During this special season, do you wonder if true joy and lasting peace are even possible? Despite the beautiful decorations and festive parties, are you left feeling empty and searching for more? This Christmas, we invite you to watch this message of hope from Will Graham, with musical guest Natalie Grant, and discover how you can have everlasting joy in your life today.
Hello I’m Will Graham, and I’m
here in the mountains of western North
Carolina, as you can tell.
We’re getting close to Christmas time
and we’re here
to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
We’re at the Chatlos Memorial Chapel
here on the grounds of the Billy
Graham Training Center
here in Asheville, North Carolina.
And today,
we have an incredible artist joining us.
All right.
Natalie Grant,
she’s an incredible songwriter and singer.
I know that you’re gonna be blessed by her.
She’s coming
all the way from Nashville, Tennessee,
just to share some of her
favorite Christmas songs.
I want you to do me a favor right now.
Right now,
I want you to share this right now
with someone that desperately needs
to hear the good news of Jesus Christ.
All right?
There’s someone that’s hurting out there.
They need to hear some good news,
and this is the time to do it.
All right? So share with them.
And right now, let’s go inside with me
and we’re going to start to celebrate
the birth of our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ, and what He’s done for us.
All right. Come follow me.
In a land faraway
time stood still long ago,
There were shepherds in fields
or at least this is how the story
goes.
The story goes.
Woman with child.
And an inn who with no room,
Born in a manger
fortelling a tomb.
This is how
the story goes.
But it’s more than a fable
and it’s more than a fairy tale.
It’s more than my mind
can conceive.
I believe
the wise men saw
the baby boy
the angels call the Son of God.
Heaven Child
The Great I Am.
Born
to take away My sin through
nail-pierced hands.
Emmanuel has come,
I believe,
I believe. 2000 years
still the story lives on.
It’s God’s gift to us
sent to earth wrapped in flesh
His only son
Your only son
and the heartbeat of heaven
confounded our wisdom.
But it’s still the simple truth
that set me free.
I believe
the wise men saw the baby
boy the angels call
The Son of God.
Heaven’s child
The Great I Am.
Born to take away
my sin through nail pierced hands.
Emmannuel
has come
And I
believe.
Precious child,
how can it be
that God’s great plan
for history
would send You to
a lonely tree,
that You would come
for one like me?
I believe in a Cross.
I believe He came for one
and He came for all
Heaven child
He became a man
And He gave His life for me
in spite of all I am.
Oh I believe, I believe
in You Jesus.
I believe, I believe.
Christmas lives
in me.
I believe.
I believe in You
Oh, I believe in You Jesus.
I believe.
Hey, Natalie.
Hey. Great to have you here.
Thank you so much for coming
here to the cove.
We are so honored to be here.
Thank you for having us.
Well, you know, it’s right around
Christmas is right around the corner. Yes.
You know, I got a lot of Christmas
memories myself, you know,
some gifts with from my grandparents
or something like that.
Some great food.
What’s one of your great
Christmas memories?
You know,
I have an incredible actual story
that happened
when I was only six years old, but
it was one of those core memory stories.
So I was born and raised in Seattle,
Washington in the Pacific Northwest.
My grandparents lived in San Diego,
so like every two years
we would all pile into a motor home,
drive down the Five
from Seattle to California.
And I remember we would stop
at little campgrounds along the way.
And there was this one particular,
if anybody remembers
a KOA campground,
but we’d stop at a KOA campground.
So we’d pull in with our motor home.
And I just remember
seeing the silver Airstream trailer.
Do you remember those Airstream
trailers?
And so I my dad has never met a stranger,
of course, got out, met the family.
I remember specifically
that it didn’t have a door.
I just, I remember it looked like
it was in kind of rough shape.
And my dad came back
and since we were going at Christmas time,
we had our own little tree
on the motorhome.
We had our gifts under there
and my dad came back
and he said, “That family,
they just lost their mom.
