Advent Devotional | HOPE
This Christmas we wanted to bring you messages of Hope, Love, Joy and Peace from some of our artist partners!
Red Rocks Worship, Ben Fuller and Christy Nockels share encouraging thoughts on keeping our eyes fixed on the One who gives us our greatest hope in this season and in all seasons.
Red Rocks Worship
Hope Has Come
The Christmas season is here!
Anyone who knows me knows that by July of every year I'm itching for Christmas. I love it. Give me the snow. Give me the candy canes. Throw in those Christmas songs in a worship set. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone that could quote “How the Grinch Stole Christmas'' more accurately than me. I LOVE CHRISTMAS.
It also isn’t a secret that this time of year can yield anxiety, stress and depression for a lot of people. There are so many interruptions and so many things that fight for our gaze. We have all experienced this.
For a while now the Lord has been strongly speaking to my heart that He wants his Church to look at Him and to focus on Him.
I’ve been so directed by Hebrews 12:2, “We look away from the natural realm and we focus our attention and expectation onto Jesus, who birthed faith within us and who leads us forward into faith’s perfection.”
Directing our gaze feels like such a ordinary thing; our eyes will naturally fix on something with or without our permission. However, we all know that it’s not so easy to truly notice and understand what we are seeing.
While reading in Matthew 12:1-21, we find Jesus traveling throughout cities and healing people. He was fully man and fully God, spreading hope everywhere he went.
But after his miracles, the Pharisees would get more and more frustrated with him for not behaving in the way they expected him to.
Isn’t it interesting that while Jesus was healing, the people who were missing the wonder of his miracles were those who were giving their lives to lead Israel spiritually?
It's almost as if they were too busy fixating on what they thought the Messiah would look, sound, and behave like rather than seeing the hope of the world right in front of them.
Doesn't this sound familiar?
It is frighteningly easy to read about the Pharisees and shake our heads at their blindness. But the truth is, the human heart is prone to wander.
We often neglect to behold Jesus in his fullness. It’s easy to call him Lord, and a whole other matter to surrender to him as the Lord of our lives. This takes connection. This takes refocus.
It takes a transformational gaze to see Him as our hope.
I work as a Worship Pastor at a wonderful church in Denver, Colorado called Red Rocks Church. While so many of my moments are filled with purpose and an ease to walk in my calling, a few years ago around this time of year I found myself tired, stressed and worn out.
We had rehearsals, dress rehearsals, Christmas parties, multiple services, a string quartet, multiple campuses, and all of the other things. You get the picture. I was exhausted. I was seeing without beholding, fixating on the how instead of the why.
Making church happen had become the idol that got my gaze rather than Jesus. Our set list that year had us singing one of my favorites, “O Holy Night.” During our marathon of Christmas services, maybe the fourth or fifth time, I found myself singing that iconic second verse yet again,
“Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name, all oppression shall cease.”
Those words are powerful and poetic, but I had been missing it. I had been singing the words but not letting them move me. Then suddenly in that moment, I felt the Lord interrupt me and come in close.
He graciously let me see Him and feel His presence in an undeniable way. Suddenly, those lyrics were no longer just words strung together poetically. I saw the Lord, and once I beheld Him, those lines had their power returned to them.
I tasted and saw the goodness of God (Ps. 34:8) and as I did, hope was infused into the words, “all oppression shall cease.” I began to believe that Jesus really was the hope of the world.
My friends and I at Red Rocks Worship wrote a song for our church this season called, “Hope has Come.” A lot of the language we chose to describe Jesus comes from the fact that he has revealed himself as our hope and he is very much alive. We wrote this song so that we could lead our church to look at Jesus.
Instead of anything or anyone else stealing their attention, we wanted to collectively fix our gaze on the only One who is worthy of it all. I'm so grateful for the Lord’s work on the cross. Jesus made a way for us to be redeemed, healed, forgiven, and reconciled. But these alone aren’t the full spectrum of the Gospel.
Jesus told us that he would return. He’s coming back. Scripture tells us that he will return with fire in his eyes and victory on his side.
When we say, “Hope has come,” we mean it to describe the coming of Jesus as an infant born of Mary. But we also mean it prophetically for when Jesus will come back for his people.
The reality is that this Christmas season will give you multiple excuses—maybe even “valid” excuses—to be distracted and to focus your gaze elsewhere. It can be very easy to lose sight of Jesus. In the midst of all the disruptions, can I urge you to fight for your focus?
We are given the alternative to beholding hope in Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Let everything you do in this season come from the overflow of your connection with Jesus.
Let Him be your constant hope.
