Advent: Hope

Advent is observed the four weeks prior to Christmas in anticipation of the coming of our Savior. It serves as a reminder and tool to prepare our hearts for the true Christmas celebration, Christ’s birth. Advent helps to quiet our souls from the worldly noise and pressures of the season.

This week, we focus on hope.

Hope is often used interchangeably with wish. My son, Collin, as a young child would often say, “I sure do hope so” to anything he wished to get. For example, I would say something like, “Maybe it won’t rain and we can go to the park”. To which he would respond, “I sure do hope so!”. This is not hope. Hope isn’t a wish or a want. We aren’t hopeful based on what we can see or how we feel.

Hope is the anticipation and confidence that God is who he says he is and will do what he says he will do. Hope is built from trusting God’s character. It is the manifestation of remembering all the ways we have seen him move our mountains in the past knowing he will continue to do so in our future despite how things appear. Ultimately, hope is understanding sin and death have been defeated!

Just like 3-year-old Collin, our fleshly nature would like us to misinterpret our wants into seeing them as needs. We are tempted to create a “Christmas list” so Santa can “check it twice”. We place our desire for the created over our desire for the Creator. Yet, he remains faithful in the midst of our faithlessness.  He is the Rock that cannot be moved (Deut. 32:31).

Just as Christmas celebrates the birth of a baby in a manger, we can also celebrate our new birth. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade” (1 Peter 1:3).

“We have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people” (1 Timothy 4:10). We have a "living hope" in a "living God" that “can never perish, spoil or fade”! “And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

Just as Zechariah’s silence was proof of how he could “be sure” of God’s message through the angel of the Lord, the Holy Spirit within us is our assurance of this living hope.

As written, the Christmas carol “Silent Night” is enough. It is beautiful and meaningful in both lyric and melody. I have so many powerful core Christmas memories tied to the original version as I am sure you do too. But the 2021 We The Kingdom version, “Silent Night (Heavenly Peace)”, brings my heart to its knees with their added chorus which says:

Holy, Holy

Hope in a manger for you and for me

Bow down and worship

Come rest your eyes on the King

Jesus our heavenly peace

Jesus is “hope in a manger for you and for me”.

“May your faithful love rest on us Lord, for we put our hope in you” (Psalm 33:22).