Pastor Gary Wilkerson looks at three vignettes from the Bible showing how God blesses and people's response to His blessing. Through our obedience God will bless us, but we aren't to keep those blessings for ourselves. He blesses us so that we can be a blessing to others.

In our struggle to maintain and restore Christmas, we often get caught up in the politics and forget the true meaning of Christmas—Jesus. A new covenant Christmas is about celebrating the glorious liberty that we have in Christ. Gary Wilkerson reminds us that through him, we have eternal life and our accusers are silenced.

Many of us would confess to marital, financial or emotional mountains that need to be moved in our lives; but there is an even more important, negative and hindering mountain for many of us. It is an Old Testament mountain of law, rules and list-keeping. There is a new covenant mountain where we are free from sin and made righteous in Christ. Many of us have a foot on each mountain. We haven't fully trusted, or believed, Christ for the victory He won for us. God wants to shake the mountain of human effort from its foundations and remove it from our lives.

We are in a place now where we have arrogantly set our course against the ways of God as a people, as a nation. We have a window of opportunity and it will require the whole church, every denomination. It’s time to take everything and put it aside and go back to prayer, go back to the will of God. We have to go back to prayer.

Unforgiveness will rob you of the spirit of thanksgiving. It's one of the many reasons God commands us to forgive others. Whether releasing someone from the pain they have caused you is relatively easy or one of the hardest things you could do, Claude Houde calls us to act on forgiveness. Only till you have done so can you find a true heart of worship and thanksgiving.

In scripture we can see a pattern of our responsibility as Christians, our inability to fulfill those responsibilities in our own human effort, and Jesus' grace which empowers us to be obedient to that which He calls us. Grace is not something we earn through works, but is an unmerited gift from God—made possible by Christ and the cross.

God sometimes suspends the comfort of His people to test His promises in their lives. It is through the testing of God's promises that He forms His living word in us. He plants in us a word of authority and mercy that breaks through the hardened hearts of our generation. It can be a painful process, but God has given us a vision of Christ to comfort our hearts through the dark times that He sometimes leads us into.