Hope in the Garden
My good friend Paul Johnson wrote the following for our church to use as the First Sunday of Advent Reading, and I thought it was worth posting. Stay tuned for more...
The Christmas season is a time of celebration. However, there are many conflicting ideas of what exactly should be celebrated. It might seem to an outsider that our purpose for the Christmas season is to celebrate family, or possibly food, or even evergreen trees - and, sadly, most of the time they wouldn’t be far from the truth. In a world of conflicting ideas, it is easy for us to lose sight of what is truly important and exalt things that are not in themselves bad, but may cause us to miss the point of the celebration.
In order to be reminded why we celebrate this season, we will be focusing our attention on the advent, or coming, of our Lord Jesus Christ. Each week we will recognize a theme and a location that is associated with the coming of Christ. This Sunday we will look at hope in the Garden of Eden.
The Garden of Eden may seem to some to be an odd place to start, especially since our focus is the hope that Christ brings and the garden is most usually associated with the fall of humanity. But right on the heels of our fall into sin there comes a promise from God—a promise that is delivered, oddly enough, as a curse to the enemy, the serpent: “He shall crush your head and you shall bruise him on the heel.” Already, in the garden, we see our first glimpse of the savior who will come to crush the enemy and give us hope. Our hope is first seen in the garden in the fact that we are fallen and in need of regeneration in order to have a right standing with God, we hope for regeneration. In other words, we are continually looking forward to the time when God reaches down and saves us from ourselves.
You might be thinking, “This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with Christmas?” The advent of Jesus Christ is the culmination of our hope. All of our longing for regeneration is finally made manifest in the birth of a tiny baby in a lowly stable. This is why we celebrate. We celebrate the advent because hope has come to the world—“In Him was life and that life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can not overpower it.”
The Christmas season is a time of celebration. However, there are many conflicting ideas of what exactly should be celebrated. It might seem to an outsider that our purpose for the Christmas season is to celebrate family, or possibly food, or even evergreen trees - and, sadly, most of the time they wouldn’t be far from the truth. In a world of conflicting ideas, it is easy for us to lose sight of what is truly important and exalt things that are not in themselves bad, but may cause us to miss the point of the celebration.
In order to be reminded why we celebrate this season, we will be focusing our attention on the advent, or coming, of our Lord Jesus Christ. Each week we will recognize a theme and a location that is associated with the coming of Christ. This Sunday we will look at hope in the Garden of Eden.
The Garden of Eden may seem to some to be an odd place to start, especially since our focus is the hope that Christ brings and the garden is most usually associated with the fall of humanity. But right on the heels of our fall into sin there comes a promise from God—a promise that is delivered, oddly enough, as a curse to the enemy, the serpent: “He shall crush your head and you shall bruise him on the heel.” Already, in the garden, we see our first glimpse of the savior who will come to crush the enemy and give us hope. Our hope is first seen in the garden in the fact that we are fallen and in need of regeneration in order to have a right standing with God, we hope for regeneration. In other words, we are continually looking forward to the time when God reaches down and saves us from ourselves.
You might be thinking, “This is all well and good, but what does it have to do with Christmas?” The advent of Jesus Christ is the culmination of our hope. All of our longing for regeneration is finally made manifest in the birth of a tiny baby in a lowly stable. This is why we celebrate. We celebrate the advent because hope has come to the world—“In Him was life and that life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness can not overpower it.”
posted by DrewDog at 11:23 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home