushing people around him. His kids don't really want to be around him. His kids are rolling their eyes, they're shrugging their shoulders. When someone expects you to actually perform all the time and be perfect, it crushes relational things. That's why many of us get away from God. Many of us were born into a religious environment or God's religious environment where it was all about the rules and the crushing, the crushing expectations

that aren't in the Bible that you can't uphold. And what's left is not to find a different understanding of who Jesus was, what's left for many people is just to abandon the faith entirely. Because they get destroyed. Because this zeal, we just can't do it. Clark gets a delivery, and as he gets this delivery, he's sure that this delivery is going to be the bonus check that he needs to fulfill the perfect family memories of having the perfect pool, but it isn't quite a bonus check. Here it is. Ha ha ha ha ha, I guess you can find out some of our standards based on what we decide to bleep and what we don't bleep there, can't you? Not too perfect, according to some of you, is it? Nothing about our lives is perfect, nothing. Our families aren't perfect, our kids aren't perfect. If we don't have kids, that might not be perfect with us. The person we're dating, they're not perfect for us. Sorry to break the news to you. The friends that we have in our life, they're supposed to give us that family feel, they're not perfect towards us. They seem like transient, they treat us sometimes like a horrible family member treats us. Nothing is perfect, and if you take a look at the first Christmas, you'll see

Nothing is perfect, nothing. I already mentioned Mary having a child out of wedlock, Joseph not being excited initially about raising somebody else's child that didn't have his DNA, and then we look in the book of Luke, another version of what the Christmas story was, and the interesting thing about Luke, Kyle brought this out a couple weeks ago, which is really strong for him to do so, is Matthew is from Matthew's perspective, the first book in the New Testament, one of the four authorized biographies of Jesus. Matthew, his source material is mostly Jesus who was with him all along. Mark, Mark, and John, they're close to the inner circle, but then Luke, he's kind of like a second generation, he's not in one of the quote unquote original 12 apostles, or real close to him, and historians are very united that one of his source materials, one of his interviews, if you will, the place he got his information, was from Mary, he leaned very, very heavily into Mary. So Mary has a very interesting perspective on what took place, because she was there and she lived it. Here's what it says in Luke chapter two, verse one. In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration when Quintinius was governor of Syria, and all went to be registered, each to his own town.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the town of Nazareth to Judea, to the town of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. So they're hanging out in Nazareth, that's where they are, they're adopted hometown, that's why Jesus is known as Jesus of Nazareth, but he's born in Bethlehem, because one of the imperfect things. of Christmas, this original family had to deal with, is there's a census. And the way they would figure out, they counted everybody right, is everyone's gotta migrate to where they were born. And so, since Joseph is the guy, sort of the head of the household in ancient times, he, they went to his hometown of origin, which was Bethlehem. Let me tell you something. The last thing you wanna be doing when you're eight, seven, nine months pregnant, the last thing you wanna be doing is taking a long trip. Is it not good? I mean, jostling around and riding the camel, they're walking with extra weight. This is a horrible experience for Mary, horrible. The first Christmas was horrible for her. Ever give birth? I never have.

I've been to four births. Three of them I remember. The first one was my own. I've been to four births, and I'll tell you what, I'm always accused of not having good memory. Yeah, I do not remember that first birth at all. But I'll tell you, my other three kids, man, if you ever get to be in a waiting room or in a birthing room, whoo, man. You're talking about sounds and smells and blood and at least grunts, if not shrieks. It is a chaotic scene. There is no perfect birth the way you'd like to think of it. And this is what Christmas is about. Wasn't it perfect to give birth to Jesus the way that he was given? And then here it goes. Let's keep going, verse six. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth, and she gave birth to her newborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in the manger because there was no place for them in the inn. Oh, this sounds kind of perfect. Little baby Jesus. All balled up his little fists, having a good time. And wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Just swaddling. I mean, I like this. Swaddling just sounds so nice. I like to swaddle, so I'm gonna go home and just do some swaddling. Just, ooh, comfortable, just swaddled. This is not good. This is not good for Jesus at all. Now, I said that Jesus says, "'Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.'" Because what else is the standard gonna be? You know, he's gotta give us some aspiration. We wanna be like him, and he's perfect. So if he wants us to be like him, he's perfect. So that's the kind of course we're on. But what's really important to understand is when we knowingly give him something that is less than our best, it's not just imperfect, it's less than our best, we're not giving him our heart, he is not happy at all. There's a part in the Old Testament book of Malachi where God says, why do you keep insulting me and bringing these horrible lambs to sacrifice? Because they knew that there had to be payment for their imperfections. And their payment, God said, I'm not gonna take your life whenever you make a mistake, but I would like you to be reminded that it's a bloody affair when you dishonor me and you go the opposite direction.

