If God is like this…

Oh Advent, how I love what you do to my soul–  the chanting psalms, the smell of evergreen, the wreath and candles, the picture frames on the wall.

I love walking with our church in these seasons of deliberate expectation.  Can you imagine doing Christmas without Advent?  What a loss.  How plastic.  And desperate.  And driven.

Thank you Restoration for being a church that preps well together.  I love praying with you, singing with gusto alongside you, and waiting.

On Sunday, I talked about how Jesus is the perfect imprint of the essence of God.  When we see Him, we see what God is really like.  Then I listed out 7 things that God is not and by corollary, 7 things that God is.  In case you missed it, sounded like this…

“But, if God is like this.  If He is not absent, or boring, or hard to know, or far off, or irrelevant, or impotent or hard to understand.  If He is creative, fully-disclosed, close, critical to what we need, powerful, and intimately clear…  If that is what God is really like.  Then we have to work hard to not know HIm.  We have to deliberately choose to not know Him.”

That’s a different way to think about it, eh?  That our friends and family who don’t know God are actively trying to not know Him, to keep Him at a distance.  If we think about it, we can understand why–  if we are not sure if someone is a good cook, let’s keep him out of the kitchen.  If we are not sure we can trust God to run our life, let’s keep him on the other side of that fence, mountain, or website…

Here is my invitation in Advent–  when you get tired of actively trying to not know God.  When you are ready to stop running the other way…  would you consider Jesus?  He is the exact imprint of His nature.  He perfectly understands what it is to be US.  And He has what we most desperately want and need.

When you are tired of keeping God away, come sit in the beauty of Advent and wait.  We have a seat for you.

-David