Gospel.com Blog

Need help getting into the holiday spirit this Christmas? If you’re looking for a little Christmas insight, take a look at these holiday essays and articles from various Gospel.com community ministries—they’re online Christmas classics that are freshly relevant each time the holidays roll around:

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Forget the ten lords-a-leaping and five golden rings—this Christmas, listen to the twelve voices of Christmas! The Twelve Voices of Christmas is an audio drama that tells the story of the first Christmas from twelve different perspectives, from the angel Gabriel to the tyrant Herod to the Wise Men. You can listen to each story in MP3 format, or read a text transcript.

Twelve Voices was written by Woodrow Kroll of Back to the Bible. If you enjoy this Christmas drama, be sure to also tune in to his daily Back to the Bible radio program, where he and co-host Tami Weissert delve into a different Bible study topic each day of the week.

One of the most recognizable elements of the Advent season is music—in fact, it’s unlikely you’ve made it this far into the holiday season without hearing Christmas music being played somewhere, whether it was at a church service or being piped over the PA system at the mall.

Listening to the music of Christmas can be a great way to walk yourself through the anticipation and eventual joy of the Advent season. Here are a few resources from the Gospel.com community to help you better appreciate the sounds of Christmas.

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Christmas is coming! For most of us, that means more than a little stress: there are presents to buy, family get-togethers to plan or attend, holiday traffic to contend with. For most of the “Christmas season,” it’s hard to find time to stop and take a deep breath, let alone ponder the spiritual significance of the holiday. It’s easy to put off quiet meditation and worship until Christmas Day itself—and even then, you’ll be lucky to get in a few hours of quiet before the relatives show up for the big Christmas dinner.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Christmas is a celebration of a world-changing event—the birth of Jesus Christ. If we put off thinking about the meaning of Christmas until December 25, we rob ourselves of a chance to experience the peace and joy of the Christmas story.

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It’s Black Friday! Thanksgiving is over, and Christmas is on the horizon—but unfortunately, it’s easy for us to let this time between Thanksgiving and Christmas become a celebration of materialism and not of the coming Christ child. For Christians, Christmas can be a delicate balance between giving and good stewardship. So how do we manage our spending in a way that honors God?

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The status quo is never ‘”good enough.” And so, once a year, the staff of Hollywood Jesus gathers at Renton, Washington’s Harambee Church, for the Hollywood Jesus Annual Gathering—there to revisit HJ’s foundational goals, build bonds of fellowship, and hone skills in order to bring the best possible cultural insights to the web.

Better yet, the event is also open to readers, pastors, and writers from other publications! On tap for this year’s workshops—December 29 through 31—are writer and critic Jeffrey Overstreet, recently honored at the City of Angels Film Festival; Peter T. Chattaway, film critic for CT Movies and Books and Culture; Mike Gunn, Harambee pastor and co-founder of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church; James Harleman, Mars Hill pastor; author, animation scholar and educator Ken Priebe; Hollywood Jesus founder David Bruce; HJ Managing Editors Greg and Jenn Wright; and HJ Channel Editors Melinda Ledman and Maurice Broaddus.

That’s an impressive lineup of Christians on the cutting edge of faith and culture. If that sounds like something you’d like to participate in, you can read more about the Gathering and get registration info over at Hollywood Jesus.

Need some help getting into the Thanksgiving spirit this year? With Thanksgiving right around the corner, here are some holiday-themed resources from ministries in the Gospel.com community.

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Thanksgiving is coming. Do you feel thankful?

The Bible tells us to “always give thanks to God the Father for everything” (Ephesian 5:20). But what does that really mean—are we expected to literally say prayers of thanks to God as we go through the day? Prayer is a wonderful way to thank God… but what if there was a more tangible way to express our gratitude?

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Want to make a different in somebody’s life this holiday season? This Thanksgiving and Christmas, consider giving a gift that will make a real impact: volunteer!

If you thought that Christian service meant committing to years of overseas mission work, think again! ChristianVolunteering.org is a new site that can put you in touch with over 1,000 ministries and more than 2,000 volunteer and short-term missions opportunities. With so many opportunities, there’s almost certainly a niche that matches your skills and interests. Here’s just a few of the ways you can serve this holiday season:

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They came, they dressed up in silly costumes, they loaded themselves down with candy—and now that Halloween is over, Americans are already gearing up for Christmas, still six weeks out. (In fact, if you were paying attention, you probably saw Christmas sales cropping up a month or two ago.) What’s the deal with our cultural obsession with holidays… and with our tendency to recast them as massive commercial events?

Those are the questions asked by Jim Dahlman in a recent post over at The Culture Beat. He sheds a little light on the strange blend of consumer culture and religious tradition in our holidays, and on the way that both approaches influence each other. Give it a read. And get started on that Christmas list….