December 27, 2024
Hello Grace Vineyard family and friends!
Happy Friday to you.
I hope you had a joyful Christmas celebration. Christmas Eve at Grace Vineyard was very special, with “Christmas Letters”. Thank you Ammee and Jay and all the crew that worked hard to share the Christmas story in such a beautiful, creative way. Here’s a few pics from the night that I grabbed from various social media posts and text messages. I always love seeing the room lit up by candlelight on Christmas Eve when we sing of our Savior’s birth. I hope I never get so familiar with this story that I lose my awe at the incredible, shocking, humbly loving, powerful story of how the Creator of the universe became a baby, born in poverty, announced to shepherds, in order to save the world. “For God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son…”!
On our last Sunday of Advent, I talked about Advent Love, and how God’s plan to deal with all the evil in our world was to redeem the very people who succumbed to sin, save us, forgive us, cleanse us, empower us, and spread His love through us until the whole world will be one day permeated with His love as the knowledge of the Glory of the Lord fills the earth as the waters cover the sea! This coming Sunday I want to take us back to the writings of Peter to learn about God’s shocking plan for us to “participate in the divine nature” in order to accomplish His vision for the world.
Check out these incredible words from the 2 Peter:
2 Peter 1:3-4
3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4 Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.
I mean, isn’t that an incredible statement: “participate in the divine nature”?! It’s almost too much to take in, and yet, that’s what the Bible teaches is God’s provision for us as we follow Jesus and join Him in His mission for our world. We’ll be meeting as usual at 9:30. I hope you’ll make every effort to get there a little early so you’ll be ready to fully engage in worship when we begin. If you can’t be with us in person on Sunday, here’s the link for the Zoom channel: Zoom Meeting ID 153 112 432, Passcode 684814, and here’s where you would go for the Facebook Live channel: facebook.com/gracevcf.
And if you want to catch up on last week’s message, you can catch it right here on our YouTube channel:
2024 End of Year Tax-Deductible Donations
I’ve been asked to make sure you know about IRS deadlines for tax-deductible donations. If you’re someone who files your taxes in such a way that you need to keep track of tax deductible donations to charities, you just will want to know that in order to get a tax deduction for your end of the year donations to Grace Vineyard, we need to receive them on or before December 31st. Specifically, if you mail a check on December 30, but it doesn’t get to our office until January 1st, the church is not allowed to record that donation as occurring in 2024. If you use online giving by December 31st, you’ll be just fine.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned 4 areas of donations that we are focusing on as the year ends, along with giving links that will designate our gifts for the specific areas we feel led to give to, and I’ll do that one more time:
These are the 4 specific areas we are targeting:
- Christmas Benevolence — helping those in need, especially single moms and widows this Christmas. Our benevolence fund was empty a few weeks ago, but our church family is coming through! Help us finish strong by clicking here – Christmas Benevolence Gifts – to donate. Yes, Christmas has passed, but we are still in the business of helping those in need, so we still need to fill up our benevolence funds.
- Missions — Every year we invite people to commit to give monthly for one year to support our missionaries. We add up those commitments and set a budget for missions (with a reserve pad), letting our missionaries know how much they can expect to receive from us. The commitments have fallen short and our missions fund has almost run dry. Click here – Missions Donations – to donate to our missionaries.
- Special Building Project – our giant GRACE sign is in serious need of refurbishing. We have a team who has spent a lot of time researching the best and most cost-effective ways to address the sign project. We have already received one large donation for the project, but we still need about $12,000 to complete the job. Click here – Building Fund – to donate to our building fund so we can refurbish the sign.
- Taking care of our local church – this is where the tithe (giving 10% of our income) comes in. Tithing pays for ongoing operational costs like insurance, electricity, gas, water, mortgage, staff salary (3 full time and 2 part time), office supplies, etc. Our general fund was also very low a few weeks ago, but that has started to turn around with your end of the year donations so far this month. That’s good news, but we haven’t completely turned this ship around yet, so we’re hoping everyone who calls Grace Vineyard their home will do their part — to give general tithes and offerings click here – General Donations
Several of you have already given generously as we close out the year, and we are so grateful for your partnership! Thank you!!
Cambodia Team is at L.A.X.
Steve, Irene, Brian, and Emmett are already at Los Angeles International Airport as I write this, getting ready to fly to Cambodia where they’ll meet up with Eddie and Bethany Roach and join their ministry there. Their flight is scheduled to leave at 10:30 tonight! It’s always exciting when a team from Grace Vineyard leaves our city to do the ministry of Jesus in some part of the world far from our own! Please keep them in your prayers. There is often spiritual warfare coming in opposition to missions work, and the greatest spiritual weapon we have is PRAYER! Before you know it, we’ll be in the middle of January and they’ll be back with us sharing the stories of how the Spirit of God worked through them. What an amazing joy to partner with Jesus in loving His world!!
And that’s all I have for you this week. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your weekend, and I look forward to encountering the Presence of God together with you on Sunday morning.
with love and blessings to each of you,
Ron Ohst