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| I think I remember this Smurf Advent Calendar! |
What are our anticipations before Christmas this year? Is it the family gathering together? Are you anticipating Christmas dinner? Or maybe it’s all the music, lights and decorations that come with the season? OK, let’s be honest, don’t we all anticipate the presents? We have been trained from a young age that Christmas is about giving and receiving gifts? Did your childhood Christmas morning look like one of those Video’s you find on YouTube with screaming children going crazy of the Nintendo 64? (It’s there, look it up.)
What do we anticipate this Christmas? Another way of saying this is, “what do we hope for this year?” Listen, here’s what you need to realize as we get ready for this Christmas season: What you anticipate for Christmas will influence your perception of Christmas. If your perception is the lens through which you look at Christmas your anticipations of Christmas are the frames holding that lens in place.
Every year, millions of people fly through Christmas and they miss it entirely. The teaching team has decided to address that and for the next four weeks we want to do a series that prepares us for Christmas. We want to help you and ourselves frame Christmas well and understand its full significance in our lives.
Today we will look back to the time right before the very first Christmas. Before Christ was born there was also an anticipation taking place. It was the anticipation of the Messiah.
This year, agree to let God’s promises fuel your anticipations. His promises to you are Salvation, peace, the Holy Spirit. All these promises are fulfilled through Christ.
We remember these promises through a season celebrated by the Church for hundreds of years called Advent. Advent means “coming” and begins the fourth Sunday before December 25th, and calls us to anticipate the birth of Christ. It’s about the hope we have for the Messiah that is yet to come.
And so as a community, we wait, we anticipate. Why? Because, like Israel over 2000 years ago we claim today that all is not as it should be. All the promises have not yet been fulfilled. As the Israelites anticipated the birth of their messiah, today, we remember the birth but again, anticipate the return of the messiah.
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