Every year our family celebrates Advent season by creating a family Advent calendar. Each day the girls pick out a slip of paper to see what our family will do together to enjoy the holiday season together. Activities range from practical like wrapping presents and making homemade gift tags, to fun like doing a Christmas word search race and drinking hot cocoa, to spiritual like meditating on aspects of the incarnation.
On the first Sunday, we talked about the concept of waiting and what it must have been like to hear the prophets foretell of Christ. As we were discussing, Mark brought up the idea of how the Jews were so eager and full of hope for the coming of the Messiah, but they were only eager and hopeful for a Messiah that fulfilled their expectations. They were so intent upon their own interpretation of liberation and salvation that they completely overlooked and rejected the transcendent liberation and salvation that God was offering.
This thought led me to reflect on how we approach prayer and Bible study, and how we see God moving around us. When we go to scripture to search for God, when we humble ourselves before him in prayer, and when we look around us and see his hand at work, it is so important that we discern and remove our own biases and agendas. We cannot approach these things through the lens of what we think God will do or should do. Our ideas of what God will and should do reveal for more about us than they reveal about the true nature of God. If we earnestly want to know God as he is instead of what we would have him to be then we must search ourselves to recognize our own preconceptions, and pray that God would give us wisdom and insight to know him despite them.
The irony is that the Jews refusal to let go of their expectations for liberation and salvation is the very thing that prevented them from finding the surpassing freedom that Christ died to give them. This same irony threatens us when we assume that our ideals are the same as God’s, so we do not humble ourselves and search what scripture actually states and what is consistent with God’s nature. It can be a little difficult to let go of something that we hold dear and true, but we can be assured that what God has to offer is much greater and richer!