So you're gonna bring an animal, and we're gonna kill an animal who's gonna be a substitute for you. You don't have to get killed, but you're gonna be reminded of my grace and mercy that I'm not taking this out on you. So they had the whole sacrificial system brought up in it. Now here's where it gets really interesting. These people knowingly wouldn't give God their best. So they would bring lambs that had spots on them or were ugly, they would bring lambs that had broken a knee or something like that, lambs that were gonna die in two days or something like that. So, oh, I gotta get a sacrifice. Here, let's give the one that's just worn out and I don't have any use for it anymore. And God says, that's ridiculous. What are you doing? If you had the governor over at your house, you'd give him a good lamb, but me, you dishonor me. Friends, have you ever considered that God's heart breaks when he looks at many of us and sees the interest and creativity and passion we have around Christmas and we don't have that same interest, creativity, and passion around our relationship with him? That Christmas gets our best. Christmas gets our best finances.

Christmas gets our best planning. Christmas gets our best beauty. Christmas gets our most time. Just focus time on it, focus. Christmas gets our best. And maybe God sometime goes, hey, I like a little of that. I'd like you to be as interested in our relationship as you are your relationship with Christmas. And so the wrapping of swaddling claws, the reason why the claws were there was to keep the lambs who, for the temple sacrifice, they were raised here in Bethlehem. That's where they were raised. And they would wrap their hooves in swaddling claws, which came to be known as swaddling claws, to keep the animal perfect for the sacrifice, which is why when John the Baptist sees Jesus for the very first time, who, not for the first time, he sees him at a baptism, John's baptizing, and he sees him and he says, behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, because Jesus is going to be the perfect lamb. So the swaddling claws that are made to wrap. around the lamb's feet to keep them perfect, to keep the, those same swaddling claws are wrapped around baby Jesus. Except this was not a moment of perfection for Mary because she didn't have enough money to have a full-size blanket for him.

So wrapped in swaddling claws, I don't think Mary understands here at all, oh, this is gonna be the perfect lamb of God that's come to take away the sin of the world and die in people's places. I don't think she understands that at all. She just grabs something that's close by and wraps it around him because Jesus is born in a place where there was livestock. We read that verse, there's no room at the inn. Not perfect Christmas, not a perfect birth. I'm going to get out of the cold and I can't get a room. The innkeeper says, well, you can go where the livestock goes. We think of a manger as like, you know, a nice, beautiful barndominium, beautiful, creative thing with snow on top of it and animals around that are smiling and perfectly coiffed and then Jesus put in this beautiful, like a rustic, wooden cradle. The manger is not that scene. The manger, the manger was a feeding trough which in this area of the world, there wasn't a lot of trees, there's a lot of stones, all likelihood was a rock with a hole dug out of it that Jesus placed into a livestock cereal bowl. That was his first crib. He was born likely in a cave. There's caves all over the region. I've been to Bethlehem a bunch of times.

There's caves all over the place. If you had livestock, stick them in a cave, keeps the sides, you know, keeps them in the sides. You don't have to build a fence and everything. So Jesus, the birth is an environment where there's dirty livestock animals and his first crib has got slobber from a cow on it and he doesn't have full-size blanket to wrap around him. Friends, you get the picture. It's not perfect. So when your life isn't perfect, you're starting to look like Mary herself. You're starting to look like Joseph himself. You're starting to be in the conditions in which Jesus was born into this world. Now the lights of Christmas have a significant meaning and in the Christmas vacation movie, they also have a significant meaning. For Clark Griswold, the meaning of Christmas lights is for everything to be perfect. So he's gotta overdo it. He takes his Christmas lights and he staples them to the shingles, which is a former roofer. I still can't believe you would do that even on a movie set. It's just, it's a crazy, crazy scene for him to again, attain the level of perfection. And let's see what happens as he tries to attain this level of perfection.

