We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

The Longing of Advent
The Advent season is a time of anticipating the coming of God, in Christ, a time of turning our imagination toward the revelation of God’s love for us. This after all is the deepest longing of our heart, and our natural longings always point us to something real.
We grow hungry only because there’s such a thing as food. We get thirsty only because there’s such a thing as water. We have sex drives only because there’s such a thing as sex. Human drives and desires seem to point to realities that fulfill them. If we can get philosophical for a moment, we might say that intuitive longings have ontological implications. They tell us something about the real world.
We naturally long for and hope for love that is beyond what we experience in our mundane lives, for something beyond us. During the season of Advent, we remember this longing and put our hope in the fact that God has come in Christ.
If our Creator is in fact like this—a God who came to us as a baby and then died a hellish death out of love for those who were killing him—then we can begin to understand why we are like we are. Our hope-filled dreams of love outrun anything we find in the world, and now we can understand why. We dream beyond the world because we are made for someone beyond this world. We are created by God and for God, and as Augustine said, our hearts cannot rest until they rest in God. We are created to love and be loved by a God who is, from eternity to eternity, perfect, unsurpassable, incomprehensible, infinite love.
Paul and the Gospels proclaim that, out of his unfathomable love, the God whom we restlessly long for has come into our world. In Jesus, God entered our domain to fulfill our dreams. He has come to unambiguously reveal who he is and what he is like. Against everything we’ve imagined “God” or “the gods” to be, Jesus shows us that our Creator is a God who is willing to be crucified to redeem sinners.
He has also come to reveal to us who we are. We are rebels who are nevertheless loved by our Creator with an unconditional love. And he has come to set us free from the power of evil that enslaved us and ultimately to restore the entire creation to what he always wanted it to be. He has come ultimately to extinguish the kingdom of darkness and establish the kingdom of God, in which his perfect love, joy and peace shall someday reign without opposition.
In our heart of hearts, we want to believe the story of Jesus is true, and we have compelling grounds to believe that this story is, in fact, grounded in actual history (see Lord or Legend). Of course, accepting that this story is rooted in history and placing your trust in Jesus requires faith, for it is impossible to prove any historical claim with absolute certainty. However, rejecting the story and basing your life on the assumption that the story is only a myth or a legend also takes faith, for it is equally impossible to prove this claim. I submit that the first act of faith is much more reasonable than the second act of faith.
However we live, we live by faith. The deepest longings of our hearts point us to the reality we find in the story of Jesus. Let’s reflect on this together during this Advent season.
—Adapted from Lord or Legend, pages 153-154.
Photo via bykst via VisualHunt.com
Related Reading

Why Didn’t Jesus Denounce Military Service?
A common objection to the claim that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament were opposed to all forms of violence is that neither Jesus nor anyone else speaks out against it. When soldiers asked John the Baptist what they should do in response to his message, for example, he told them not to…

Sermon Clip: Keeping Christmas
Through Christ, God fulfills all his promises, and by yielding to him and giving up control, we can set ourselves free. Full Sermon here: http://whchurch.org/sermons-media/sermon/keeping-christmas

Enemy Love
Rob Hogeslag via Compfight Zack Hunt over at The American Jesus shared the story of Paul Keane who offered his own burial plot to Tamerlan Tsarnaev if his family could not find a cemetery that would accept his body. You’ll remember that Tsarnaev was one of the men who carried out the Boston Marathon bombings and…

God’s Church is Not “Pretty”
This week we’ve been looking at various aspects of what it means to be the church. Today, I want to address the paradox of how the church can be both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Jesus came into our fractured world to manifest the beauty of God’s reign and revolt against the evil…

At the Start of This New Year
Anthony Easton via Compfight Wishing all of you a year filled with an increasing awareness of God’s presence and a willingness to go where he leads you. May you be challenged every day to love outrageously as we are loved by God. May we be one as Jesus and the Father are one. Peace and…

Benefit of the Doubt Is Here!
Benefit of the Doubt is finally here and you should definitely get yourself a copy! Frank Viola interviewed Greg about the book recently and you can read it over on Frank’s blog Beyond Evangelical. In fact, Frank is so enthusiastic about the book that he added it to his Best 100 Christian Books Ever Written list. Wow. Also,…