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Advent - a time of New Beginnings

It's the First Sunday in Advent and I want to invite you to sojourn with me through this season of celebration that leads us to Christmas Day. Advent is a season and not just a day. It begins four Sundays before Christmas...in fact, this year it's the earliest it can begin.
Advent means "arrival, coming"...and it reminds us that Jesus Christ came to us to be Immanuel - God with us. Today I ask you to consider with me - God Promised the Messiah - His Son - and he kept that promise in a rather remarkable way. His Son didn't come bursting through the clouds with 10's of thousands of Angels, but rather came through birth.
700 years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah looked upon the landscape of His nation - Israel, and he saw a discouraged and fearful people.  To the North came a threatening nation that was preparing to attack.  Within his own nation he saw an unfaithful people when it came to God, and he knew the inevitable - God would allow the Assyrians to attack and win.  The nation was about to be destroyed.
Yet in this destruction, God made a promise.  It was in a simple picture:
Isaiah 11:1-4
1 A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him-- the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD--
3 and he will delight in the fear of the LORD. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears;
4 but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth...
A Shoot - a small stem from the stump...new growth would occur...a new person would come and it would all be changed in time.
We are distracted by world events.  A new election, a chaotic Middle East, a concerned and struggling Europe.  North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria...daily headlines and daily concerns.  We are so easily distracted by the noises that are the loudest around us that we might even miss the shoot coming from the stump.
Yet it is God's promises that will always outlast worldly concerns and events.

If you would like to come with me on this Advent sojourn, I'd like to recommend you pick up a book I wrote three years ago. It's available through Amazon as an e-book.
I love this season and hope you can grow to love it too.
https://www.amazon.com/Advent-Sojourn-Elliott-Pollasch-ebook/dp/B00FN1130C/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

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