Advent Day 4 ~ Prepare

Today's word is prepare.

" 'See I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire will come, days the LORD Almighty.' " ~ Malachi 3:1

We learn in the Gospels that this messenger spoken of by the prophets Malachi and Isaiah (Isaiah 40:3) and sent by God to prepare the way for the LORD Jesus Christ was John the Baptist (read Mark 1:1-8). John the Baptist had the role of preparing the hearts of the people in his region for the coming of the Messiah.

Our role in observing the Advent season is to prepare the way for Him as well ~ in our own hearts, in the heart of our homes, and in the lives of the people we encounter every day. The Lord you are seeking will come...

Joy to the world the Lord is come,

Let earth receive her King,

Let every heart prepare Him room,

And heaven and nature sing,

And heaven and nature sing,

And heaven, and heaven and nature sing.

(From Psalm 98) Issac Watts

The Advent Words 2017 prompt and Scripture reading calendar can be found in this post or in the Facebook group.

Advent Day 3 ~ Expectation

Today's word is expectation.

Background image by Aaron Burden @unsplash.com

Isaiah 64 is a prayer of lament. I like how Dennis Bratcher, @crivoice.org, defines lament:

"Generally, a lament is a prayer that cries out to God from the midst of desperate grief, pain, or any circumstance that seems out of control. It vocalizes the hurt to God with the conviction, the faith, that God can and will bring relief. A lament is not just the venting of frustration, but is a profound statement of faith in God from the midst of utter human hopelessness. The significance of a lament is that the worshipper prays in the midst of his pain. He believes that God cares about His condition and he has enough faith in God to trust Him with the outcome."

This definition of a lament gives the impression, that even in the midst of pain and suffering, the prayer is rooted in hope. Hope and expectation are so deeply intertwined in the Advent season that it's easy to miss that there is a difference between them. 

Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary defines expectation as waiting born out of hope or fear. While biblical hope is the "confident expectation, the sure certainty that what God has promised in His Word is true." (J. Hampton Keathley, III @bible.org) Both are future oriented. Both are an activity of waiting. But it is our perspective and our faith that brings about the difference. Hope requires more faith than expectation does, and hope is based on the promises of God. Therefore, hope is confident expectation - it is a certainty based on God's Word. 

Let me expand our other passage for the day to include a few of the verses before it and we will see this confident hope based on God's Word:

"Yet this I call to mind

and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord's great love we

are not consumed,

for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning; 

great is your faithfulness.

I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion;

therefore I will wait for him."

The Lord is good to those whose hope

is in him;

it is good to wait quietly

for the salvation of the Lord."

lamentations 3:21-26

The author says, "Yet this I call to mind"; he is recalling God's Word and His character as described in His Word. In Exodus 34:6-7, the Lord Himself described His character to Moses, stating that He is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. It is because the author here in Lamentations can recall God's Word and depend on the promise of who He is, that he can say, "and therefore I have hope." His expectations of who God is and how circumstances in life will play out are based on the confident hope he has in who God says he in in His Word.

I have struggled most of my life with my own expectations - of myself and of others - often based on feelings and the defense mechanisms I developed out of disappointments and hurts from others. I would love to tell you that this mainly happened when I was young and before I became a Christ-follower. But the truth of the matter is that the defense mechanisms we develop when we are young will often pop back up in times of high stress or painful experiences later in life. Bible study, prayer and other spiritual practices have been the things that have helped me develop a defense against allowing unhealthy expectations to govern my outlook, and ultimately my hope. Much of this blog and my art journaling has been about my journey in recent years with losing hope due to not handling disappointment and loss well, and then regaining it through God's healing in using various spiritual practices, as well as art. So often when I think of the word expectation it has a negative impression for me. But we see in both of today's passages that for Isaiah and the anonymous author of Lamentations, their expectations are rooted in hope. May our journey through God's Word in this Advent season serve to build our faith and our hope.

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." Hebrews 11:1

My art journal pages for today:

Let me also recommend some Advent resources from other people I follow:

• Shelly Miller, who lead a group called the Sabbath Society, is writing about Advent on her site shellymillerwriter.com.
• Grace Table has a variety of writers contributing to their site. Visit gracetable,com.
• The background photo for the verse at the beginning of the post is by Aaron Burden, a youth pastor and photographer, I follow on Instagram and unsplash.com. Visit his blog and experience his incredible photography. aaronburden.com

The Advent Words 2017 prompts and Scripture reading calendar can be found in this post or in the Facebook group.

Advent Day 2

Today's word is wait.

"And it will be said in that day,
“Behold, this is our God for whom we have waited that He might save us.
This is the Lord for whom we have waited;
Let us rejoice and be glad in His salvation.”

