A Festival of Nine Carols & Lessons — Free Stuff Friday on Monday

I didn’t have the time to post this on Friday last week (for Free Stuff Fridays), so I will post it today for all those pastors and music/worship leaders frantically trying to come up with a service for Christmas Eve because they have also been extremely busy in the Christmas season. This will also be great for a family looking to do something special on Christmas Eve or during the Advent season.

This is a Festival of Nine Carols and Lessons, all ready-made and ready to go, complete with a narration manuscript and Gospel invitation at the end. The numbers are for our Christmas song book, but the hymns and carols are easily found on the internet or in most hymnals.

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If you use this, please make a comment to let me and others know how, where, and when you used it to encourage us all.

The Christmas Psalms

The Sacredness of the Common

Submitting to God’s work in the commonplace of life recognizes that heart-shaping does not go on and off the clock. God remains attentive to our hearts, to what we are becoming, even if we ourselves are not (nor can we always be)…. If God is always paying attention, there is no room to hide. Those who segment life sometimes do so to avoid dealing with the sacredness of the commonplace.

Reggie McNeal, A Work of Heart (San Francisco: Jossei-Bass, 2011), 178.

The Christmas Psalms

My Soul, Wait Thou Only upon God

He who worships truly carries his Holy of Holies with him. He who takes his own fire need never complain of the cold, and with wood and fire all prepared, he can find or he can build an altar upon any mount. Happy is the soul that has learned to lean upon God, who can say, amid all the distractions and interventions of man, ‘My soul wait thou only upon God.’

Henry Burton in Wilbur M. Smith, Peloubet’s Select Notes on the International Bible Lessons for Christian Teaching: 1958 (Boston: W. A. Wilde Co., 1957), 381.

Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness

We must worship God in the beauty of holiness. We do this, when approaching him, in the name of Jesus Christ, and through the assistance of his Spirit, all our faculties are fixed and engaged in this work; our expressions accompanied by suitable affections, by holy longings and thirstings of soul after God. In short, when the whole man is dedicated to the solemn act of worshipping God.

Edward Bickersteth, A Treatise on Prayer

The Splendour of His Royal Dignity

His [Jesus Christ’s] presidency over the church triumphant will continue for ever. Jesus, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood; but his presidency over the worship and services of the church triumphant will constitute, if not the principal, at least one of the main functions of his priesthood in eternity. The splendour of his royal dignity will never eclipse the memorials of his death as a priest on Calvary, which he carried along with him to the throne of God. No; while eternal ages roll on, he will appear in the midst of the throne as a lamb that hath been slain, and by his appearance in this character he will continue to direct, enliven, and stimulate the praises of saints and angels for ever and ever. As believers in the church on earth are sweetly constrained, by the love of God in giving his Son to save them, and the love of the Son in giving his life a ransom for them, to devote their persons and services to God, so the saints in glory will be sweetly, yet powerfully, influenced by the same motives, in prosecuting the services of the celestial world; and these motives will be maintained in constant operation by the saints in light having perpetually in their view the memorials of that death by which they were redeemed to God out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.

George Stevenson, The Offices of Christ