The Joy of Advent, Part 1: Repentance and Purpose

Paul prays a beautiful prayer in Romans 15:13, where he says, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” 

You see, in the midst of life, which can often feel like a juxtaposing battle, God through his Son promises he will never leave us, that he will be with us always, and that there is meant to be for us a sense of joy in the very companionship of Christ. This comes from knowing we belong. We’re not sort of duking this out on our own down here, but we really are asking for God to work something in us. 

Prepare Him Room

But the promise of the gospel is not just that we’re the recipients of all that great love and joy. For us to be able to receive God’s love and joy, things must happen within us. It’s like the Christmas carol: “Let every heart, prepare him room / And heav’n and nature sing, and heav’n and nature sing. Joy to the world!” In other words, there’s something inside us that needs to be readjusted to make room for this kind of transcendent and eternal, ineffable joy. 

It’s not just that life’s great, and we’re grateful, and we’re looking forward to Christmas. It’s the declaration that there are things in our life, in our culture and in our world that are profoundly not right. And that’s what repentance is. 

And that’s really the heart of Advent: this call to get ready, because the King is coming. The promise is for a new heaven and a new earth. “The wolf shall lie down with the kid,” as it says in the book of Isaiah. “All flesh shall see it together.” 

So we are here, saying, “Lord, you’ve already come once in your Son Jesus. You promised to come back—that’s what we say in the creeds—so I want you to do the needed work in my heart so I can prepare, so I can be not only changed, but actually be a channel for change in the places where you have put me. A channel that God uses to bring peace into the relationships around me, in the people I know and care about, in the community in which I serve.”

Joy to the World

So all of that is the heart of what we are trying to do here in Advent. And as the verse in Romans says, God is the God of hope. We can hope in him. He made these commitments to us, we’ve made these commitments to him, and we have hope that he is at work in our lives and in the world. 

And how do we have that hope? Because he has already acted: in sending his Son, in sending the prophets, in bringing us to this place where we are in our lives right now, that God is, in fact, at work. And we are being asked to join in the work he is already doing. 

The hope we have is the congruence between that which God is doing and that which we’re attempting in a way that makes a real difference. Because the God of hope is saying, “You’re at work, and I’m putting my hand of blessing on it. I belong to you, and you belong to me.” 

It is exactly that kind of companionship in the work that gives a sense of joy. It means our life has an eternal purpose. We’re not just out here trying to figure it out and doing whatever we want to do. If I’m a servant, my life is not my own. I don’t get to call the shots. The real story is,  “I’m here to do the will of him who sent me.” 

That’s a part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus: We follow Jesus. We look to him. And the promise is that as we begin to do so, joy pours into our lives, because we realize our life has eternal significance. 

Joy to the world!

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.