She died of cancer and
they lost their house because of the dad
spending his time with her.
He lost his job
so they’re living in the trailer.
So we’re going to take our tree
and we’re going to take our gifts
and we’re going to give it to them.”
And I’m six years old
and I said, “You cannot take my gifts!
What do you mean?
I don’t want to give my gifts away!”
I’ve been waiting.
I had been waiting for the Baby Alive
doll the entire year.
That’s what I’d been asking for.
And I just remember,
I don’t remember what our age was,
but I remember when we gave them that tree
and our gifts.
There was a girl about my age.
She opened up the gift,
and it was that doll.
And I remember as a six year old,
I couldn’t probably articulate it
at that young of an age.
But I remember I thought in my flesh
that I might just grab that away.
But it did something to me to see
what it meant to her to get that doll.
And even though I was only six years old,
it was that moment of, okay, wait,
there really is a joy that comes
from giving instead of receiving.
And I maybe couldn’t articulate
that as a six year old, but I remember
when I got to give my Baby Alive
doll away. Christmas
can change everything for us, right?
Yes. And,
you know, music is one of those things
that can really change people’s hearts,
especially during the worship time.
And so we appreciate you so much coming
and sharing your gift of music.
And thank you so much for coming in.
Merry Christmas by the way.
Merry Christmas to you.
Thank you for having us. And listen,
my friends, that’s what it’s all about.
It’s about worshiping.
And we’re going to continue
worshiping the Lord Jesus Christ right now
here at this Christmas season.
O Holy night,
the stars are brightly shining
It is the night of our dear
Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world
in sin and error pining
Till He appeared
and the soul felt its worth
A thrill of hope-
the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks
a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees!
O hear the angel voices!
O night divine,
O night when Christ was born!
O night divine!
O night
O night divine.
Truly He taught us
to love one another.
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break,
for the slave is our brother.
And in His name
all oppression shall cease.
Sweet hymns of joy
and grateful chorus raise we
Let all within us praise His Holy name.
Christ is the Lord!
Oh Christ, I will praise Your name forever!
His pow’r
and glory
evermore
proclaim!
His pow’r
and glory
evermore
proclaim!
Fall on your knees!
O hear the angel voices!
O night divine
O night,
the night my Jesus was born
O night divine
O night,
O night divine
It was a Holy Night
It was the night hope was born
On behalf of the Graham family,
we want to wish you a merry Christmas
and thank you for joining us.
I know it’s a busy time of the year,
maybe chaotic at times this time of year,
but I want to just take time to look at
what God’s word has to say.
And I just want to read one verse
and just talk about this one simple verse,
all right?
And it comes out of the Book of Isaiah,
which is about 600,
700 years before the time Jesus was born.
And that’s what we’re celebrating
at Christmas, the birth of Jesus.
And so I want to look at Isaiah chapter
nine, verse six.
It says, For unto us,
a child is born. Unto us a son is given,
and the government
will be upon His shoulder
and His name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace.
And so I just want to look at this
in little segments.
And the first part is “For
unto us a child is born.”
This talks about Jesus’s humanity.
When a child is born,
it’s about his humanity.
Every person who ever lived was born.
I was born. I was born in January of 1975.
You were born on your birthday.
All right.
Everyone who is born has a birthday.
And that’s what we’re celebrating
with Jesus.
It’s His birthday.
Now we don’t know exactly when He was born,
but we know it was a little bit over
2000 years ago.
All right.
Now, Jesus was born and He was very much
human, just like you and I were humans.
Jesus was human,
and He was someone that got hungry.
He got tired.
The Bible says He wept,
He got sore muscles
I’m sure. He had the ability to be happy.
And He laughed and probably had jokes
and stuff like that.
Whatever it means to be human,
Jesus fully understood.
He knew all those things.
He knew what it meant to have
to sleep out in the cold wind at night.
He knew what it meant to have a home
cooked meal.
