We understand that God created the depths of the heavens and the furthest reaches of the Galaxies.
And while we recognize the transcendence of God and his majesty and his greatness, a God who does not reveal himself to us is unknowable and ultimately unlovable.
If the only God we have is beyond the stars. What good is He?
Especially in times like these, we want a God who is near a God who understands our hopes and fears, our uncertainties and our difficulties.
If we look beyond the signs of the Christmas season and turn our eyes into the scripture.
Back to the first Christmas, we find a name given to the Christ child.
More important than many of us realize a powerful name that represents an idea that only God could have originated a truth that he only could bring forward himself a promise fulfilled with the coming of Emmanuel.
I’m David Jeremiah. Welcome to turning point.
The vocabulary of Christmas is very familiar words, like joy, celebration, worship, festivities, love, gift, giving, and carols fill our conversations.
But there is one word straight from the story of Christ’s birth.
That is the most important word of all that word is a symbolic name given to Jesus Emmanuel.
Why is Emanuel such an important word at Christmas? Because of what the name means?
It actually means God with us. And that is what Christmas is all about. You.
See Christmas celebrates the moment when the Son of God came to earth, to be with us, to love us, forgive us and save us.

Nothing illustrates Christmas more than the name Emmanuel.
So please join me for this timely message as we learn the many ways God is with us.
On today’s edition of Turning Point, when we spend every day with Jesus, he opens our eyes to the purpose he has given us in every moment.
When we spend every day with Jesus.
Every day can be an extraordinary day with God introducing Doctor David Jeremiah’s new 365 day devotional every day with Jesus inside this beautiful leather soft volume, you’ll find 365 daily inspirational readings from Dr Jeremiah paired with selected scripture to challenge and encourage you in your walk with God to take with you and read wherever and whenever you need to connect with Christ every day with Jesus is yours in appreciation of your gift of any amount in support of this program.
This devotional is also a favorite turning point resource to share with others.
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Let this daily devotional inspire you in the coming year to live every single day with Jesus for Jesus and like Jesus request yours from turning point today.
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Now here is Doctor Jeremiah with his message, God is with us.
It was 1944 when this happened, the German city in which Dietrich Ritzel was living was bombed and thousands of people were killed.
And after the bombing stopped, Dietrich was lying on a bench in the railroad station that was serving like a makeshift hospital.
And he was looking up through the partially destroyed roof as the fires were burning all over the city, he caught a glimpse of an inscription that was carved into one of the remaining sections that was still intact in the ceiling.
And the inscription read as follows beyond the stars.
There must live a gracious father lying there looking at that inscription.
He thought, I don’t want such a God.
I do not want a God who is beyond the stars. I need a God who’s here.
I need a God who’s present a God who’s available a God who knows and understands my situation.
And while we understand the transcendence of God and his majesty and his greatness, a God who does not reveal himself to us is unknowable and ultimately unlovable.
And we don’t want such a God.
Let’s be honest, if the only God we have is beyond the stars up there somewhere where we cannot ever reach or know He is of no value to us whatsoever.
We do not want a God who only dwells beyond the stars.
We want a God who dwells with us and who understands what it is like to live as we live here on this earth, especially at times like this.
We want someone who understands our pain and our suffering.
We want a God who is near and that is what we have in Jesus Christ.
That is the wonderful message of Christmas that God has come into the midst of our suffering to help us face the challenges of life.
And the Christmas name for our Lord that reminds us of this wonderful truth is Emmanuel.
Say that with me, Emmanuel. I love this name probably more than anything else because I have needed to know this so many times in my life.
There’s a lot of times in my life when, if I, I don’t know what to do except to cry out to God.
And when you cry out to God, it is so incredibly important to know He is here. He hears us.
He knows, not only does he answer our prayer, he knows what to do about a request.
So God is with us is a really important truth.
And I’d like to take just a few minutes today and give you four or five reasons why we should really embrace this truth, especially now.
