Living Between the Advents: The Fuel that Keeps Hope Burning

Living Between the Advents: The Fuel that Keeps Hope Burning

Jesus

Read:

Revelation 21:1-7

Devotional

Advent has been a season to slow down and look back, reminding ourselves and remembering who our God is and all He has done. He is a God who fulfills every promise, a God who meets us in uncertain places, a God who interrupts our lives because its what we need.

But honestly, the Advent season is such a mixed bag for me.

We talk about the triumphant entry of the Light into the world, but today, my world often feels dark. Even when everything around me in this broken world seems light, even then I often carry a dark cloud inside me because I’m broken.

And so they tell us, “Advent is a season to look back, but it isn’t complete unless we look forward.”

So we look back to the past and remember, we look forward to the future we long for, but I live today. And today is often hard, and today I’m often sad.

This is the tension of the “already/not yet” reality of Advent.

And so I’m asking myself:

How does all of this help me today?

How does looking back at God’s faithfulness in the past and looking forward to what God has promised in the future . . . 

meet me in the mess? 

meet me in the trial?

meet me in the sadness?

meet me in the mundane?

The answer to these questions is one I fight to remember and desperately need others to remind me of:

Looking back at God’s abundant grace in the past while looking forward to His certain return in the future is the fuel that keeps hope burning today. 

Remembering causes my hope to burn brightly, believing He will again show up today and every day with more grace and more grace and more grace until that final day when death is no more, and pain and suffering are all gone. Every wound will be healed and every longing will be fulfilled.

This is grace upon grace.

If God did not spare His own Son, will He not freely and abundantly give us everything we need to know Him and love Him today?

But in order to keep hope alive, I have to acknowledge I carry a mixed bag. My mixed bag carries great joy, and it also carries deep sorrow. It carries confident hope, and it also carries a sometimes exhausting weariness.

But I truly believe that acknowledging my mixed bag makes my celebration today even more powerful.

Because I’m not blindly raising my glass in celebration while ignoring all that is broken in this world and broken inside of me.

And I’m also not giving up in defeat as I see all that is broken in this world and broken inside of me.

I am holding up both my hands in praise and worship to my victorious King, and also in protest and defiance of a defeated enemy, crying out . . .

Christ has come

Christ has won

Christ He reigns

He will come again!

Today is an invitation to celebrate the first arrival of our King and the certain return of our King. And that invitation is a personal invitation from a King who knows everything your bag carries. Because it is a personal invitation, our responses are allowed to look different.

For some, celebration will be full of laughter and music and feasting. A small foretaste of the great feast we all long for.

For others, celebration might be a silent song of longing praise, knowing that in this life, every celebration is tainted with some form of loss.

Whatever form our celebration takes, today we are invited to celebrate our God’s abundant grace. Grace that showed up when the Eternal Word took on flesh. Grace that will come again one day in triumphant victory over every dark and broken thing. And grace that meets us today with a personal invitation to celebrate a God who still steps into our world. A God who still shows up at exactly the right time and exactly the right way, giving us exactly what we need.

Today is a celebration of a God who still comes into our lives in all His fullness, and who is still bringing with Him today . . . 

Grace upon Grace