Devotional Advent Part 1

For many people Christmas is a full time – filled with friends, family, festivities, and good feelings. But for many people, Christmas is not so much a filled time but a fraught time. It’s a season of feeling not connected but disconnected – disconnected from people and even from God. Maybe, just maybe, whether for explainable reasons or for reasons unknown, you feel as if God is not speaking to you right now. And you reach out for some word of comfort, maybe a word of direction, and you just feel like he’s silent. And so because God is silent, while other people are celebrating, you’re struggling to find reasons to celebrate.

If this is your situation this Advent season, then I want to remind you of an important Advent truth shared by the Gospel-writer John. Think about how John describes Jesus’ birth in John 1:14. When John describes the event of the first Christmas, he puts it this way: “The Word became flesh.”

Now in his commentary on the Gospels, the church father Augustine drew an analogy between human spoken Words and Jesus Christ, the Word become flesh. Augustine points out that whenever we say words out loud, this is not just a
function of our vocal chords but also of our thoughts. And when our thoughts take on a voice, that doesn’t mean that those thoughts cease to have an existence apart from that voice. Rather our voice is the means by which our thoughts are expressed.

Similarly, when the Word became flesh, it meant that the divine Word took on its highest and clearest expression in and through Jesus’ human body. To put this another way, if you haven’t heard from God lately and you are wanting to hear the clear, crisp, undistorted voice of God, you cannot do any better than by looking at the life of Jesus exactly as it is found in God’s Word.

So today, if you’re finding this Advent season so far to be a season of divine silence, remember to put this season of silence into full context. Put the story of your experience within the larger story of God. Though God may seem silent, do not forget that this same God has already spoken loud and clear. In fact, he was the one to start the conversation and that through the Word.

Today, if God seems silent to you and you’re looking for a reason to celebrate, then I encourage you to go back to the beginning of the conversation – God’s conversation with humanity and with you personally – and celebrate the fact that through the life of Jesus God has started a conversation with you. And now it’s your turn to respond. What better time than this Advent season?