And here’s the first one, we need to know that God is with us in our service.
You know, serving the Lord is the most wonderful thing you can do apart from becoming a Christian to be called to serve the Lord in some special way is the greatest thing you can ever know.
But sometimes even in the serving of the Lord, whether it’s in a class or whatever you do, however, God uses you, it can become worrisome as well.
People have served and served and served and sometimes your body is just weary and you look up and you got all this stuff to do and you’re just tired.
And I wanna remind you that God has specifically throughout the old and the New Testament, given his promises uniquely and wonderfully and purposefully to people who are involved in serving him.
Let’s just take for, for instance, Moses Moses had that incredible experience with the burning bush and God called him and said, Moses, I want you to go and talk to pharaoh and tell him, let my people go.
And Moses said to the Lord, oh my Lord, I’m not eloquent, neither before nor since you have spoken to your servant, but I’m slow of speech and I’m slow of tongue.
So the Lord said to him who has made man’s mouth, that’s a good start or who makes the mute, the death, the seeing or the blind.
Have not. I the Lord now therefore go Moses and I love this and I will be with your mouth.
I would be with your mouth.
Did you ever know anybody that you wish God was with their mouth?
That you maybe you should suggest this verse to them?
That they need to pray this prayer God be with my mouth. It clean some stuff up, wouldn’t it?
What God said to Moses?
You don’t have to worry about what I’ve called you to do because I’m gonna be with you.
Not just with you personally, you’re worried about what you’re gonna say.
I’ll be with your mouth when we go to serve the Lord, whatever it may be in some formal position or some informal everyday situation, we’re all servants of the Lord.
When we serve the Lord, God has promised that he goes with us.
We don’t have to do this by ourselves.
And frankly, if you try to pull this off on your own, you’re gonna be very tired, discouraged and frustrated.
But when you have God as your partner and you go together and God is with you.
It is a wonderful thing. God is with us when we serve him.
And secondly, God is also with us in our struggles.
We have at least two things that bind us together as Christians. Let me tell you what they are.
First of all, we’re all in the body of Christ, we’re all in the same. You may not like it.
You may not think you should be in the same family with somebody.
But if you’re a Christian, if you know Jesus Christ, you’re a part of God’s forever family.
We all have that in common. But here’s the other thing we have in common. We all have problems.
There’s no such thing as getting from the cradle to the grave or from the cross to the grave without problems.
The Bible doesn’t tell us if you become a Christian, all your problems will go away.
Most of us discovered when we became Christians, we got some problems we didn’t have before we got some new problems.
Everybody has problems. But in the group of people who have problems, there are two kinds of people, people who admit they have problems and people who don’t.
And if you don’t admit you have problems, you got a problem friends.
If you don’t admit your struggles, you don’t have any way of getting help.
God isn’t going to swoop in and save you from your problems until you come and acknowledge that you have them.
And the Bible says that He is always here for us when we’re going through stuff.
Here’s what it says in Hebrews 13, he himself has said Jesus has said I will never leave you nor forsake you.
So we may boldly say the Lord is my helper and I will not fear what can man do to me or Psalm 27 1.
The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?
And if you don’t know this one, write this down in your notebook. Here it is Isaiah 41 10.
Fear not for I am with you. Be not afraid for. I am your God. I will strengthen you.
I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. That’s who God is.
That’s what God does. He has come to help us in our struggles.
Sometimes when we’re going through stuff, we think God has left us.
And we only think that because we’re hurting so much, we don’t know how to look around and find Him, but I promise you He’s there.
He’s there with you in the midst of all of this.
And when you don’t know what to do, you know who you talk to. You know that God is there.
He is with us in our service. He is with us in our struggles.
He is with us in our sorrow.
When you have God with you, it doesn’t make the sorrow go away.
I mean, a lot of people think if you become a Christian, your problems are reduced.
And I’ve already said that isn’t true. When you become a Christian, you don’t lose your sorrow.
