The First Week of Advent: Tuesday, December 3, 2024
Are you prepared for the Christmas season? In A Charlie Brown Christmas, Charlie runs into three of the Peanuts gang, each getting ready in their own way. His sister, Sally, is sending a letter to Santa Claus listing all of the fantastic gifts she expects because of her good behavior during the year. Lucy has her mind on gifts, too, but is expecting another year of disappointment. As she tells Charlie, “I always get gifts that I don’t want – toys and clothes.” Charlie asks her what it is that she really wants. She replies, “Real Estate!” And Charlie’s dog, Snoopy, is getting ready by decorating his dog house so that he can enter it in a decorating contest that carries a cash prize.
Typical ways of “getting ready” for Christmas, one and all. Yet none of them help Charlie find the happiness of the season for which he’s searching. It would seem that the proper preparation for Christmas lies in something other than decorating, gift obsession, and the like.
How do you go about getting ready for the season? What are the things that really help you get into the holiday mood?
Getting ready for the season is what Advent is all about. It’s a little season of preparation. It involves some traditions. Playing seasonal music, baking seasonal foods, putting up the Christmas tree; these are all part of the preparation that takes place in Advent.
Yet Advent is much more about a spiritual preparation than an outward preparation. Because Christmas is the celebration of our Savior’s birth, Advent’s preparation for that celebration lies in inviting us to spend a little time each day focusing on that true meaning of Christmas. Why do we need a Savior to begin with? When and how to God promise to send a Savior? Jesus promised to return again in glory, but when and how will that happen? These are the types of questions that Advent allows us to address and find answers.
Let’s start with the first question: Why do we need a Savior to begin with? The prophet Isaiah gives us many of the promises of a Savior that God made hundreds of years before Jesus was born. One of them (Isaiah 9:6-7) starts by describing the spiritual condition of that we are all in before the coming of Jesus: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. For those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned.” (Isaiah 9:2).
Sin is likened to darkness, a darkness that is like “the shadow of death.” Being without God in your life is just like that. You can’t do anything to please or impress God because you have no knowledge of Him and what He likes. You can’t walk “the straight and narrow” when you’re blinded by the pitch black of absolute darkness.
But God, in His mercy, sent Jesus into this world to make Himself known, to do away with our sin through the death and resurrection of Jesus on our behalf, and to make it possible for us to receive spiritual sight. That is, a real knowledge of who God is, what He is like (all grace and love), and that nothing pleases Him more than when we walk in faith.
The birth of Jesus, which was the very first step in achieving the mission of salvation given to Him by God the Father, is joyous news to everyone that is walking in the darkness of sin. It’s why we celebrate Christmas. We prepare for that celebration by admitting our need for a Savior!
Prayer: Dear Lord, thank you for sending the Light of your love and grace in Jesus into my sin-darkened world. Thank you for revealing your grace, mercy, and love to me in Jesus. Let my need as a sinner find its answer in the good news of my Savior’s birth, and let it fill me with peace. Amen.