Isaiah 25:9

"All of Advent reminds us that God is making us ready. The waiting, the hoping - it all points us to the miracle unfolding, the grace of God comes into our barrenness and fills the space with Himself."
Kris Camealy, Come, Lord Jesus

"Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Advent creates people. New people.”The newness we experience in Advent only comes because of the steadfast love of God. Because He loves us, God gives us this time, a season of waiting, which isn’t passive at all. As we anticipate and prepare for Jesus’ arrival, our hearts can’t help but be transformed–we become new people, in the fullness of Jesus’ presence. This is what God’s steadfast love looks like in action." ~Kris Camealy, Come, Lord Jesus

        "I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,

    and in his word I put my hope.

I wait for the Lord

    more than watchmen wait for the morning,

    more than watchmen wait for the morning.

Israel, put your hope in the Lord,

    for with the Lord is unfailing love

    and with him is full redemption.

He himself will redeem Israel

    from all their sins."

Psalm 130:5-8

The Advent Words 2017 prompt and Scripture reading calendar can be found in this post or in the Facebook group.

Advent Day 1

The Advent season has four weekly themes ~hope, peace, joy and love.

This week, the first week of Advent, the theme is hope. 

Hope is also our word for today.

In a book I'm reading about the Christian Year, author Bobby Gross says that the four weeks of Advent can "train us in hopeful waiting".

Throughout the Old Testament the prophets spoke of a Messiah that would come and serve as the King of the Jews. This Messiah would free the Jewish people from oppression and He would rule the world. For centuries the Jewish people looked for signs that He had arrived. They waited in hope for the One who would be their salvation.

"And again, Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse will spring up,

one who will arise to rule over the nations,

in him the Gentiles will hope."

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him,

so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit."

Romans 15:12-13

In Paul's letter to the Romans he wants to assure the Gentiles - his readers then and now - that the Messiah (the root of Jesse) the Jews waited for is also our hope. Take some time and read the whole passage, Romans 15:1-13, and you will see that hope serves as bookends for this passage. Verse 3 points us to the purpose of the Scriptures, that they were written to teach us, "so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope." God has provided His Word to instruct us, but not simply in ways that build our knowledge, but in ways that impact our lives and build our faith in order to produce hope in us. He goes on to point out that in His life here on earth, Christ became "a servant of the Jews on behalf of God's truth, so that the promises made to the patriarchs might be confirmed (those promises of the Messiah throughout the Old Testament) and, moreover, that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy." (verses 8-9a). The next few verses (9b-12) point to what was written in Isaiah, that the hope the Jews had in the coming Messiah was meant for the Gentiles as well.

We have what we didn't even know we longed and hoped for. In this season of Advent we can connect our hearts with the longing and hope the Jews had so many centuries ago as they waited for their salvation, for the Messiah. We can, at the same time, rejoice that for those of us who have a relationship with Jesus, we have our promised salvation. In the Advent season we focus on three comings of Christ: His first coming, his arrival in history as baby in a manger, His second coming at the end of time, and His coming into our own lives in Spirit and power.

With Paul, I pray that "the God of hope may fill you with joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit". May our times in the Scriptures and our times creatively connecting it through art enable us to connect with the hope that we have in Christ ~ who has come, is coming and will come again.

My journal pages for today:

I hope you will share your Advent art in our Advent Words 2017 Facebook group. We're journeying through this season together, sharing our art and conversation. :)

If you have not already joined our Advent Words 2017 Facebook group I encourage you to join us. Click on the link above or on the group badge to the right.

The Advent Words 2017 prompt and Scripture reading calendar can be found in this post or in the Facebook group.

 

Welcome to Advent Words 2017!

Advent officially begins on Sunday. We are just two short days away form the beginning of the season and the art challenge! In the midst of preparing for the holiday - buying presents, preparing for meals, attending events - we can slow ourselves down for just a bit each day and delve into Advent and what is most important about Christmas ~ Jesus Christ.

Advent has been call a "two-fold gaze", looking back we remember that Christ has come, while getting in touch with the longing the Israelites had for the Messiah. Looking forward we anticipate Christ's promised return. The word Advent simply means "coming", taken from the Latin word adventus. 

"He has come and is coming. One day, He will come again." ~Kris Camealy

In her book Come, Lord Jesus, author Kris Camealy says, "Advent in the church, is a season of preparation rimmed with hopeful expectation." My practice of Advent preparation over the past years has been to reflect on Scripture passages, quotes and devotions through art journaling. This year I have launched my own Advent art challenge (see original post here), and today I am sharing the prompt calendar to give those participating time to prepare before we begin on Sunday.

Participate in any creative form you choose ~ art journaling, commonplace book, photography, poetry, memory keeping, collage, etc. If you would like to download a PDF of the calendar you can do so here. Warning: it is a large file.

You can also join our Facebook group: facebook.com/groups/adventword2017. There you can share your art and join the conversation. You can share on Instagram as well with #adventwords2017. Join us!