Week 1

Good morning and welcome once again. Today, it is incredible to believer, we are at the start of the Advent season! As we have mentioned already, Advent is the time that we prepare our hearts for an “arrival,” someone is coming and we need to get ready. Some of you likely did some preparing this week. You prepared for Thanksgiving, cleaned the house, cooked some food, or traveled to be with family. But what do we do with Advent for Christmas? Every year we go light Advent candles, each year we talk about the birth of Christ, why do we do it? We don’t just do it for the sake of tradition. It would be really easy to have cookie cutter services throughout Advent and hear the same thing over and over again and not put a lot of thought into it. But we don’t do that, we look at the Christmas story in different ways, from different biblical perspectives, different themes, in all kinds of ways because each year we need to prepare our hearts. We need to be reminded that Christ was born on this earth, that it was a miraculous event, and that it all happened because of God’s great love for us. So while we visit the same Christmas story each year, we never want to become deaf to the truth and the message behind it. With this in mind, let’s take a moment and pray together. Let’s pray that God would grant us new ears to hear this story and hearts ready to believe it.

Prayer

Engage

This year as we go through the Advent season, we are going to look a lot at classic Christmas carols. A carol is a religious folk song or popular hymn that is associated with Christmas. This week, as you maybe guessed by our special music, we are going to look at the classic song, O Holy Night. O Holy Night has some pretty interesting history behind it. There was a church in France that had their organ renovated in the 1800s and to celebrate that, the priest convinced a man named Placide to write a Christmas poem for the church. What makes this even more interesting is that Placide wasn’t known around town as a devout Christian, in fact he really had no interest in religion. Placide then had a composer named Adolphe Adam write the music for the hymn. The hymn was an instant success and went all throughout the Catholic church. But, after a few years, people realized who wrote the song and that he wasn’t a Christian, and they tried to get the song to stop being played. At this point it was to late, people had become to attached to it. Even though some churches prohibited the original song from being played, a minister from the US, John S Dwight, decided to translate this French carol into English, and that is the version that we all know and love today.

But there is another interesting fact about this carol. In the early 1900s, Reginald Fessenden was a 33 year old Canadian professor who did something totally unique. Out of his own garage he made the very first AM broadcast in the history of the world on Christmas Eve in 1906. He simply read Luke 2 into the microphone, then grabbed his violin and played O Holy Night. O Holy Night was the first song broadcast in the history of the world.

Tension

In the song there is a phrase that I want us to focus on this morning. If you want you can open your hymnal to #187 to read it (Don’t worry, we are going to get to the Bible, I just want to point out this phrase). In the first verse we read, “A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!” I think one thing that remains to be true is that our world is weary. Our world constantly seems to be in a state that isn’t very good. Kind of like when you’re super busy one week and you say, “I just have to make it through this week and then I can relax.” But that week ends and you never get to relax because new things keep coming up, that seems to be the state of our world. There’s a lot of anxiety, there are worries about the economy, about relationships, people struggling with health concerns, all kinds of things happen in this world that make it seem like we are just treading water. We are just staying above the water and we are weary of it.

But I love what this song points out, even thought he world is weary, it finds something to rejoice about! The weary world rejoices because there is a thrill of hope that comes from the birth of Jesus. For centuries the people of God had been waiting for the Messiah to come. And on that Christmas night, everything about the world changed because of the thrill of hope that entered the world. The next day when the sun rose, the world was different. As the hymn says, “for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!” The world is different that morning once again, because of the birth of Christ. Through Jesus we can have a new and glorious morning, a fresh start that is full of hope. And to focus on this part, I want us to turn to Lamentations 3. We looked at Lamentations last year, but it really addresses the new and glorious morning that is possible because of God. As you turn there, remember that Lamentations was written when Jerusalem was taken over by Babylon, and the prophet Jeremiah was lamenting about what was going on, he was expressing the hurt and pain he was feeling. But chapter 3 contains a really uplifting, powerful message.

Bible

Lamentations 3:20–26 NIV

20 I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. 21 Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: 22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. 23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 24 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” 25 The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; 26 it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

The passage starts off with Jeremiah recognizing what is happening within him. His soul is downcast. He is weary from what is happening in his life and for his people. But despite that, he does what? He calls something to mind, he remembers something. What does he have? In the midst of this terrible time, he remembers truths about God that allow him to have hope. Jeremiah is able to have hope despite what is happening to him because he remembers the Lord’s great love, his compassion, and his faithfulness. And similar to the hymn, we see that morning brings about God’s compassions. They are new every morning. Jeremiah then talks to himself in the last three verses we just read. He says that the Lord is his portion, therefore he will wait for him, the Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him, it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

When Jesus was born, the world experienced a new day, where nothing would ever be the same again. For us still today, a new day with Jesus can bring amazing things to our lives. A new day with Jesus brings three truths that can bring a thrill of hope to us in our weary world.

