The Repeated Announcement

Continuing on with this season of God’s announcements. We can almost feel as if it all seems too repetitive.

Every year we hear the announcement as told to Zechariah and Elizabeth.

Every year we hear the announcements as told to Mary and Joseph.

And each year we spend a month just thinking of what God announced to them, how they responded and what he did for them.

So the Christmas season, as well as Subara in preparation for it. Is it not all repetitive? Why does the church feel the need to celebrate what continually seems like old news?

What is fascinating about the news of the Gospel is that to us hearing it 2,000 years later, it naturally comes to us differently every time.

This message is both old but ever new.

The reason is not because the church is repeating something, but it’s making a memorial. And in the Bible when you make a memorial—when you do something in memory like Jesus commanded— you make presents that thing.

The church presents it again as if this thing you have heard for the first time. Why?! Not because people in the world haven’t received and accepted this news but because people in this church haven’t received this good news.

In the gospel, we see Zechariah knows there will be a messenger coming in the Spirit of Elijah to prepare the way of the Lord. He is someone who had repeated the Scriptures all throughout his life. But when it finally came to relate to his own life, it was hard to believe. It was only after some repetition and silence, Zechariah came around to believe.

This repetition in the life of the Church has to help us arrive at a few truths.

First, it’s help us believe that God is working all things in our life, the good and the bad, for our own good and benefit.

Second, it’s to help us know that God exists. We sometimes live as if God doesn’t exist. And if we do believe that he exists we don’t always believe that he is a good God, a loving Father, who has sent his son Jesus Christ to die for my sins. We sometimes live believing that what God has allowed and permitted is for us to lose. In Jesus Christ, we have seen that he not only exists but to bring us to knowledge of God.

Sometimes its to get us to a point and think, “We never knew God was like that.”

We repeat this news because we sin so often that we need the words of forgiveness to be spoken into our hearts. That God can recover what was forfeited by our sin. To bring us from strangers of God to children—from enemies to beloved.

We give eternal thanks to God for this church he has given us, which never gives up on reminding us God is here, he loves us, and wishes for us to live and walk in peace. For that, we give thanks and praise to Christ, his Father and the living Holy Spirit, now at all times and forever.