Longing (Advent)
Notes
Transcript
PRAY OVER YOURSELF:
Holy Spirit fill me as I welcome your people.
Calm my rising emotions as I share this greeting.
Give me your confidence in my weakness.
Help me stand before your people with a real awareness of their desperate need to know the Father’s boundless love and the Son’s gentle heart. AMEN
Gospel Call (WORSHIP LEADER)
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!
HOW LOVELY IS YOUR DWELLING PLACE
IN CHRIST ALONE
I SPEAK JESUS
SCRIPTURE READING (JAMES KAY)
For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
“Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles,
and sing to your name.”
And again it is said,
“Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.”
And again,
“Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles,
and let all the peoples extol him.”
And again Isaiah says,
“The root of Jesse will come,
even he who arises to rule the Gentiles;
in him will the Gentiles hope.”
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Last week we began this Advent series considering what it means to wait.
We said we can wait passively, just sitting on our hands, not doing anything. Or we can wait in preparation, planning, studying, praying, proactively making the best use of our time, because the days are evil, as Scripture says. The days, and the world and the flesh and the devil want us to wait in passivity. The Lord wants us to wait in preparation.
But in both cases:
The waiting is the hardest part
Everyday you get more yard
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart
The waiting is the hardest part
That was from the pen of the great prophet Tom Petty, and he sums up in this chorus what many of us feel about waiting. It is painful. It can result in anxiety and in us acting too soon. Waiting is indeed the hardest part, right?
Well it depends on what you are waiting for.
Are you waiting at the DMV to get your license renewed?
Are you waiting to see if you have all of your paperwork in order to get passports?
Are you waiting to get a deep cleaning or a root canal at the dentist’s office?
I used these examples because these are three things that I have experienced waiting for, and the waiting was the worst. It was almost as bad as what I was waiting for.
But God’s Word, his Holy Scripture gives us a word that transforms how we who believe and who trust in him are to wait…hope.
Hope is formed through expectation.
This is more like a child waiting on Christmas morning to open their presents.
Or an overworked individual waiting on a long anticipated and much needed vacation.
Or a Mama waiting on the birth of a child, that she has nurtured and cared for over the nine months that the baby was being intricately woven together in her womb.
We are not to wait as the world waits. Anxiously. Impatiently. With frustration. No, we are to wait with hope.
We join the psalmist when he says in Psalm 62,
“For God alone, O my soul, wait expectantly, for he is your hope.”
Advent, this season that we are in right now, means “coming” and it precedes Christmas. The coming of the Lord in the incarnation. Advent is a time of fasting, or going without, but it is done with great anticipation awaiting the Christmas feast.
Much like Lent which is a time of fasting for 40 days preceding the Easter feast. Or when we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord and savior Jesus.
We celebrate his coming to the world as a child on Christmas. He is the God who comes down to meet us where we are, and we celebrate his rising at Easter as the God who lifts up, the God who raises the dead.
But before each of those feasts comes a fast. A time of going without. And in this time we wait, with the rest of the world for all to be made right. For justice to prevail. For racism to end. For violence to end. For peace to reign.
But we do not wander blindly.
We wait expectantly.
We wait with hope.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love.
Faith and hope are always needed as we fast. Faith and hope are waiting virtues as Tish Harrison Warren says, but only love alone lasts. Faith and hope will no longer be needed when we see him fully, when we behold Him, the object of our faith, the one who is our very hope, we will see him face to face. Only then will we know Him fully, as He knows us fully right now. Faith and hope are beautiful gifts given to us by God, as we wait expectantly, but only love will last. Then we will celebrate. Then we will feast. But right now, we wait.
We fast before we feast.
And as we fast, we are shown the things that control us, the insignificant things that keep us from seeing and experiencing the significance of God.
Man does not live on bread alone, Jesus says, but on every word that comes from God.
What are we currently attempting to fill our lives with to sustain us?
Food does not sustain us. Our jobs, our vehicles, our money, our devices, do not sustain us. God alone sustains us. And it is in Him alone that our hope must lie, or when we get bored of waiting we will cling to the wrong things. Advent helps to wean us off of these things. These false hopes, and teaches us to place our confidence in the true hope of the world.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
The gospel of John is characterized by its contrast between light and darkness.
Darkness is the realm of brokenness and sin. It is associated with guilt, shame and hiddenness.
Light banishes darkness, exposing what has been done in secret. Light reveals—which can be both terrifying and comforting.
The larger context around the most well-known verse in the Bible John 3:16 makes this clear.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.
The condemnation is this. That people loved the darkness more than the light. We love to keep the dark areas of our lives hidden, but Jesus want us to reveal it to him.
At Christmas, we celebrate how light entered into the darkness. But Advent tells us to pause and look, with complete honesty, at the darkness.
Advent asks us to name and confess what is dark in the world and in our own lives, and to invite the light of Christ into each shadowy corner.
In Advent we take time to examine what is hidden. This season asks us to come clean about those things done in the darkness. So many of the destructive things in our lives and in the world are shrouded in secrecy and shame—from human trafficking to porn addiction, from sweatshops to whispered gossip, from physical abuse to unacknowledged alcoholism, from corruption of power to quiet despair.
Advent tells us we CANNOT welcome the light of the world while hiding the truth of who we are. We cannot follow the light of the world while we hide in the dark.
Only by dwelling in that vulnerable place can we learn to profess true hope. Not a cheap hope, but a hope offered by the very light that darkness cannot overcome.
As we confess and come clean in these ways, we are given this grace filled opportunity to repent. This literally means to change your mind or to turn around. So, when we repent we are changing our mind and turning away from false truths, and turning toward God.
Isaiah pairs the term repentance with rest.
Isaiah 30:15 (NASB95)
For thus the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, has said,
“In repentance and rest you will be saved,
How do these two go together?
The call to repent is not a call to get busier, trying to jam more good works into an already overcrowded schedule, redoubling our efforts to “do better.”
But it is a call to step back and pay closer attention. Not to remake oneself, but to be remade. To repent is to rethink everything from the ground up. That takes time and a miraculous amount of grace.
By turning from sin—which lies and offers us rest, but only gives us exhaustion—we learn that true rest is in Christ; it is rest that comes as a gift.
The only day that God sets aside as holy is the Sabbath day. The only day that we are told to do nothing and receive the gift of all that he has done.
To repent is to put to rest our own efforts to save ourselves and instead change our mind enough to slow down and allow God to transform who we are. Repenting is the act of slowing down to catch up with God.
I don’t know about you brothers and sisters, but when I feel the emptiness, even in my very good life, I rush to fill it. I run to distraction. I stuff my waking moments with busyness, television, devices, words, and work. But these things are all cheap attempts of creating my own sense of fullness.
Advent helps to wean us off of trusting these things. It helps to wean us off these false hopes, and teaches us to place our confidence in the one true hope of the world.
We join generations of Christians before us in this hope. We are banking it all on Jesus, the one true hope of the world.
Prayer
Prayer
(JAMES KAY)
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 put our hope in the coming King.
SING:
CHRIST OUR HOPE IN LIFE AND DEATH
LIVING HOPE
ABIDE
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
Let’s read this Psalm together.
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.
