Advent Conspiracy

I first came across AC last year but had completely forgotten until someone else I know blogged about it. How could I have forgotten!

I'll probably use the videos to promote alternative gift ideas for Christmas. The last few years we've done alternative gifts as well as the more usual gifts for each other.

How does God feel about me?

I'm currently preaching a series on various characters in the Bible. This coming Sunday it's David. Having just done Peter, it's interesting to do another great character who was flawed and made mistakes, and yet, because of the grace of God, still found a place in his purposes and plans. But then again how many biblical character wouldn't you describe that way?

I do not believe that there is ever such a thing as God's second best for us. The grace of God can take all our errors and bring about something that will glorify and honour God's name.

Anyway, as I think about David and some of the things I might include on Sunday I was reminded of a quote we used at Christmas in our Carol Service. There's a great Max Lucado book called One Incredible Moment, that contains extracts from many of his other books around the theme of Christmas. Near the beginning, in fact it may be the first chapter, he says this:

Here is what we want to know. We want to know how long God's love will endure... Does God really love us forever? Not just on... Sunday when our shoes are shined and our hair is fixed. We want to know... how does God feel when I'm a jerk? Not when I'm peppy and positive and ready to tackle world hunger. Not then. I know how he feels about me then. Even I like me then.
I want to know how he feels about me when I snap at anything that moves, when my thoughts are gutter-level, when my tongue is sharp enough to slice a rock. How does he feel about me then?...

Hope in the darkness

It's advent again, and we're into the second week having just had our second Sunday in advent celebration yesterday. Our theme for advent this year is hope, and yesterday we looked at hope in the darkness. We heard the words of Isaiah 9 read and we thought about how light brings hope and the connection with Jesus as the light of the world and therefore the hope of the world.

Whenever I start to preach on a topic like that, I can feel the passion rising. Maybe it's because I'm not at all successful in evangelism and mission, that I feel it so keenly. But as I think about the mandate we have to bring good news to every corner of the earth, to every person who lives in our neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities, I can't help but feel the pain and disappointment of not seeing folk being added to the kingdom of God. Where are the people who are being added daily to the church? Where are the stories of how we're touching lives and seeing them transformed by the gospel of grace? 

And so I'm forced to my knees to ask God's forgiveness for my shortcomings and to ask for his empowering to get involved with evangelism, to influence my friends, my family, my neighbours, towards a relationship with God. To do whatever it takes to help someone see how much God loves them, how deeply he cares for them and how far he has gone to win for them an eternal future they could never win for themselves.

Perhaps 2008 will be a better year, a more successful year. Whatever the outcome though, I'm still going to commit myself to take every opportunity that comes my way and make myself available for God to use how he wants, when he wants, where he wants and to what ends he wants. To take every opportunity to bring light into darkness so that no one near me needs to stumble around in the gloom.

The price of Christmas

Here's a quote from Max Lucado:

The blood of Christ does not cover your sins, conceal your sins, postpone your sins or diminish your sins. It takes away your sins, once and for all time.

If you are human then concealing sin is probably your preferred option. Failing that you might try to diminish them by comparing them to sins that are, in your opinion, much, much worse.

But you can't do either of those. 

A final option is simply to ignore your sin, simply postpone dealing with it.

But God sees, and God has chosen to act on our behalf.

Perhaps we are overly familiar with forgiveness to remember the awesome nature of what God has done for us. It's good to be reminded that we stand forgiven at a high price. In these days of super discounts and cash-back offers, The price for our forgiveness remains out of reach, too high for you or I to pay ourselves. 

That God steps into our history to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves is still the amazing message of Advent.

Advent for Protestants!

Jeff asked about resources for Advent in a comment on a previous post. Sorry to say that I don’t know of much that is available (although skip towards the end for a couple of books that I’ve found helpful). Over the years I’ve had to write stuff for myself and this is how I’ve done it.

For me, the value of Advent is in the opportunity to slow down and appreciate the wonder of God’s self-revelation through his Son. Christmas is such a rush when we try to pack the whole story into the small box that is a traditional Carol Service. So I’ve always tried to think a little outside the box to make the most of the time.

In case this is a completely foreign land to you, Advent consists of the four weeks running up to Christmas counted using the Sundays. So, this year, the first Sunday in Advent is December 3rd and the fourth will be Christmas Eve.

We make a decision to start using more overtly Christmas songs from the first Sunday, slowly building towards our Carol Service when we will sing many of the traditional carols with one or two more recent songs. We don’t want to sing all the same carols every week for four weeks, so we try to draw up a working list for the four weeks. Our style of worship makes this reasonably easy to do. We also make sure we frame our worship around the theme of the incarnation for these four Sundays.

Visually, we begin to decorate the church over this time too. It’s the advantage of having a building that you can do this. But there are other ways. We have artists in the church who do backdrops (we built a stable stage set one year!) and we’re trying to do some creative window designs (we have plain glass in our windows). We also have an Advent wreath. This has five candles on it, and we light one, then two, then three etc, week by week.

As to the themes we use, well I’ve mostly done those myself. It usually starts with something familiar within the context of the nativity story and I work out from there. So this year my theme is Love Unlimited and we’ll look at this through the eyes of the incarnation but we won’t start there. At the moment I’m working on exactly how I’m going to do this (I’ve been unwell for a couple of weeks and got really behind with the planning). I’m trying to work out the overall plan for the Carol Service and then use that to shape the weeks running up to it. Here’s the basic outline:

Love Unlimited

Promised in the past: What God said through the prophets and the Old Testament story
Anticipated at the time: What were people waiting for? What are people looking for today?
Fulfilled in Christ’s coming:
Completed in his time: A look at God’s purposes and future promises (probably!)

Some things may change as I work on these ideas, but you get the flavour.

Past themes have included looking at the nativity through the eyes of the different players. So we’ve done Mary’s story, Joseph’s story, the shepherds’ story. We’ve done things like Christmas Unwrapped, Not just for Christmas (how the story of Jesus affects the whole of life) and one year we looked at the names of Jesus and what they mean. So we did Emmanuel, Messiah, and Jesus (I can’t remember the fourth one of the top of my head).


This was last year’s poster and invitation.



One resource that does come to mind is a book by Max Lucado called One Incredible Moment. This is an anthology of extracts from many of his books. The narrative style lends itself to be read in services and I try to write in a similar style for the narrative parts of our events. Another Max Lucado book for Christmas is God came near.

We’ve also used videos. We’ve used some of the videos available through people like Midnight Oil and we’ve done some ourselves. Willow Creek have some great music and we’ve used music, PowerPoint etc to provide moments of reflection during services.

Okay, hope that helps and inspires.

Advent 2006

In the past I've probably been guilty of making too little of advent. After 15 years in ministry, coming up with another Christmas service let alone four weeks of Christmas themed services, gets a little harder. It was a few years ago now that I decided personally to make more of advent.

I made this decision because I thought it honoured the church and the story to give it more time. All the stuff of a commercial Christmas squeezes the story into the smallest space possible, and we, I was guilty of doing that at church too. So now we have advent. Maybe not an advent that everyone would recognise, but we give ourselves time to appreciate the wonder of God's story.

Over the four weeks leading up to Christmas we'll sing Christmas songs as part of our worship, we'll share aspects of the story and we'll build up to our carol service instead of rushing headlong towards it. At least that's my hope. Our theme this year is: God's unlimited love. Here's our Christmas invitation.



I hope you have a great advent too, and your expereince of God's unlimited love is deepened over the next few weeks.