But here’s what the Bible says. The Bible says you sorrow, not as others who have no hope.
If you have a Christian sorrow, it’s not despair, it’s sadness.
I mean, who isn’t sad when you no longer have the opportunity to interact with somebody that you love someone in your family, a grandparent, a parent, a child uh goes to heaven unexpectedly or in due time and sorrow comes, but God is with us in our sorrow.
He draws near to those who are hurting. That’s what the Bible says, especially when you’re hurting.
God draws near to you. Isaiah says it this way.
When you pass through the waters, I’ll be with you and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.
When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned nor shall the flame scorch you.
When Jesus went back to heaven, the last thing he said to his disciples, I know you’re upset and you don’t know what’s gonna come next.
But here’s what I want to tell you.
When I go back to heaven, I wanna send somebody in my place. He called him another comforter.
Jesus was the first comforter and he’s going to send him another comforter.
So when Jesus went back to heaven, he dispatched 40 days later, the Holy Spirit into this world and the Holy Spirit came to be with us.
The Holy Spirit now is God with us.
And the Holy Spirit is in many respects better than if Jesus had remained on this earth.
Let me tell you why. If you study the life of Jesus.
When he was on this earth, he helped people because they came to him.
Jesus was localized, he lived out his whole ministry in a very small country. The size of Vermont.
Would you believe he never went outside the borders?
So if you needed Jesus to help you, you had to go where Jesus was and that limited his ability to help everyone.
So when he went back to heaven, he put in plan B, the second part of this and he sent his Holy Spirit and guess what?
The Holy Spirit lives within every person who has put their trust in Jesus Christ.
When you ask Christ to come and live within your heart, he comes to live within your heart.
And the spirit of Jesus comes to live within you as well. So the Holy Spirit fills everyone.
So Jesus isn’t in Palestine. Jesus isn’t in Israel. Jesus is in you.
He’s in you and you, he’s in your heart. He’s with you.
So when you go through these issues, you don’t have to go somewhere to get help.
The someone who gives you help is within you himself. He is with you. He is the Holy Spirit.
And I want to tell you when you’re feeling alone, you’re not.
If you’re a Christian, you are never alone. And that’s why Christians say this to me.
When I was going through that pastor, I never felt the presence of God like I did during that time when everyone else is gone, God draws near and makes His presence known.
And that is the wonderful truth of Emmanuel. And then God is with us in our stumbling in our sinfulness.
You say, well, I’ve sinned God’s gone. I messed up. I don’t see God again.
No, God doesn’t leave you when you sin. That is both an encouragement and a conviction.
At the same time, you may think that if you do this, God will leave you alone.
But if you’re a Christian, he’s not going to leave you alone.
The Bible says that Christmas is about something very special, the forgiveness of sin.
She will bring forth a son and you will call His name Jesus for He shall save his people from their sin.
Why did Jesus come to this earth as a baby?
Be born into human flesh and walk among us for all these years without sin and go to the cross, hang between two thieves, give up his life.
He did it because that was the only way that we could ever know God.
Our sin had to be paid for.
And the only one who could pay for it was someone who was like us and someone who was God.
And so Jesus came and he took that upon himself and paid the penalty for all our sin.
First John 49 and 10. Is it this way?
And this is love not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the satisfaction for our sin.
That’s what the word propitiation means.
So when we mess up, when we do things we shouldn’t do, don’t get the idea that when you do that, God leaves you, he doesn’t leave you.
He may discomfort you. He may come after you.
He may give you a bad time until you get right. But he doesn’t leave you.
He never leaves you A few years ago. Someone gave me a book called America’s least competent criminals.
It’s gotta be the funniest book I have in my library in many respects.
For instance, in 1989 in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, this guy is arrested on suspicion of being a criminal who’s breaking in all the vending machines, all over town and stealing all the money And nobody can prove that it’s him.
