Advent Retreat (The Art of Waiting) - First Meditation (Awaiting Our Lord)
FIRST POINT: Living in Expectation
PRESENTATION
35 Let your loins be girt and lamps burning in your hands.
36 And you yourselves like to men who wait for their lord, when he shall return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may open to him immediately.
37 Blessed are those servants whom the Lord, when he cometh, shall find watching. Amen I say to you that he will gird himself and make them sit down to meat and passing will minister unto them.
38 And if he shall come in the second watch or come in the third watch and find them so, blessed are those servants.
39 But this know ye, that if the householder did know at what hour the thief would come, he would surely watch and would not suffer his house to be broken open.
40 Be you then also ready: for at what hour you think not the Son of man will come.
ILLUSTRATION
SECOND POINT: Living for our heavenly homeland
PRESENTATION
17 ¶ Brethren, join in imitating me, and mark those who so walk as you have an example in us. 18 For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.§ 20 But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 ¶ who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself.
ILLUSTRATION
THIRD POINT: Perseverance to the end
PRESENTATION
18 For I reckon that the sufferings of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come that shall be revealed in us.
19 For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God.
20 For the creature was made subject to vanity: not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope.
21 Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God.