Park Cities Presbyterian Church: Advent Devotionals

Introduction to Advent Devotionals 2008

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:34 -0500

The pastors and staff of Park Cities Presbyterian Church have written and designed this collection of devotions for each day of Advent, December 1-24, plus a special devotion for Christmas Day as a gift to assist your preparations for the celebration of the arrival of the Infant Savior.

We hope the title of this series, “From Bethlehem to Golgotha,” will prompt your worship of this Infant who was “born in a zoo and killed on a slaughterhouse cross so that we could inherit paradise, and all on His back.”

Day Two of Advent

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

Imagine for a moment that you are a Jew living in the first century, and you have just made your way out to the Judean wilderness to listen to the message of a rather strange man—according to the rumors—a prophet. You have gone to listen to the message of John the Baptizer; you have gone to listen to the wonderful message of Isaiah 40:1-5.

Day Three of Advent

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

Many of us often thank God for the gifts He has given us—and how gladly we receive them! It’s easy to forget that the gifts of God to us are not given simply to be thankfully received. This passage talks of being “enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge” (v. 5). Does God give us these gifts so that we might become great orators or profound professors? Is His final goal that we triumph over this world on the wings of our great wisdom and rhetoric?

Day Four of Advent

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The glory of the Lord will arrive without fail. It will travel without difficulty and will not be delayed by men. The glory of the Lord will be revealed. It will be revealed, Isaiah says, so that everyone will see it together. There will not be a man here and a woman there saying, “I have seen the Lord,” because it will be evident to everyone.

Day Five of Advent

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

Words have always had a strange power. When spoken they are, as it were, a living extension of the breath, the voice and the very will of their speaker. At the same time words have a life of their own. The joining of three simple words to form the sentence, “I love you,” has had a profound effect upon all humans throughout the history of the English language. The first century Jewish conception of God’s Word was no different. On the one hand, the creative Word of God was seen as the living extension of the Creator Himself. In His Word He was present ordering the chaotic world of Genesis 1. In other places God’s Word seems to have a life of its own. This is especially so in the personification of the Word as the life-giving Torah of Psalm 1 or the creative Wisdom of Proverbs 3.

Day Six of Advent

Fri, 05 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

From Genesis, as the curtain rises in the opening scenes of the drama of redemption, chaotic darkness fills the stage.

Yet God’s Word is pregnant with illumination. In creation, God speaks His Word as the light into the night. Similarly, in redemption God speaks His Word as the Light into a spiritually dark world. From their first steps of exile from Eden, Adam and Eve saw the light of God in the “flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24).

Day Seven of Advent

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The pernicious nature of sin interferes with our pursuits of justice, and ultimately we are left with an unfulfilled longing for making things truly right. This longing for righteousness is the mark of our creaturely dependence on God, for the true and ultimate righteousness comes from Him alone.

Day Eight of Advent

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

In horror movies, darkness is the cloak under which evil and seething things hide. Light is the broom that whisks those things away. Biblically, it is no different. Evil and seething things love darkness, and what’s more, are darkness, and light is the uniform of righteousness. If you get right down to it, since these verses look forward to days of fleeting darkness before the fierce and radiant presence of God, and our days feel nothing but dark, then we are writing and playing out our own horror movie here. We just don’t notice so much because we’ve gotten used to the horror.

Day Nine of Advent

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

All who believe in the name of Jesus are shaded under the branches of the tree of life which sprang from the root of Jesse. King Jesus, promised of old, worshiped now in the splendor of His glorious mercy and great love, has reconciled the nations unto himself.

Day Ten of Advent

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

It’s almost Christmas. And you’re thinking of home—even if “home” is no longer what it once was, even if mom and dad are gone, even if siblings are grown, married and have moved far away, even if the old home place itself has been bulldozed to make way for a Wal-Mart parking lot—you’re thinking of home, and sadness fills your soul, because that home, those times, those dear people, that life are gone, or at least will never again be known and felt and enjoyed like they once were.

Day Eleven of Advent

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

As we grow in the knowledge of who God is, we grow in our confidence in Him. King David in the Old Testament, like Paul in the New, expresses unswerving confidence in the Lord. In the first four verses of Psalm 27, David tells us the reason for his confidence.

Day Twelve of Advent

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

One of the most profound moments in world history came when Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs first illumined a street in Manhattan’s financial district. A new way of seeing had broken in upon the world that promised to forever transform human life and culture. For the author of Psalm 119 that light is the Word of God. Like a lamp God’s Word illumines the path of the psalmist and provides a sure way for his feet to travel.

Day Thirteen of Advent

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

One of the central motifs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, is travel. The members of the Fellowship travel over vast amounts of territory in their anti-quest toward the land of the Dark Lord to destroy his ring of power. When they tarry for rest or food they are careful to get underway quickly so that night does not overtake them. After the sun sets the servants of the Enemy abound and danger is close at hand.

Day Fourteen of Advent

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The immense truth that Christ is the light of the world must be foundational to our thinking as we study this text, the opening words of which amazingly apply the metaphor to us: “For at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (Verse 8a). We are light!