He knew all these things.
And so Jesus could fully represent
all of mankind.
He knew everything that humans experience,
and so He could relate
to every human part of life.
For example, he was tempted, you and I,
our attempt to do right and wrong, right?
We can be tempted either way.
He was tempted.
But yet the Bible says He never sinned.
Did you know that you and I,
we were meant to live in a sinless world?
But guess what?
Adam and Eve, the first people who ever
lived, they messed up and they sinned.
They sinned against God.
When we sin, that just means we broke
God’s laws.
We broke God’s Word.
God told us not to do something,
for Adam and Eve,
it was not to eat of this a certain tree,
to eat the fruit of that certain tree.
They did. They sinned.
They disobeyed God.
And since then, you and
I have been living in a simple world.
But that’s what Christmas is all about.
I want to talk about that here
in a minute.
But let’s look at the second part.
It says, Unto us, a Son is given.
This talks about Jesus,
not only is His humanity,
but now His deity as He’s the son of God.
All right.
The Son is given. In other words,
the Son is not born. It is given.
This is God giving us His son. God
the Father gave us His Son
and we call His name Jesus.
And that’s what the Bible says in John 3:16:
For God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten son.
That’s what it’s talking about.
That’s where it’s talking about
right here in this verse.
It was God giving us His Son.
So this talks about his pre existence.
In other words, as God, Jesus,
I’m talking about, as God,
He’s always existed. He was never created.
Neither was he ever born as a God.
All right?
He has no beginning or an end.
That’s his deity.
All right? So we see His humanity.
We see His deity.
But what is He going to do?
That’s what we see in the next part.
The government will be upon His shoulder.
This is future tense.
In other words, this is going to be
sometime in the future.
It hasn’t happened yet.
And so this is going to take some time
in the future when all the governments
guess what, they’re going to take place
and place him on his shoulders.
All all these kings
are going to look to Him.
They’re going to look to Him for answers.
They’re going to look to him for wisdom.
All kingdoms are going to serve Him.
He alone carries the responsibility
of running the government.
He’s not going to need help.
He’s not going to have to have
some advisors helping Him
or some vice presidents or executive vice.
But no, He can do it by himself.
He he can do that.
But what are the traits of this
new kingdom?
Guess what? It won’t be.
It won’t be
a complex system of bureaucracy.
The Bible says that He alone shoulders
the whole government.
He needs no help and that’s why it says.
He’s a wonderful counselor.
Part of this is that he’s going to be
a wonderful counselor.
There’s a lot of confusion in the world
right now, and there will be no confusion
when Jesus is in place.
And that’s what we see,
just as we saw with Jesus, God on Earth.
That’s what I’m talking about, Jesus, God’s
only Son here on Earth.
He gave wonderful advice.
Matter of fact, When we read the Bible,
especially in the New Testament,
when we see Jesus come in this world, when
He grows up, he gives wonderful advice.
And there’s people that took His advice
and some that did not.
And those who did take His advice,
they were blessed
and they prospered in life.
It was good wisdom, but God would give
still good wisdom to those and guess what?
They would reject His advice.
They left
sad and did not benefit from life.
And what I’m talking about.
There’s a great example.
There was a rich man
and he came up to Jesus
and he said, Jesus,
what I need to do to inherit eternal life?
And He said, Keep the Ten Commandments.
And guess what? He said, I’ve done that.
Jesus said, All right, well, good.
Now sell everything you have
and give it away.
And he wouldn’t do it.
He was sad.
He wouldn’t do it.
And so he did not benefit
from God’s wisdom.
But we live in a world of confusion.
We can look around
and we can see the confusion.
Maybe there’s confusion in your whole life
and you’re trying to make sense.
You’re trying to make the right decisions.
But they’re just, you’re confused.
Do I go left?
Do I go right?
Do I take this and leave that?
There’s,
there’s a lot of tough questions in life.
