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
Are the Gospels Historical Fiction?
Some scholars today argue that the stories recorded in the Gospels are actually intentional fabrication. In essence, they argue that Mark took Paul’s theology and robed the story of Jesus in a fictitious historical narrative. The other Gospels followed suit. The argument is clever and removes the difficulty of explaining how a legend of a…
When the Last Few Moments Changes Everything
One of the central things ReKnew wants to accomplish is to challenge followers of Jesus to accept that the self-sacrificial love Jesus revealed on the cross is the definitive, and even the exhaustive, revelation of God’s character. Everything about God, we believe, should be understood through the lens of the cross. For most Christians, Jesus…
Myth Become History
The Gospel of John tells of the coming of Jesus in an unusual way. John writes: In the beginning the Word already existed. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. Everything came into existence through him. Not one thing that exists was made without him. He was the source of life, and…
Xmas
Kevin Dooley via Compfight Zach Hunt brings a huge challenge in this article about the ongoing lament about the “liberal attack on Christmas.” Maybe the real problem is not with the media or the “liberals” or the merchants, but with us. There’s an opportunity here for us to remember who we really are and what…
Sermon: The Twist
In this sermon clip, Greg Boyd discusses how when you read a book with a twist ending, the ending reframes the entire story. The Bible is no different. In this sermon, Greg shows how Jesus’ message reframes how we are to understand the Bible, and he shows us why the Anabaptists shared this belief. You…
Loving Enemies in the Day of ISIS
The following excerpt from Myth of a Christian Religion discusses Jesus’ command to “turn the other cheek.” Whatever our response to the persecution of Christians in the world, we must take this passage seriously. While this excerpt does not tell us exactly how to respond, it can be used to shape our attitude and stance…