Day Fifteen of Advent

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

Central to the Jewish worldview was the Temple, God’s dwelling place on earth. In much the same way the Temple is central to the Christian worldview, but in the Christian worldview the Temple is not a building, instead it’s a “spiritual house” made up of “living stones” (i.e. Christians) which have as their foundation the “Living Stone,” Jesus Christ. In other words, the true Temple of God is the church and this true Temple, where God now makes His dwelling, is built upon Jesus, the Rock (Matt. 7:24-25). He is the One who was rejected and killed by those who couldn’t grasp the reality that He was the One through whom and upon whom God’s true Temple was going to be built. But in God’s sovereign plan, this “stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” of the “spiritual house” where acceptable sacrifices are made to the one true God.

Day Sixteen of Advent

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The great missionary purpose of Old Testament Israel was not “Go and tell” but “Come and see.” When Yahweh, the God of Israel, called out for Himself a people for His own possession, He had more in mind than Israel’s salvation. His purpose was to make His righteousness shine so brightly within a particular people that the nations would be drawn to the one true God. As Isaiah elsewhere prophesied, “The mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains…and all the nations shall flow to it” (Is. 2:2-3). God meant for Israel’s light to be the nations’ light, and her salvation their salvation.

Day Seventeen of Advent

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The gospel has been hidden. That is, its true and excellent character has not been seen. People have not observed that which is completely and comprehensively plain. They have missed the image of God in the face of Christ. The word image has at its root the idea of representation. Christ, being God, represents God, so much so that he who has seen Jesus has seen God the Father (John 14:9). If any person cannot see this graphic display of God in Jesus, Paul says they must be blind.

Day Eighteen of Advent

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

You are what you eat.” At least that’s what the promoters of healthy dieting tell us. In the Sermon on the Mount, however, Jesus tells us, “You are what you seek.” This seems to be what John is getting at in this portion of his letter. You take on the character of that which you seek or worship. Standing behind John’s words is the image of God theology of Genesis 1. To be made in the image of God means to be both God’s representation and God’s representative upon the earth. Those who worship the true God both resemble and reflect Him into the world. Humanity has been created as kind of refracting mirror, as it were, to catch the light of God and cast it out again to illumine the creation with His glory.

Day Nineteen of Advent

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

For many of us, we’re entering that frantic phase of last minute Christmas shopping. Duty and drudgery have crowded out desire. Many of us are desperately looking for gifts not because we really want to but because we’re compelled by a conviction that we have to!

Day Twenty of Advent

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The imagery here is of a felled tree. The axe of divine judgment fell on the forestlike people of Assyria (Isaiah 10:33-34) which provides the perfect foil for the shoot of the Messiah. The Majestic One has cut the arrogant boughs off the tree of Assyria and brought its lofty arrogance low with His great might.

Day Twenty-One of Advent

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

It’s the difference between holding your breath in anticipation of a great promise and no longer caring enough to bother. What happens when we forget God’s great promises? What happens when we quit holding our breath? What happens when we take big, lazy belly fulls of air and think nothing of it? God takes our breath away. Like he took away old Zechariah’s voice. What happens when we quit believing? He knocks the wind out of us by sending a prophet. So old Zech and his wife Liz get pregnant in old age, and as if that weren’t enough, the kid grows up to be John the Baptist, a wildeyed desert dweller who eats locusts and honey and wears a camel hair cloak and a leather belt, and people keep coming to see him out in the wild places even though he screams at them, “Repent! The Kingdom of God is near!” And in between his rantings he pours water over their heads. You’d think they’d have gotten the idea.

Day Twenty-Two of Advent

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

Our God is a God of salvation and deliverance, and we participate in a grand history of redemption. The Word of God is a history book of God’s redemptive acts in time and space.

Day Twenty-Three of Advent

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The Jews were chosen of God (Deut. 7:6-11), but God had cast them from Him. They had possessed the light of God’s Word (Deut. 4:7-9), but now they groped blindly in deepest darkness. The nation that had danced with God on the mountaintops now languished in a gloomy valley of despair (Isa. 8:5-8,22). Judah had violated the covenant, now they suffered the consequences of their disobedience (Deut. 11:26-28).

Day Twenty-Four of Advent

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

For Christians, Christmas is a time of refreshment and restoration. Zephaniah ends his short prophecy with God’s promise of restoration. Like all of the prophets, Zephaniah brings a message of warning about God’s judgment. At the same time, he includes the reminder that God does not forget His covenant. Judgment for sin is certain, yet God’s grace is even more certain. Zephaniah foretold the day when all our fears would give way to praise. That day came when Jesus entered this world. His life and death set the stage for our ultimate victory and joy.

Day Twenty-Five of Advent

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

The young couple leans in to stare at the monitor as the little life they had conceived in secret was about to be made manifest. Through the use of ultrasound doctors are able to see the baby’s beating heart, the development of the spinal column and the internal organs. Doctors can predict the child’s physical development, but they cannot predict the child’s spiritual development. They cannot look at a baby and know how God will use this child for His glory.

Christmas Day

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00 -0500

“Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central event the humiliation of its God.” —Bruce L. Shelley