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Stepping Through Christmas - Week Three

December 13, 2026 0 0

 

Jesus is the Door, The "I Am" Dimension

 

This week reveals the great Christmas twist: Jesus doesn’t just walk through the doorway — He himself IS the doorway – he is the entryway to new life with God. Thinking back to hte wardrobe door to Narnia, Jesus is the doorway leading from a cold, confined survival space into a vast new vibrant world.

 

1. Step On Through -- Matthew 1: 18-25

Theme: How God helps us to face obstacles.
 

Context: This reading gives us a compelling glimpse of Joseph’s inner psyche. He is full of complex emotions and thinks he is facing a brick wall. There’s no way through. Then an angel comes to him in a dream and shows him how to find a door – a way through -- there is life and wonder on the other side, he can trust, he can take that step.
 

Discussion Questions:
 

  • What would have happened if Joseph had turned away from this obstacle and quietly divorced Mary?
     
  • We humans are good at holding lots of hypotheticals in our heads. Joseph can picture what can happen if he stays with Mary and what could happen if he leaves her. But we’re often bad at stepping outside of our own experience to view it from the outside. How does God use dreams, prayers, conversations, art and the natural world to help us step outside our problems and see them from the outside, not with cold detachment but with compassion? Do you have any experiences of suddenly getting a new insight on a situation when you’ve seen it from the perspective of a compassionate outsider rather than a self-critical insider?
     

Personal Reflection: Where are the impassable walls you are facing in your life that you could bring to God in prayer?

 

2. The Narrow Gate -- Matthew 7: 13-14

Theme: Choosing the small, unpretentious door of Christ over the wide, crowded entrances of everything else competing for our attention.
 

Context: Here Jesus touches on the philosophical issue of ‘free will. We are not forced to follow him, rather we are free to make the choice to do so. Christianity is not so much a set of rules as it is a relationship. And we all know relationships require investment and perseverance!
 

Discussion Questions:
 

  • What is Jesus driving at when he describes ‘the narrow gate’? Why is it narrow, what makes it so? Why is following Jesus not a wide escalator or even a flume that sends us shooting down with no friction? As a group explore what the analogy means and how you interpret it.
     
  • At Christmas there are a lot of wide-open gates and broad roads urging us on to drive on in, park up, and promptly empty our wallets. What are the wide-open gates we should be way of this season? They might be literal doors or simply paths we just don’t want to go down.
     

Personal Reflection: What are the important relationships and connections you are wanting to make this Christmas – who do you want to contact, remember, meet up with?

 

3. The Door of Faith -- Acts 14: 21-28

Theme: Celebrating how God opened a door of faith to the entire world.
 

Context: Acts of the Apostles came together as a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, sharing the same authorship, and recounts how the Jesus movement rapidly spread across borders and boundaries reshaping entire communities.
 

Discussion Questions:
 

  • The apostles’ account depicts how geography and demographics are no limitation on faith. This story started somewhere but it is for everyone everywhere. How confident are we in our local communities and churches that we have a story that started ‘somewhere’ but is for ‘everywhere’?
     
  • What are our stories of doors opening this Christmas? Where have we seen doors and hearts opening to Jesus?
     

Personal Reflection: What are our prayers for clarity and openness about our faith this Christmas?
 

Head to Week Four!