Well, I did my best to hold off on this post as long as possible, but now that it's November, I think I can safely say that I am already getting very excited about Christmas! As far as my reason for being excited about Christmas, I think the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of David Crowder. In case you had yet to hear the news, he and his band came out with a Christmas album this year, and it is quite spectacular. It was a bold marketing move on their behalf to come out with it at the beginning of October, but it seems to have worked on me! Even though there are no original songs, there are some wonderful arrangements of some Christmas classics, so it is definitely worth checking out.
For fear of this simply becoming an album review, I will move more toward what this post is actually intended to be. As I have begun to think more about Christmas, and with my current theme of waiting, I have begun to focus on the people of Israel, who spent thousands of years waiting for the events of Christmas. From the time of the fall, the promise of a Savior was something that this entire nation of people longed for and desired more than anything. Through captivity in Egypt, wandering through the desert, finally getting to the promised land only to spend generations warring with their neighbors, demanding a king from God, the kingdom being split in two, another period of captivity, a string of prophets who could not get through to the people, then finally a period where God fell silent, the people of Israel were constantly longing for the gift they had been promised from before God even established His covenant with Abraham. They had ritually been sacrificing for years, longing for the day when God would provide the ultimate sacrificial lamb: His only Son, the perfect a blameless Lamb who would set all men free from the grip of sin.
But what happened? The nation of Israel, in large part, missed the gift that God designed specifically for them. Over the years, their ideas of what God would do for them through His Son had gotten warped. They had allowed their own desires to get in the way of what God had provided: an example of how to live a life, freedom from sin, and a chance to have the broken relationship with God made whole again. So, as we head into this Christmas season, it is my prayer that we do not do as the Israelites did and get so caught up in our own expectations of what Christmas is that we miss what it truly is: God coming down to us, giving His Son so that He could restore the brokenness in all mankind. Oh, and enjoy some pretty spectacular Christmas music!
For fear of this simply becoming an album review, I will move more toward what this post is actually intended to be. As I have begun to think more about Christmas, and with my current theme of waiting, I have begun to focus on the people of Israel, who spent thousands of years waiting for the events of Christmas. From the time of the fall, the promise of a Savior was something that this entire nation of people longed for and desired more than anything. Through captivity in Egypt, wandering through the desert, finally getting to the promised land only to spend generations warring with their neighbors, demanding a king from God, the kingdom being split in two, another period of captivity, a string of prophets who could not get through to the people, then finally a period where God fell silent, the people of Israel were constantly longing for the gift they had been promised from before God even established His covenant with Abraham. They had ritually been sacrificing for years, longing for the day when God would provide the ultimate sacrificial lamb: His only Son, the perfect a blameless Lamb who would set all men free from the grip of sin.
But what happened? The nation of Israel, in large part, missed the gift that God designed specifically for them. Over the years, their ideas of what God would do for them through His Son had gotten warped. They had allowed their own desires to get in the way of what God had provided: an example of how to live a life, freedom from sin, and a chance to have the broken relationship with God made whole again. So, as we head into this Christmas season, it is my prayer that we do not do as the Israelites did and get so caught up in our own expectations of what Christmas is that we miss what it truly is: God coming down to us, giving His Son so that He could restore the brokenness in all mankind. Oh, and enjoy some pretty spectacular Christmas music!