Application

A New Day with Christ Brings Exactly what You Need.

Notice, that a new day with Christ doesn’t bring you want you want. There are times when what you need is different than what you want. What we need is the same thing that Jeremiah needs in this passage. Verse 24 says, “The Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for him.” What does it mean that the Lord is his portion? Jeremiah is likely referring back to when the Israelites were wandering around in the wilderness after Egypt and how God would provide for them. God would give them manna, this special bread from heaven, each and every morning. God would give them just enough for that day. If they tried to take more and keep it, the food would go bad, it would rot, it wouldn’t be any good. God was trying to teach them to depend upon him for what they needed each and every day. Jesus taught us that same thing. When Jesus is teaching the disciples how to pray he tells them to pray for their daily bread.

A new day with Jesus brings exactly what we need. Whatever we might face in life, there is likely an earthly solution to it, and they can help. But what we actually need is Jesus. The people who were waiting for a Messiah wanted a conquering king. They wanted someone to rise up in political and military power to overthrow the Romans. That is what they wanted, but it isn’t what they ultimately needed. What they needed was a sacrificial Messiah who would solve their problem of sin. And I know this sounds like a Sunday School answer, but whatever you are facing in life, what you need is Jesus. If your marriage is struggling, if you are struggling, if things in life are just making you weary, what you need is Jesus.

A New Day with Christ Brings You Hope to keep Going.

With Jesus, you are given the hope to keep going. The hope that Jesus gives you is the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the thought that no matter what happens today, there’s a new morning coming. Verse 25 of Lamentations tells us that the Lord is good to those whose hope is in him. When we have a new day with Jesus, we experience the hope that we need to keep going. One reason why our world can be so wear at times is because we don’t know where to place our hope. We struggle with placing our hope in the wrong places and people. We put our hope in our earthly relationships, but often that relationship isn’t perfect and so you struggle. We put our hope in our bank account, our retirement account, and when the stock market plunges we lose all our hope. When we put our hope into the wrong things, we are going to end up hurt, we are going to feel hopeless in a weary world. And as a callback to our “Let Us” sermons, let’s read a verse in Hebrews once again together.

Hebrews 10:23 NIV

23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.

When we hold to the hope that we profess, the hope that comes from a new day with Jesus, we realize that God is faithful. Don’t let go of your hope in God even if it feels like you have been in darkness for days, months, or years. We hold to our hope in God just as the people of God did for centuries.

A New Day with Christ Brings Help

Verse 26 tells us that it is good to wait. That doesn’t sound like a good thing, does it? We don’t like to wait for anything, I’m pretty sure that is why the microwave was invented. We don’t like to wait, it is not a joy, it is not fun, and if it is at all possible, we will do anything we can so we don’t have to wait. But we are told that it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. This is what the people were doing before Jesus was born. They were waiting for the messiah. We wait for Jesus, wait upon God, because we know what he can do in a single day. We can never put to words the difference that one day with Jesus can make. All throughout scripture we see examples of this. People weren’t even around him a full day but still had their lives changed. Lazarus was dead, buried in a tomb for days, buried for so long that everyone knew his body would have started to smell at this point. But Jesus shows up and simply tells him to come out. A man who was born unable to walk, and he is just sitting, begging for money to survive until Jesus shows up and tells him to pick up his mat and walk. Once again, it is amazing what one day with Jesus can do.

As we look at our weary world and remember the Christmas story, we have to realize that there is a thrill of hope when Jesus enters into our lives. We wait until Jesus shows up, we wait for that new and glorious morning, and rejoice because you know that it will come eventually.

It might feel like you are in the middle of the night that Jesus was born. There is no way that night was silent, no matter what any hymn says. Joseph and Mary have travelled from home, they’re away from what they know, the baby’s coming and Mary doesn’t have an epidural. (I have a whole new appreciation for the Christmas story after experiencing Amy give birth.) But at the end of this night, Jesus is born, hope shows up and life is not the same anymore.

A new day with Jesus brings us what we need, hope, and help. That is what Advent is meant to remind us of. We prepare our hearts for the birth of Jesus because nothing will ever be the same again once we accept that miracle child as our savior.