Waiting (Advent)
Notes
Transcript
The Pray for the filling of the Holy Spirit as you bring this welcome to the people. Ask the Lord to check your rising emotions and help you get through this greeting, as you stand before the people with an awareness of their desperate need and the Savior’s massive love.
Gospel Call (BLAKE BASSHAM)
To all who are weary and need rest,
To all who mourn and long for comfort,
To all who feel worthless and wonder if God cares,
To all who fail and desire strength,
To all who sin and need a Savior,
This church opens wide her doors with a welcome from Jesus Christ, the
Ally of his enemies, the Defender of the guilty, the Justifier of the
inexcusable, the Friend of sinners. Welcome!
THIS IS AMAZING GRACE
HIGHLANDS
SURELY GOODNESS
SCRIPTURE READING (BLAKE BASSHAM)
And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
THE WORD OF THE LORD
PEOPLE: THANKS BE TO GOD
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
There is a mighty difference between passivity and preparation.
Passivity is an acceptance of whatever happens without a response.
Preparation is the process of planning, training, studying, of proactively making oneself ready.
Passivity is giving up.
Preparation is gearing up.
Jesus tells his disciples, to go and wait for the promise of God, which was that the Holy Spirit is coming, to give them the power needed to be his witnesses. This is not a waiting of passivity, this is a waiting of preparation.
We often associate waiting with inaction, but waiting is faith in action.
Waiting is one of the most difficult disciplines of life, but true faith is able to wait for the fulfillment of God’s purposes in God’s time. But while we are waiting, we must be obeying.
I am terrible at waiting, I always have been. I am by nature an impulsive person. I’m not a waiter, I’m a doer. If I have an option to wait at a stoplight or stop sign, or I can drive a longer way, saving me no time, I will take the longer way because it keeps me moving. This is not because I am an efficient person, but because I am an impatient person.
And there are pictures of this in the world all around us, that show the same struggle most of us have with waiting. At amusement parks you can buy a fast pass that gets you immediately to the front of the line. When you go out to dinner, you can order an appetizer that literally says, if you’re too hungry to wait for your meal, eat a smaller meal first. With every tv streaming app you buy, you have the ability to purchase it with adds or without adds for $50 more a month. How many of us buy it without ads?
You bet, every stinking time, no matter how much extra. We struggle with waiting.
We’re not awesome at waiting, because we’re not awesome with patience. If we are forced to wait we become frustrated. And waiting is the one thing, no matter how many times we do it, we never get better at. It’s always hard to wait. And it shows us just how little we actually control things around us.
The season leading up to planting the Garden church has been a long season of waiting. We have seen so many people come and go within the last three and a half years. And we saw just how much preparation the Lord needed to do, in order for us to truly rely on him in our work.
Looking back at this past three and a half years, if you were to ask me, what the hardest part about planting a church has been, I’d tell you without hesitation, it is the waiting.
We don’t get better at waiting the more we do it, but we do get better at trusting the one who has called us to wait. And that is what we are going to begin doing today as a church, planning, studying, training, proactively preparing ourselves by learning to more fully trust the one who has called us to wait.
As Brother Blake said, Today is the first day of Advent, where we wait together on the coming of the Lord. Advent is historically known as the beginning of the Christian Year. Yet it is quite different from our American idea of New Year’s, as it does not begin with a lot of frantic activity, but rather it begins with waiting. We are to go and wait for the coming of the Lord. And that is what the term advent means, “coming.”
And while we as the church, can say “didn’t the Lord already come? Isn’t that what we celebrate on Christmas? Why do we need to reenter a season of waiting each year?”
Because we as Christians are not just celebrating one coming of Christ, but three.
The coming of Christ in the incarnation. This is what we celebrate each Christmas.
The coming of Christ in fulfillment of his promises to judge the living and the dead. This is typically coined his “second coming.”
And we wait on the coming of Christ right now, in our present moment through the power of the Holy Spirit.
We see Jesus tell his apprentices that before they can depart from Jerusalem and do anything else, they needed to go and wait. With that, he was lifted up in a cloud and taken out of their sight.
They must have been dumbfounded, just standing there looking up for who knows how long, before some angels came along and said, “yo bros, why y’all looking up in the clouds? He will come again in the same way that he left.”
