Advent week 4: Love that comes first
By the fourth week of Advent, something shifts.
The waiting hasn’t disappeared, but it feels different now. Hope has taught us how to sit in the dark without panic. Peace has reframed what we mean by calm and control. Joy has reminded us that delight isn’t something we manufacture but something we receive. And now, Advent turns our attention to love.
Not a vague feeling.
Not sentiment.
Not something fragile.
Love, as Scripture presents it, is something far more solid. Something that moves toward us.
Love That Does Not Stay Distant
When the Bible speaks about God’s love, it almost never treats it as an abstract idea. It shows us love in motion. Love crossing distance. Love entering real human space.
“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9).
God’s love is not proven by how intensely He feels, but by how fully He gives. Advent reminds us that love didn’t remain theoretical. It took on flesh. It learned to breathe. It entered a world marked by fear, power struggles, injustice, and quiet despair.
Jesus did not arrive in a peaceful world. He stepped into a tense one. A world shaped by Roman power, economic pressure, and spiritual exhaustion. And yet, this is where God chose to make His love visible.
Love in a Manger, Not a Throne Room
The details of Jesus’ birth matter more than we sometimes realize.
He is born to ordinary parents.
In an occupied land.
Laid in a feeding trough.
Announced first to shepherds, not rulers.
None of this is accidental.
God’s love does not announce itself with dominance or spectacle. It comes low. It comes near. It meets people where they actually are, not where they pretend to be.
Paul later reflects on this when he writes, “But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
Advent love is not a reward for readiness. It is grace that arrives before we are prepared.
Love That Holds the Whole Story Together
Looking back across the last few weeks, this is where everything converges.
Hope was never just optimism. It was anchored in a promise.
Peace was never just calm. It was reconciliation with God.
Joy was never just emotion. It flowed from belonging to Christ.
Love is what binds them all.
Love is why God did not abandon a silent world.
Love is why the Prince of Peace came without an army.
Love is why joy could exist even in hardship.
Love is the reason Advent exists at all.
Love That Still Comes to Us
What makes Advent so enduring is that it does not only look backward. It trains us to recognize how God still works.
We still live in a world that feels unfinished.
We still wait.
We still wrestle.
We still hope.
And yet, the same love that entered the world in Bethlehem continues to move toward us now. Not because we have earned it. Not because we have everything together. But because this is who God is.
“See what great love the Father has given us, that we should be called God’s children” (1 John 3:1).
That is not poetic exaggeration. It is identity.
A Quiet Ending, Not a Rushed One
Advent does not end with answers neatly wrapped up. It ends with a child. With God close. With love embodied.
As Christmas approaches, the invitation is simple.
Do not rush past this moment.
Do not reduce love to sentiment.
Do not assume God is distant.
He has already come near. And that changes everything.
Advent Week 3: Joy Has a Name
This week of Advent feels different.
The last couple weeks were about waiting and peace. Big ideas. Long stretches of history. This week feels closer to home. More personal. Joy tends to do that. It doesn’t stay abstract for long.
Most of us think of joy as a feeling. Something warm. Something seasonal. Something that shows up when life is going well and quietly disappears when it doesn’t.
But Scripture keeps pushing us toward a deeper truth. Joy isn’t just something we experience. Joy is someone we meet.
Joy That Steps Into Real Life
When the angel appears to the shepherds in Luke 2, the announcement is simple and overwhelming at the same time.
“I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”
Not joy for the powerful.
Not joy for the put-together.
Joy for ordinary people standing in the dark doing ordinary work.
This is important. The world Jesus entered was not waiting for joy. It was tired, heavy controlled by Rome, spiritually restless, and was politically tense.
And yet joy arrives anyway. Not as a mood. Not as an escape. But as a person entering real history. Jesus does not wait for conditions to improve before bringing joy. He brings joy with Him into the middle of things as they are.
Joy Rooted in Who Jesus Is
This is where Advent helps correct us.
Joy in Scripture is never detached from truth. It is never shallow optimism or forced positivity. It is grounded in who God is and what He is doing.