It is beautiful. Man, the stress to get there may not have been worth it. At some point, you have to wonder, Clark, what is so broken in your life that you need Christmas to be perfect? Is it the rest of your life is in shambles? Is it the rest of your year is so boring you need a perfect Christmas? I mean, what is it? At some point, we gotta start asking those questions. All of us. At some point, we need to ask questions of, why do I keep having these base drives that I don't wanna have? At some point, we have to ask ourselves, why do I keep doing the thing that I know is not good for me? At some point, we have to ask ourselves, why can't I follow through on things that are good for me and others that I think God wants me to do? At some point, we have to ask ourselves deeper questions. Like, why is it that we're broken? Why is it things aren't connected? Jesus says in Luke chapter five, verse 31, he says, it's not the healthy who need a doctor, not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Now, if you read this, you take it at face value, it seems what Jesus is saying is, hey, if you're healthy, you don't really need me

in reading Christianity. Christianity is for the weak. Christianity is for the sick. The healthy don't need a doctor, they're sick. So if you need to go in rehab and you've got a dependence issue, yeah, yeah, it's for you. Okay, yeah, if you're really, really sick and weak and you can't hold together a marriage, you're just hurting, so yeah, there you go. It's a crutch for you, Jesus is there for you. Yeah, yeah, if you just aren't a person of self-discipline, and you need to believe in something ethereal because you need that for yourself, you need that for yourself, but other people, they're just fine, but you, you feel like you need that, then Jesus is for you. Is that what Jesus is saying? He's not here for healthy people, not for sick people. This sentence makes no sense to you unless you understand that Jesus has a sarcastic personality of time. This is sarcasm. He's saying, if you want me around, you have to admit your need, but if you're perfect, if you're Mr. and Mrs. Perfect, if you have no needs, then I guess you don't need me. He's not saying, he's not saying there's people who are healthy, no. In and of our natural selves,

all of us are destructive in our natural selves. In and of our natural selves, all of us will look for ourselves, our own interests instead of God's interests. In and of our natural selves, all of us will be about ourselves and try to manipulate things for ourselves instead of things for God. all of us will bring harm onto people around us. We're not bringing harm onto ourselves, we're bringing it onto others because our standards for them and our expectations for them are way, way too high. Jesus is saying, if we wanna have him, if we wanna have God, we have to admit that we are imperfect and we have to admit that we have needs and we have wounds and we are weak. It's holy sarcasm. I'll just admit, I need Jesus as much or more now than I did when I was 15 years old and I gave my life to him. I grow increasingly aware of my shortcomings, shortcomings I didn't even know that I had, but the deeper I go with God, the more I understand how far away from him I am. I become very, very aware that I cannot do it on my own. More aware now than I was actually when I was 15, more aware of my need for him. I need him, I want him, everybody has wounds. Everybody has needs, everybody has sins, everybody.

All of us have a need for healing, all of us. There's a guy I know who runs a Christian search firm, is what he calls it, which helps nonprofits and churches find senior level talent. If they need a new senior pastor or something like that and you haven't developed anybody inside, then you can go to him, he'll go out and find them, and he'll bring you like three candidates. He doesn't wanna call himself a headhunter. If you're a Christian, you can't call yourself a headhunter, I guess, but that's what he is. He's a Christian headhunter. And so as he's gleaning people and trying to figure out him or the people he works for him, one of the questions they ask, because it would be horrible to present somebody for the church, you should hire this guy or here's these three people, and then you find he or she's got skeletons in their clods that they've had an adulterous affair some time not too long ago, or they've embezzled funds or something like that. So standard question is, he said, have you had any moral failures? And one guy he asked that to late in the process, have you had any moral failures? The guy thought to himself, and then he said, my whole life is a moral failure. And that's when he realized, oh yeah, that's the whole heart of Christianity.

We are all moral failures, we are all imperfect, and that's why we need Jesus. All of us need him. All of us are moral failures. And if you can't see how you're a moral failure, there you go, you're a moral failure right there, because you can't even see, you're so deluded about who you are, thinking you're so incredible. No, you're not. God's not impressed with you, not at all. So why your righteousness? The Bible says like filthy rags compared to his swaddling cloths, filthy rags. They mean nothing to him. But this is where he excels, this is where Jesus excels. It's this thing, like the thing we think would disqualify us from Jesus is the very thing that caused Jesus to draw us close to him. Like, okay, I'm dirty. Jesus, oh, you're dirty, yeah, yeah. You're like, get that, I'm coming to dwell in your neighborhood is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna come be around you right now. I've never fortunately had the kind of moral failure that would get me into the papers and make me lose my job, but man, I have moral failures. I fail God regularly. I'm hopefully trying to have less and less of them. I'm getting closer to looking like him.