Remind yourself that no matter what you see or what is happening in your community or in the world, He is still the hope of the world and He is coming back. In order to only look at Jesus, it forces you to not look at other things.
Decide to turn around from what isn't worthy of your attention and affection, and choose to look at Jesus.
Choose to behold him. Choose to adore him. Hope has come, and hope is still coming.
“Hope Has Come” | Red Rocks Worship
Ben Fuller
Who I Am
“And so from that time on many of the disciples turned their backs on Jesus and refused to be associated with Him. So Jesus said to the twelve, ‘And do you also want to leave?’ Peter spoke up and said, ‘But Lord, where would we go? No one but you gives us the revelation of eternal life.’ John 6:66
This scripture has changed my life in the realization of not only who Christ is and was to Peter and the disciples, but who He is to me.
After all the things I’ve tried, to fill the voids in my life that only Christ could fill, my question to you is,
“To whom else shall you go?”
I’ve got nobody else. And after all that running away, running to Him has made me realize that I’m a child of the most high God and the most high God’s for me, and guess what?
He is FOR YOU.
Are you choosing to follow Jesus daily?
Have you stopped everything and announced to the world that YOU are a child of the most high God and the MOST HIGH GOD IS FOR YOU?!
How much longer can you avoid the truth?
Prayer:
Dear Lord, I’ve been lost. I’ve been wandering down here afraid to face you because of the choices that I made. But here I am Lord, I’ve run out of options. Here I am Lord, I’m in need of a miracle. Hear my cry Lord, for I’ve been crying too long. And If you can hear me, would come down here and save me Father, I’m yours Lord, and I have no one else to turn to but you, so show me who I am.
Amen.
“Who I Am” | Ben Fuller
Christy Nockels
Wrap This One Up
Christmas is a favorite season of mine and several years ago, we wrote a song that is probably the most meaningful to me of any we’ve ever written. While we definitely took a few artistic liberties with the song, it is based on the sacrificial system of the first century and how we can behold Jesus as the Lamb of God.
In that familiar Christmas passage of scripture in Luke chapter 2, we read about a multitude of heavenly angels who appeared to a group of shepherds to proclaim the news of the Messiah’s birth. Many scholars believe those shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night were actually shepherds closely guarding very special lambs. These were the lambs that would be raised and certified for sacrifice in the temple.
Passover Lambs were specifically raised in fields on the outskirts of Bethlehem.
In the book of Micah, chapters 4 and 5, we find prophecies about the Messiah, a ruler who was to come from Bethlehem, who would lead his flocks in the strength of the Lord. It is said that this ruler would come from “the tower of the flock” called Migdal Eder, which was in those days known to be home base for these very shepherds and their flocks.
According to Jewish writings, during lambing season, these sheep would have been watched around the clock and were the only flocks that would have been watched by night. When it appeared that a spotless male lamb had been born, the lamb was carefully inspected for blemishes.
Some ancient Jewish writings even say these lambs were routinely swaddled in strips of cloth by the Shepherds to keep the lamb from thrashing about and soiling their coat and to protect them as pure.
Imagine the surprise and holy fear that must have descended on the shepherds that night as they were going about their business of finding the next Passover Lamb.
Suddenly a host of angels burst open the night sky!
One has to wonder if when the angel said, “and this will be a sign to you, you’ll find the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” - was it a sign to them not only of where He was but also Who He was?
If indeed swaddling cloths were part of those shepherd’s routine for spotless lambs, surely a lightbulb of recognition went off.
And I wonder, when they did find Mary and the baby King, did it suddenly make sense? Did they stand in awe that they were the first to inspect this tiny babe, swaddled tight, pure as freshly fallen snow?
Imagine the gravity of that night.
The final Passover Lamb had been born. And when this baby boy grew and became a man, He would do away with the sacrificial system once and for all by becoming the curse for us, and making a way for us to be united with Him forever through the shedding of His precious blood.
He was the One.
Of this they were sure, for the scriptures say the shepherds glorified and praised God for all they had seen and heard, just as it had been told to them.
They rejoiced, even though they couldn’t have fully known that beyond His sacred birth there would be a sacred death as this perfect Lamb would fulfill the Law forever.
His body would be wrapped up one final time and laid in a tomb, but on a glorious Sunday morning three days later, hope would break through again as it had that night so long ago in Bethlehem.
Our true hope is that His birth was breakthrough, His death was breakthrough and His resurrection was and still is breakthrough.
In believing on His name, Jesus, we are restored to the Father forever and our Emmanuel resides with us. Let’s make room in our hearts this Christmas season for the perfect spotless Lamb of God.
“Wrap This One Up” | Christy Nockels