Isaiah speaks of joy flowing from salvation.
The Psalms tie joy to God’s presence.
Jesus Himself says that His joy is something He gives to His disciples, not something they manufacture.
Joy is not pretending everything is okay.
Joy is knowing who holds everything, even when it isn’t.
That’s why joy can exist alongside grief. Why Paul can speak of sorrow and joy in the same breath. Why Advent joy makes sense even in dark seasons.
It’s not based on circumstances.
It’s anchored to Christ.
Joy That Remains
This is where it gets personal.
Most of us are carrying things into this season that don’t magically disappear because it’s Advent. Stress. Loss. Uncertainty. Fatigue. Questions we don’t have answers to yet.
And Advent doesn’t deny that.
It simply reminds us that joy doesn’t depend on those things resolving first. It depends on Jesus having already come and still being present with us now.
Joy is not fragile when it’s rooted in Him.
It doesn’t vanish the moment life gets heavy.
It stays, quiet sometimes. Steady. Real.
A Different Kind of Joy
So maybe this week of Advent isn’t about trying to feel joyful.
Maybe it’s about noticing where Christ already is.
About recognizing that joy has a face and a name and a story.
About letting joy be something we receive, not something we perform.
Joy came into the world once.
And He is still here.
Advent: Hope in the darkness
Silence doesn’t mean absence. This Advent devotional explores the 400 years between the Old and New Testaments and how God prepares us in seasons of waiting.
Imagine you walk outside on a winter night that is so dark it is disorienting. There are no stars, no moon in sight, and no lights that you can see. The only thing present is the stillness in the air that swallows the horizon. You can hear your footsteps but can’t see where they land, and for just a moment you wonder, “will morning ever come?”
That kind of darkness. The kind that is thick, disorienting, and engulfs every part of you. That is the world the prophet Isaiah was speaking into. And it’s the world many Christians find ourselves living in today.
“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone.”
Before Advent becomes a season of candles, wreaths, and carols, it begins in the shadows. It starts in the stillness and the darkness. Before the people saw this “great light,” they were walking in darkness. They were dwelling in a land of deep darkness. But as we reflect on this, we see one decisive truth. Silence does not mean absence.
Israel’s Long Night: A Darkness That Lasted Centuries
When Isaiah first spoke about “a great light,” Israel wasn’t simply discouraged or had their feelings hurt. They were living under the crushing realities of invasion, exile, national instability, and spiritual confusion. The northern tribes had already fallen to Assyria. Judah was on a similar path. Even the temple, once the center of God’s presence, felt hollow. This was truly a dark time.
But the deepest darkness came later.
After the prophet Malachi closed the Old Testament, Israel didn’t hear another prophetic word for four centuries.
Not four days.
Not four years.
Four hundred years.
This period is often called “the 400 years of silence.” This time of silence wasn’t merely an absence of prophetic activity. It was a profound spiritual ache. Generations lived and died without hearing a fresh word from God. It was utter silence. Silence that made it seem as though God disappeared from the scene.
As scholars like F.F. Bruce and D.A. Carson point out, the world into which Jesus was born was a world shaped by both longing and exhaustion. Some likely wondered whether God had forgotten His people altogether.
But silence is not the same as absence.
Silence is often preparation
When we look back on the history, we see something Israel didn’t - something fascinating and undeniable:
God’s silence wasn’t neglect.
It wasn’t abandonment.
It wasn’t forgetfulness.
It wasn’t deafness.
It was construction.
It was preparation.
Behind the quiet, God was arranging the world to be prepared for the Light to come. He was preparing the way for the light to come into the world at the right time. There were many different aspects and events that took place over these 400 years, and all of them were being orchestrated to help the Light shine even brighter. Some of these things include:
A common language (Koine Greek) - Through Alexander’s empire, this contributed to making the gospel easily transmissible.
A unified road system (“Roman roads”) - Allowed missionaries like Paul to travel with unprecedented speed.
The Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) - Provided relative stability that created space for the church to grow, missionairies to travel, and for the Greek language to spread.
Synagogues scattered across the Mediterranean gave people like Paul ready-made preaching platforms.
A renewed hunger for the Messiah was forged through hardship, shaping the hearts of people like Simeon and Anna.
In Isaiah’s day, God promised that a child would come. In the long silence afterward, God was preparing the very stage on which that child would step.
This is why Advent matters:
It reminds us that God’s “quiet” seasons are often His most strategic.
Theologians like Herman Bavinck, Sinclair Ferguson, and Michael Horton highlight the reality that God fulfills His promises slowly, often imperceptibly, but always perfectly. The Spirit was not inactive. He was hovering over history the same way He hovered over the waters in Genesis 1.
The light that breaks the night
When the room is darker, a small light can be so bright that it’s blinding. Christ is that light - blinding, captivating, and completely in contrast to the darkness He entered. Isaiah’s words build toward this promise, almost too gentle and too good for such a dark world:
“For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”
A child.
Not a conqueror.
Not an emperor.
Not a politician.
A child.
Israel expected God to act loudly, dramatically, and even decisively. Instead, He came quietly and vulnerably, in a Bethlehem manger. The first cry of the Messiah broke four centuries of silence - not with thunder, or lightning, or an earthquake that shook the world, but with an infant’s cry.
This is the way of God, breaking the silence of 400 years with the incarnation.
He shines light not in the way we expect, but in the way we need. What was the answer to the darkness? The silence? The desperateness and the longing? The incarnation.
As Michael Horton says, God’s glory is most clearly seen in “the slow, steady unfolding of His covenant promises.”
What This Means for Us in Our Darkness
We all know something of silence, of darkness, and even stillness. Sometimes our prayers feel like they’re hitting a ceiling. Sometimes we go through seasons where God seems far, where His nearness feels like a memory that we can’t help but long for again. Advent gives us language for this. It gives us something to look past the immediate feelings and situations in our lives, and focus our eyes elsewhere, not on ourselves, but on Christ.
It tells us:
Darkness doesn’t mean God has departed.
Silence doesn’t mean God is inactive.
Waiting doesn’t mean God has forgotten.
Sometimes, as John Frame notes, God hides Himself not to punish us, but to reshape our desires so that we seek Him more deeply.
And like Israel, we rarely understand the preparation happening behind the curtain. Only later, sometimes much later, do we see how God was putting the pieces in place for redemption, restoration, renewal. In other words, it leads to formation.
A Holy Longing: What Advent Forms in Us
Advent doesn’t ask us to pretend everything is bright, cheerful, and merry.
It asks us to bring our darkness into the presence of a God who works in silence.
This is why the Christian life is shaped not just by fulfillment but by longing (Spirit-formed, God-centered longing). Longing is not a sign of weak faith but deeper faith. The Spirit Himself stirs it (Rom. 8:23).
The same Spirit who was shaping Israel during the silent centuries is shaping you in your waiting.
Spiritual Practice for the Week: Sitting in the Holy Quiet
So how do we practice this? Try this, for five mornings this week, sit in two minutes of quiet before praying.
Let the silence feel uncomfortable.
Let yourself listen for the gentle whisper before overshadowing it with your voice.
Let yourself feel the longing.
Then pray something like this:
“Lord, teach me to trust You in the quiet.
Let Your light break into my darkness.
Prepare me to recognize Your work when it finally appears.
Come quickly, Lord Jesus.
Amen.”
Reflection Questions
Where do you feel God’s silence most acutely right now?
What might God be preparing in you—or around you—that you cannot yet see?
How might Advent reshape your understanding of waiting?
waiting with hope in the quiet
Advent invites us to trust what Israel had to learn: God is faithful even when He is quiet, present even when He seems hidden, purposeful even when we cannot perceive His work. The same sovereign grace that orchestrated the arrival of Christ is shaping your story now.
So as you wait, wait with hope.
As you long, long with confidence.
The Light has come, and He will come again.