And I’m here to tell you
that God can speak into those.
And when we take God out of our lives,
then confusion moves in His place.
All right?
When we take God of our life,
guess what moves in? Confusion.
And that’s
where a lot of us are right now.
Confused in our world.
Confusion is another word I would use
to describe the times that we live in.
We like to get counsel from anyone
or anything else.
We even get advice from astrologers
or doctors and human wisdom
and religious phonies, to be honest.
But God alone is the perfect source
of wisdom and advice.
He knows everything
and He wants the best for us.
But let’s look at the next part
of this verse
as putting all the weight,
all the government upon His shoulders.
How can He do it?
Not only is he a wonderful counselor,
but the Bible says that He’s a mighty God.
Maybe your life is in chaos right now,
and that can be the central
theme of the world today.
That could be another theme for the world
Today, With God
there is no chaos. Chaos
may be abounding in your world.
But I’m here to tell you, in God’s world
there is no chaos.
At the beginning of time, there was chaos
and the Bible says He brought order.
He created the world out of this chaos.
He had the power to do it.
And He can bring order to our lives
as well, because He has the power
to make it happen.
It says in First Corinthians Chapter 14,
it says
God is not a God of confusion
but of peace.
And you can see or even perhaps even know
chaos in people’s lives.
Maybe you can see it around your
neighbor’s life or even in your own life.
But the Bible says not only does
He give good advice,
that’s what that wonderful counselor is,
He gives good advice, but
He also has the power to take the chaos
and bring order into your life.
See, my friends, human counsel goes
only so far.
I can get a lot of great help from people.
Matter of fact, I have to rely on
a lot of human wisdom at times.
And so what I’m talking about is,
is some wonderful counsel.
But guess what it falls short in?
It does not have the power,
the ability,
to empower someone to do what’s right.
In other words,
it may be the right way to go,
but it doesn’t give me the ability
to do it.
God gives us the ability to do it
because God has the power to do it.
That’s
why He’s not only a wonderful counselor,
but He’s the mighty God
because He has the power to do it all.
And that’s what I love about it.
And so the next one that we see is that
He’s the everlasting father, He’s unchanging.
When everything seems a change, when truth
seems to change, He is still the same.
And and truth stays the same.
Hebrews chapter one says, And You,
Lord, in the beginning,
laid the foundation of the earth, and
the heavens are the work of Your hands.
They are going to perish.
But You will remain.
And they will all grow old like a garment,
like a cloak.
You will fold them up and they will be changed.
But You are the same
and Your years will not fail.
See, my friend,
everything starts and ends with God.
And that’s one of the things I love about Him.
Finally,
let’s look at the Prince of Peace.
You know what I love about that?
It means that there’s no more conflict.
Right now
there’s maybe peace.
Maybe you’re looking for peace
for Christmas
and you can’t find peace right now.
Peace is elusive right now.
But I’m here to tell you that
the Prince of Peace wants to give you,
Give you peace for Christmas. All right?
The peace that He offers now,
just like the angels’ announcement
at His birth, it says, Glory
to God in the highest and on earth
Peace, goodwill toward man.
And so He offers the peace from God.
It’s interesting
that God’s the one that offers peace.
Man never says God
I want to make peace with You.
It’s God that says,
I want to make peace with man.
You and I were sinners
and when we sinned against God,
there’s enmity between God and man.
In other words, there’s strife.
There’s conflict between God and man.
We disobey
God, and sin separates us from God
because of our sin.
And because of what He does on the cross,
He dies in our place
and he brings us that pardon.
And so now we can have a relationship
with God, we can have peace with God.
But He also brings the peace of God,
it says in Philippians 4:7,
He brings peace to our lives.
And in our mind, maybe right now
your mind’s racing everywhere.
You don’t have peace in your thoughts.
You don’t have peace
in your heart. My friends,
God can give it to you this Christmas.
All you have to do
is receive it as a gift.