So there these apprentices of Jesus were, frustrated that this one they thought was the Messiah did not come and defeat the Roman empire, restoring the kingdom of Israel. They were frustrated that Jesus, their friend, their brother, had left them. And they were frustrated that they were given strange instructions to go and wait on the Spirit to come, before Jesus would ever come back again in his glory. They had no idea what they were even waiting on. That was frustrating. They just wanted clear instructions, something to go do in the meantime. But Jesus told them to go and wait. Brothers and sisters, there is never going to be a shortage of things to do. We need not ever worry about running about running out of work.
But if we are doing that work in our own power and strength, we will become worn out trying to carry the world on our shoulders, and mad at those who aren’t working as hard as us.
We will be fueled and powered by our pride and not the Holy Spirit.
This will cause us to present ourselves as poor witnesses for the gospel of grace to the world looking to us to show them Jesus.
So before we can do anything, the call is always to go and wait for the coming of the Spirit.
Prepare yourselves, by obeying him.
When we wait for Him to show up before we just start working, our minds become more steady, our direction becomes more clear, and our reliance moves from our self to the Holy Spirit. Where we are weak, he is strong. And that is what we are going to do in this advent season. Prepare ourselves to receive his presence, by waiting on the Lord.
Throughout Scripture God always prepares a place before that place can receive his presence. He prepared the heavens and the earth. He prepared the tabernacle. He prepared the temple. And he prepared us through the work of Jesus on the cross.
So, before we go and do all of the work that needs to be done. We are going to prepare this place to receive his presence. We are going to position our hearts and minds to wait on the coming of the Holy Spirit, and what better season to do that than Advent.
But how must we wait on the Spirit this advent?
We are going to ABIDE.
In John 15:5 Jesus says,
I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.
We can do nothing apart from Jesus. So, we must abide:
Realize our need for Jesus. Return to him. And Repeat as often as possible.
We are fully dependent on him and we confess that to one another and the world as we abide.
We are going to abide through his word, our worship and with one another.
We are going to trust in his word. We cannot trust who we do not know. And when it comes to knowing God, we don’t have to guess…for he has spoken. His word shapes our knowledge of who he is and how he loves.
We are going to be transformed through our worship. The world is consistently conforming us to look more like it. But he wants to transform us to look more like him. Our worship is not just singing but it is a transformed life lived out through trust in his word. Our worship is demonstrated through our lives lived in response to who he is and how he loves.
And finally we are going to gather with one another. With one another we are better. The reason that I do not order an appetizer every meal is because my wife is with me. She makes me better, and encourages me to wait. The reason the disciples or apprentices of Jesus were able to go to Jerusalem and wait is because they had one another. With one another we are better. As believers, we are the broken body of Christ. Edifying one another, encouraging one another, equipping one another, and trusting that the Holy Spirit will show up as we invite him in to this place we have prepared by proclaiming and trusting his word. The world knows us as apprentices of Jesus through our rhythms and our relationships. The problem so often with the church is that we lean into our identity as sinners instead of our identity as saints. This makes it hard for the outside world to tell us apart from the rest of the world. We are not dependent on our emotions, our desires, or our ability to figure it out and get it done. We are dependent on our Lord Jesus. Praise God we are dependent on our Lord Jesus.
Advent is a season of waiting on the coming of our Lord. We demonstrate our dependence in our waiting. We demonstrate his power in our waiting. We teach the world around us, who is always plotting and scheming, always on the move, that the best way to catch up with God, is to slow down and wait.
We are waiting to celebrate the coming of Christ in the incarnation at Christmas, we are waiting to celebrate the second coming of Christ when he returns to call us home, and we are waiting for the coming of Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit right now.
We cry “Come Holy Spirit, You are welcome here.”
I want you to set yourself up in a posture to receive this morning.
Position yourself to wait on the Lord, ask him to show up and see if he won’t answer you.
I invite you to use this time to pray, to sing, and to trust him.
(BLAKE BASSHAM)
God, we come to you openhanded, holding our imperfect and incomplete lives before you. We need you to come to us, to rescue us, to restore us, today and everyday.
Advent comes each year and asks us to quietly pause, and to remember that we do not bring the kingdom of God to the world through our own effort or on our own timeline. We wait for one outside of us and outside of time. We wait for the coming King.
SING:
HOLY SPIRIT
ABIDE
I WILL WAIT FOR YOU
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
Let’s read this Psalm altogether.
Our soul waits for the Lord;
he is our help and our shield.
For our heart is glad in him,
because we trust in his holy name.
Let your steadfast love, O Lord, be upon us,
even as we hope in you.
