Advent is a season of "expectant waiting". For some, it's waiting for Christmas day's festivities and all the preparation that goes into that. It might be the expectancy of loved ones coming to be together and waiting for travel days. Waiting is not always easy - especially for kids!
Not all waiting is joyful. I have a friend who is battling ALS - Lou Gehrig's disease. There is no known cure for ALS...but there is God! She has faith that believes in God and so she will never give up believing God can change all of her circumstances around. And so she waits...in faith, confident of God, waiting in Hope.
Have you ever considered how much of the Advent story is surrounded by people who waited? From early on God made promises of what he was going to do to redeem and heal his creation. To Abraham, God spoke saying:
Genesis 12:2-3
And I will make of you a
great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be
a blessing. I will bless those who bless you,
and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth
shall be blessed.”
What did God have in mind? From Abraham came Israel, and from Israel came Jesus...but not for a long, long time. Waiting...expectantly, in faith, waiting. It is a gift from God to be able to wait and not become disillusioned. That describes my friend with ALS...she waits in faith for God, trusting and refusing to allow bitterness or disillusion to enter in.
How does one wait in hope, expectantly in faith? Here's my friend C. H. Spurgeon once again:
“Wait, I say, on the Lord.” —Psalm 27:14
"Our heart is strengthened by waiting upon God because we thus receive a mysterious strength through the incoming of the eternal Spirit into our souls. No man can explain this, but many of us know what it is. We do not know how the Holy Spirit operates, but we are conscious that after a season of prayer we are often much refreshed and feel as if we had been made young again.
We have gone in before the Lord haggard and worn, even despondent. We draw near God and have felt our spirit revive. Sometimes our prayer was mostly a groan, yet we did wait upon the Lord, and the eternal strength came into us.
How wonderfully do the secret springs of omnipotence break into the feeble soul and fill it with might in the inner man. Through the sacred anointing of the Holy Spirit, we have been made to shout for joy. We have been so glad in the Lord that we could not contain our joy. He that made us has put His hand a second time to the work and restored to us the joy of His salvation, filled our emptiness, removed our weakness, and triumphed in us gloriously. (Spurgeon, Charles H.. Joy Upon Joy . Whitaker House).
We wait...in Hope...believing in our God.
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