Advent 1 - 2020

I jokingly tell people that I always know how long we’ve been dealing with this pandemic, because I just have to remember how old my son is. He’s nine months this week, by the way. Nine months. It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? This year has not been for the feint of heart. It has been exhausting for most, if not all of us. And ever on the horizon has been this rumor of hope. We’re all waiting for the same thing: a vaccine. The whole world is waiting to be delivered, to be rescued, to be saved. Collectively, all across our neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools, our hearts cry out in unison, “How long?”

Perhaps more than any other year, we can relate to the people of Israel as they waited for deliverance, rescue, and salvation. Advent is the first season of the church calendar, and it begins in darkness. During Advent we remember that the world was waiting in darkness and in anguish and in great need for deliverance, crying out with one voice, “How long, O Lord?” And at the same time, as the community of Jesus, with hearts lit up by the living and active presence of Christ in our midst, during Advent, we enter into a posture of expectation for his return, when his great delivering work is brought to its glorious end and all the world is once-and-for-all at rest.

But this Advent season, I want us to take a specific posture and perspective, and I think it’s very fitting for what we’re all going through. I want us to remember that most of the world and most of the people that we have relationships with, most of them are still waiting in darkness - they are still waiting to experience the first coming of Christ in their lives. While we are blessed to wait for the second coming Christ when he rights every wrong and restores all that has been broken, the majority of the people in our lives are still waiting to experience the good news for the very first time. We live in world that is waiting.

So my prayer for you this Advent season is this: That more than just lighting a candle to remember and celebrate the arrival of Christ, I pray that the Holy Spirit would ignite a flame in your heart to share with those who are still waiting in darkness, those who need to hear the good news that the dawn of Christ has come once and is coming again.

Our passage in Isaiah begins with a people who are waiting. “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down,” the prophet says. In verse 10, we see the reason for their desperation:

Your holy cities have become a wilderness; Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our fathers praised you, has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins. Will you restrain yourself at these things, O Lord? Will you keep silent, and afflict us so terribly?

Our beautiful house is burned. Our pleasant places are now ruins. “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down.” Israel is crying out for deliverance from the way things are.

Our neighbors are doing the same. I remember going to a friend’s house one evening last month, before Halloween even, and their neighbor had decked out the house in Christmas lights. They had even beaten the department stores! Why is our world rushing to celebrate Christmas? Because they are crying out for deliverance from the way things are. They want to escape the real world.

We have mastered the art of escape. There is an overwhelming sense of hopelessness being felt today, and we all long to escape it. We turn to booze and drugs, TV, the internet, pornography, video games, work, even parenting, all in an effort to escape the bondage and burden of what’s going on (or not going on) in our lives. But all of these things, even the spice lattes, the wreaths, trees, and lights. The Christmas crooners and Mariah Carey, all of these things provide just temporary relief. But the collective cry of the world isn’t for temporary relief. What do our hearts truly yearn for? “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down.”

The world is waiting for permanent deliverance, and yet nothing in this world can come close to providing it. The world’s only hope, our only hope is the Messiah.

But it’s important for us to remember how is it that Jesus is the permanent deliverance that world is looking for. How is it that he is the only hope for the waiting world? First, he lived a perfect life for us. We miss this a lot in evangelical Christianity. All of Christ’s life is atoning. All of his life was lived for our sakes. It wouldn’t be enough for Jesus to just float down from heaven, straight to Calvary, straight to the cross, and then go back up into heaven. That’s often how we think about Jesus, but that would be missing so much of the force behind the gospel!

Jesus didn’t just come to die for us, but to live for us also, so that those who trust and follow him are united to him, hidden in him, clothed in him. So that when God looks at us, he doesn’t see us as our sinful selves deserve, as the prophet said, unclean, marred, and polluted by sin, but rather, he sees us wrapped in the perfect life of Jesus, and he accepts us.

This is why Jesus had to be a baby and a child, to perfect childhood! So that children who put their faith in him are united to his perfect child-ness. We are not perfect children, but we are wrapped in him, and he was! This is why he was a part of a family. Jesus was the only sibling who didn’t start fights! He was the only child who didn’t miss curfew or disrespect his parents. He perfected family life, so we could be wrapped in him. This is why Jesus had to be a worker, why he had to have a job as a carpenter, to perfect work. Because we are not perfect workers! We work for our own glory, but every nail he hammered and every surface he smoothed, he did for the glory of the Father. And we are wrapped in his perfect work. And most of all, Jesus was the perfect and only law-abiding Israelite! He was the only one who did not turn to the left or to the right, but kept God’s law to the letter. So now, we can be united to his perfection.

Why is this hope for the world? Because it does away with all forms of legalism! There is no room for the idea that we must do what Dad says so he’ll like us. That idea is one of the most destructive in all the world, and it is also one of the most prevalent. This is how the world operates: I must earn my place and prove to you that I should be accepted, liked, or loved. So many of our neuroses can be traced back to this. But the gospel flips it around: Christ has earned your place! Christ has once-and-for-all made you worthy of eternal love and eternal acceptance, so now you are free to obey him. Our world desperately needs to hear that. We desperately need to hear it on a regular basis.

But just as Christ lived for us, we also need to hear that he died for us. We need to know that our sin has a consequence. All of us want justice to be served, but if it is, than all of us would stand under judgment. For justice to be served, we’d all be condemned. So what we needed was for justice to be served while being freed from the judgment that we deserved, and that is what the cross does for us. He doesn’t just live a perfect life on our behalf but he puts to death our sinful lives by nailing it to the cross, by burying it in a tomb, and by giving us his resurrection. Martin Luther called it the “great exchange.” Christ has given us his righteousness and we have given him our sin, and he took our sin and buried it in a tomb, so that it would be no more.

This is the news that the world is still waiting to hear. This is the news that we have been given to proclaim. This is the reason the Lord has called us to plant this church and serve this area. This is the reason we are partnering with Home of Hope. I fear that in all the upheaval that we’ve experienced as a church in the last year: the numerous changes to how we gather: online, outdoor, in a gym. In all our focus on how to gather safely, my greatest fear is that we forget our vision of being a church on mission. A community called to the task of proclaiming the good news of Christ to a world that is waiting to hear it for the first time.

My prayer for you this Advent season is that you would be in constant conversation with the Lord. That you would look at your lives and ask, “Who is in darkness? Who in my life has not yet experienced the first coming of Christ?” Would you enter into a season of prayer for them? That your Advent devotional would not be only about your relationship with God, but that it would also be about them. That it would center around the people in your lives that are still waiting in darkness.

I’d also ask that you pray for our church during this season...