But there’s a time…
It also says there is a time in this world
that peace is going to come to us
in the future.
And He,
God, will finally set up His kingdom
and all the wars
and the conflict will come to an end.
I mean, look at another world right now.
We have wars in the Ukraine.
We have the war in Israel right now.
There’s multiple wars
and conflicts going around the world,
even as we speak right now.
But one day, my friend,
there’s going to be no more wars.
I’m looking forward to that.
So my friends, unto us, a child is born.
And who is us?
Is that everyone? No, in context,
Isaiah is speaking to those who believe,
those who rejoice in God, it says.
in Isaiah chapter nine, verse three,
He talks about this
as those who rejoice in God.
There’s no savior, no hope, no peace,
no eternal life, no mighty power,
no wise counsel for those who do not know
Jesus Christ.
And so my friends,
you can receive this gift.
His name is Jesus.
Jesus was born.
That’s what we celebrate at Christmas.
And He died on the Cross
in order to take away your sin.
And then three days later,
He rose from the grave.
That’s Easter. And my friend, He’s alive
today.
I’m not asking you to follow a dead
Christ.
I’m calling you to a risen Christ.
And you can receive this gift
by believing in Jesus
and ask Him to forgive you of your sins.
And He will.
All the joy, peace and council
comes into your life from that moment on.
If you want this in your life, then
I want you to say this prayer with me right now.
All right?
I want you to say this prayer with me
right now.
Dear Lord Jesus,
I am sorry for my sins.
And I believe that Jesus died on the Cross
for my sins.
And three days later
He rose from the grave.
I ask you to come into my life
and I want you to be the Master of my life
for now on.
Thank you for
Forgiving me.
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
My friends, if you just prayed that prayer,
then I want you to go to
WillGrahamLive.com
If you’re watching on something else,
go to WillGrahamlive.com
and click the button that says, “Yes
I prayed.”
We love to talk with you
and provide some resources
and walk alongside you
as you begin your relationship with Jesus.
Maybe you still have question. Guess what?
That’s okay too. Go to WillGrahamLive.com and click the button.
that says “I have questions.”
And I have friends
who can help answer those questions
and they’ll be thrilled
to talk with you. Again,
that’s WillGrahamlive.com
My friends, thank you so much
for being with us on this program.
And let me encourage you.
There are going to be others around you
that also needed this message of hope.
Please spread the word about this
Christmas special.
We’d love to have as many people
as possible to hear the Good News
of the Prince of Peace
this Christmas season.
God bless you all. Merry Christmas.
Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten
in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like
you could disappear?
Like you could fall and no one would hear.
So let that lonely feeling
Wash away.
Maybe there’s a reason
to believe you’ll be okay.
Because when you don’t
feel strong enough to stand,
you can reach.
You can reach out your hand.
and Someone will come
running and I know
they’ll take you home.
Even when the dark comes crashing through.
And when you need a friend to carry you.
And when you’re broken on the ground,
you will be found.
So let the sun come streaming in.
Because you’ll reach up
and you’ll rise again.
Lift your head
and look around and you will be found.
Oh yes, you will
be found.
There’s a place
where we don’t have to feel
unknown, no.
And every time you call out,
you’re a little less alone.
And if you only say the word
from across the silence,
your voice is heard.
Even when the dark comes crashing through
And when you need a friend to carry you
And when you’re broken on the ground
You will be found.
So let the sun come streaming in
because you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again
Lift your head and look around
and you will be found.
You will be found
in the shadows.
The morning is breaking.
All is new.
All is new.
Even when the dark comes crashing through,
When you need a friend to carry you
and when you’re broken on the ground,
you will be found.
So when the sun comes streaming in,
you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again.
Lift your head
And look around and you will be found.
listen, my friends, we’re so grateful
they took time out of your busy schedule
to join with us.
I want to wish you a Merry Christmas.
And thank you so much
for joining us. God bless.