They think they know it’s him but there’s no cameras and they, no one has caught him in the act, but he gets in a lot of trouble and they bring him before the judge for an arraignment and the judge was pretty convinced that he did it, but lacking any significant proof, they decided to let him go on bond, they set his bond at $400 and the guy opened his backpack and paid for the bond in quarters.
Let me tell you something.
And I don’t want this to be a down moment, but I want it to be a truth moment.
Everything you have done that you shouldn’t have done this week.
You did it in the sight of Almighty God in his presence. We think we’re so smart.
We think we get by with stuff.
We think we can do things that are wrong and nobody will ever find out.
But let me give you the distilled wisdom of being a pastor for 50 years.
I’ve watched this over the years. Here’s what I’ve learned. Nobody gets away with it.
Nobody ever gets away with it. The Bible says it this way.
Be sure your sin will find you out. Be sure your sin will find you out.
I put the scripture on the, on the screen. You might want to write that one down.
You may have a seven year fuse, you may have done something seven years ago.
You think you finally got past it, you beat it but you better not relax because be sure your sin will find you out.
Just think what it does to your relationship when you sin and you don’t deal with it.
Just think of the stain it puts on your relationship with God. Let me give you a little illustration.
This comes out of having also been a father of four kids and nothing like what I’m going to tell you has ever happened in my family.
But I understand all this. There was this young man who was told by his father not to go to a party because his father knew that something was going on at that party that he didn’t want his son to be involved in.
Ok, then I won’t go.
But when he left the house, he began to realize that all of his buddies were at the party.
So he goes to the party.
Unfortunately, for him, someone at the party calls his father and said, did you know that your son was at this party?
Worst thing that can ever happen to a kid?
And his father said no, but I’ll take care of it.
So his boy comes home and his father says to him, well, what do you do tonight?
Well, then I went bowling where you’ve been gone a long time, son while there was a long line at the bowling alley.
How did you do? I did good. What did you bowl? Now?
I could go on with that interchange.
But let me just stop the story right there and ask you this question.
You’re the father at this particular moment. What is most upsetting to you?
The fact that your son went to a party that you told him not to go to or the fact that he’s lying to you about what he did.
And if you’re a parent, I didn’t even ask for a vote, you know what the answer to that is.
So let me ask you this question. Friends.
Do you think our father in heaven is any different than that? Isn’t that an interesting thought?
Do you think when we stumble and fall, he wants us to go up trying to cover it up when we know that he knows everything that we’ve done?
Don’t you think he would be more blessed if we would just come and say, please forgive me.
I did wrong. I acknowledge my sin.
Let me ask you go back to the story for a moment.
Suppose that nothing is said on the part of the father after that confrontation and nothing is said on the part of the son.
What kind of relationship do you think you have in that family?
When the father knows you lied to him, you know, you lied to him and nobody’s talking about it.
You see the only way you can make that right.
The only way you can clean that up is to confess.
And that’s what first John 19 says if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin and what’s out cleanse us from all our righteousness, you know, like any human father longs for reconciliation when something is wrong in the family.
So are Emanuel Longs for reconciliation from those who have stumbled and walked away from him. God loves you.
He’s gonna be with you no matter what you do.
But if you have failed him, don’t try to cover it up.
Can you, can you just stop for a moment and think of the absurdity of trying to hide something from God who knows the very heart of heart, the intention that was there before anything ever happened.
So just acknowledge it and get it right.
And God says, He will forgive you and restore you and you can go on with your relationship with Him.
Finally, God is with us in his searching.
The Bible says that Jesus Christ came to this earth to seek and to save that which is lost.
God is with us to save us.
He came into this world for one purpose that He might bring many sons to glory.
I like to say it this way. Don’t forget this.
God is with us so that one day we can be with Him.
God came here to save us from our sin and make us heaven ready so that when we die, we can go to be with Him forever.
That’s what he said to his disciples when they were so discouraged.
He said in my father’s house are many mansions if it were not.