That's called the sanctification process. I want to look like him. I'm working hard at it, but every step I go, because I get deeper with God, I see things I hadn't seen before. I'm like, darn it, didn't see that there, shoot. And all the while, you feel accepted by him, and you know he's for you, and you know he wants you. And I know that, not because my emotions are telling me, I know that because that's the message here in this book, the Bible. Okay, here's my final push for this book for this year for you. 2026, I want the best for you. I want, we want you to read the Bible regularly. So again, someone's gonna read Charles Dickens very regularly at Christmastime. Do you have any regular Bible reading plan? Do you have a Bible reading plan? Is it a goal of yours? Do you follow through on it? Is there a way to help you? Because this is how you know what is right perfect and what is wrong perfect. This is how you know how much God loves you. This is, it's here, that this is about you and where you are in your life right now. It's wonderful. So in 2026, we're gonna have a time to go through the Bible in a year.

If you've never done it before, great, go through it with us. We're gonna have a little special section in the app, or if you want to follow along and read out of your paper Bible, fine. But please, please, put some effort in 2026 into your spiritual formation. If you just take a 10th of the effort you put into Christmas, put that into reading the Bible, you have it done in a year, no problem. Just a 10th of what you put into Christmas. It doesn't take that long, a little bit every day, but you'll find you'll start looking more and more like him. Perfection leads to restoration. Third thing I wanna say. Jesus is the perfect one. That's the irony. He's the perfect one. He gets born in imperfect circumstances. He has an imperfect life as far as family dynamics. That means they're an unideal family dynamic situation. Yet, as only God could, he lives as the unblemished land. He lives a perfect life. And what he does is he takes people who are different, people who are apart. He takes God, he takes God, and he takes us, and we're not connecting. That's the natural state of things. God and people are not connecting. And the Savior, the Messiah, he comes into the world

as God himself, he understands God, and born of a woman, as a woman, he understands both, and he comes in to connect us. He comes in to connect God. G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-god. ♪ Alleluia, alleluia, Alleluia, alleluia, Alleluia ♪ ♪ Alleluia, Alleluia ♪ ♪ Woo ♪ He is about restoration. Why does he restore? He restores because things are broken. People are imperfect, people are broken. If you have any needs, you are in the game where Jesus plays, that's the game where he plays. If you've got anything that's dirty in your life, he's very kind. If you did anything that was shameful last night, he is so excited you're here, whatever side you're at. He is in the house and he is for you and around you. If you've got wounds, if you've got scabs that someone keeps picking off, maybe Christmas is so hard for you because the scab just barely got healed over from last year and now Aunt Ethel is picking at it again or digging or whatever. If he understands you, he's a physician. This is what he does. He is the light. Light reveals and light heals. And I'm hoping that he is revealing something to you

this holiday season and he's going to be healing something in you as well. I've got one final word, but let's first all stand. Let's stand because I feel like right now is the best time to just respond with a song. Let's just give him a song before I give my final 2%. ♪ Oh light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us ♪ If you want his light, put your hands out in front of you, receive him. ♪ Oh light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, you shine Lord, oh yeah ♪ ♪ Oh light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, would you shine again today God ♪ ♪ Oh light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, come and shine upon us now ♪ ♪ Oh light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, oh I need you Lord, I need you Lord ♪ ♪ Oh light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, you shine Lord, sing it again ♪ ♪ Sing light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, would you shine today Lord, one more time ♪ ♪ Sing light of the world, light of the world, light of the world ♪ ♪ You shine upon us, oh come, oh come let us adore him ♪ ♪ Oh come let us adore him, oh come let us adore him ♪ ♪ If he is Christ, the Lord will praise, will praise your name forever ♪ ♪ Yes we will, we'll praise your name forever ♪ ♪ We'll praise your name forever, we've heard us cry, we've heard us cry ♪ Yes, Lord. Light of the world, light of the world,

light of the world you shine upon us. Light of the world, light of the world, light of the world you shine upon us. Shine upon my home and my kids and my wife, Lord. Oh, shine of the world, light of the world, light of the world you shine upon us. One more time. Light of the world, light of the world, light of the world you shine upon us. Light of the world, light of the world you shine upon us. This Christmas, may God be gracious to you in this imperfect world. This Christmas, may He lift up His countenance upon you. May He make His face shine upon you. May He bring His light into your dark places now and forevermore. Amen. You have a great week.