So I would have told you I go to prepare a place for you.
And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself that listen to this where I am there.
You may be also, that’s the whole key to His coming to this earth that where He is, we may be also, he wants us to be in heaven.
He wants you to be in heaven. He came down here.
He was born as a baby, became part of humanity. He was Emanuel God with us.
He is with us so that one day we can be with Him. Are you ready to be with God?
Have you put your trust in Him? Have you trusted Him as your savior?
You see, that’s the whole meaning of Christmas if we don’t get it right. We miss the whole deal.
Christmas is the greatest salvation story in all of the schedule of the year.
Christmas is for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.
And I wanna ask you today, if you haven’t trusted Him as your savior, will you do it?
Will you allow the ministry of our music, the ministry of the word of God, the scriptures, the reminder again, from the Bible that God loves you and he sent his son to save you.
Will you accept Him as your savior?
I wanna show you a verse that I probably have read this many times, but I never saw it like I saw it this week.
Here it is, this is the whole message I preached today in one verse.
It’s Deuteronomy 31 8. Here’s what it says. The Lord. He is the one who goes before you.
He will be with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you so do not fear and do not be dismayed.
Wow, that’s when you put on the dashboard in your car up on your mirror by your bed and then you will know that the Lord is the one who goes before you.
He will be with you. He will never leave you. He will never forsake you.
So don’t be afraid and don’t be dismayed.
Doctor Jeremiah will return to close today’s program right after this. Thank you for watching.
Turning point. When you support this program with a gift of any amount, Doctor Jeremiah would like to thank you by sending you every day with Jesus his new 365 day devotional for 2022.
Inside this beautiful leather soft volume, you’ll find 365 daily inspirational readings from Dr Jeremiah paired with selected scripture to challenge and encourage you in your walk with God.
This devotional is also perfect for sharing with others And with a generous year end gift of $120 or more.
In support of this program, you will receive a four pack of every day with Jesus so that you can give your loved ones a copy and help them discover Christ’s presence in their life as well.
Your support helps this program continue on this station and keeps the ministry on firm financial footing into the new year contact turning point today.
And now with one last word for today’s program, here is Dr Jeremiah it is one thing to say, God is with us at Christmas time.
But there’s a question we have to ask is God with me.
Yes, he’s with the whole world as He superintends His creation and purposes.
But for God to be with us personally, we must receive the gift of His son whose birth we celebrate at Christmas.
When you accept Jesus as your savior.
God will come to live in you personally forever to encourage you as you take your first steps of faith.
I would like to send you two gifts from turning point.
One is our booklet called Your Greatest Turning Point and the other is our monthly devotional magazine Turning Points.
They will explain how to meet Christ and offer guidance as you learn to follow him, we will send these gifts to you free of charge when you contact us at turning point today.
Back again, this year, the home for Christmas channel from David Jeremiah and Turning Point Ministries fill your season with all your favorite holiday traditions, music, carols, laughter, scripture, pageants, inspirational bible teaching and more.
Start streaming your Christmas favorites and discover new ones completely free and enjoy the home for Christmas channel at home in the car or anywhere you need a little Christmas.
Simply go to turning point dot TV.
Next time on turning point, make the season Bright Christmas on Broadway at the Historic Beacon Theater, featuring an inspirational message from David Jeremiah with musical guests the Gaither vocal band, the big band Christmas Sound of Charles Billingsley and Michael Sanchez and the voices of Lee Christmas comedy with Dennis Swanberg and hosted by Sheila Walsh.
Join us next time for our Christmas special.
Make the season Bright Christmas on Broadway with David Jeremiah here on turning point experience the setting of the Bible first hand when you travel with David Jeremiah to Israel in spring 2022 join Doctor Jeremiah as he teaches from God’s Word in the very locations where biblical events took place.
It’s a Christian travel experience that strengthens your faith, refreshes your soul and makes the Bible come alive.
Don’t miss this trip of a lifetime call or go online for more details.