Music.

Good morning, Conduit. How are you? My name is Cameron. I'm one of the pastors here.

And first, I want to say last week, last week I put out a very urgent plea,

to not leave me alone decorating the church for Christmas because you didn't

want me being left alone to decorate the church for Christmas because I would

have decorated a plant with some lights and called it good.

And so I want to say thank you to everyone who showed up yesterday to help decorate

the church and put the trees up and take the time to do that with us.

Really appreciate your willingness to, your willingness to help.

So it is the, it is the Advent season and sometimes we talk about Advent and

Christmas as if they're one in the same.

And for all intents and purposes, we can consider them to be one in the same.

But traditionally, when we think of Advent or what Advent is,

Advent is a time of preparation.

It is a period of time where we reflect backwards, where we think forwards,

and we are drawn into both a story of the promise of Jesus coming the first time as a little baby in,

a manger, you know, the sentimental story that we all know and love,

and also look forward to the hopeful promise and fulfillment of the promise

in his second coming or his return.

And so we have this Advent season, which is a season of preparation.

It is a season of looking forward. It is a season of hopefulness.

And in a world where everything or most things or a lot of things,

it depends on where you're sitting in the, where you're sitting in the room sometimes, right?

In a world where you look out into your world, the experiences you're having,

the circumstances that you're in, the relationships that you have,

things may look just only dark and only bleak and only with no future and no

hope that's resting inside of you.

And Advent is a season that wrestles with and helps us to live into the reality that there,

that we have hope in the coming of Jesus as Messiah and King, and at the same time,

not asking us to deny the very real and current realities of our life that sometimes

make it very difficult to say, yeah, you know what? I can be positive here.

I do have hope for the future.

I, everything, everything looks great. moving forward, because sometimes the

reality is that everything in your world does not look great moving forward.

And you may, you may feel the pressure as a person of faith or as a person who

wants to have faith to say, yeah, even though my world is falling apart,

I'm going to pretend like it's not,

so that I can paste on a smile and a facade and walk into church and when someone

asks me, hey, how are you doing?

I'm just going to say, it's great. I'm great. Everything's great when inside

it is anything but great.

It is anything but awesome. It is anything but hope-filled.

And so, that is, you know, there's, there's the, the scripture speaks to that.

The scripture speaks to that dichotomy that we live in as people who are pursuing

relationship with Jesus.

And taking an honest look at

the reality of scripture and the reality of a life lived following Jesus,

I think can give us hope that what we're experiencing in that dichotomy between

things being really bad but us having hope is an okay place to live.

It's okay to live in that place of tension.

You know, one of the things that we do on a Sunday morning, obviously,

when we get together, this might be your first time ever coming to church.

Might be your first time sitting in a church service.

And so you might think that, wow, this is really weird.

It started off as a concert where we all sung.

And now we're all sitting and listening to some guy talk.

And understand that, you know, like maybe for some of us who have grown up in

church or gone to church for a long time, it seems very normal to us, right?

Seems like, well, yeah, this is just what it is, but it's not that way for all of us.

And one of the things that we do at church when we gather on a Sunday morning

or on a Friday night at a worship night or anything like that,

is that we sing. We do sing songs together.

And these songs and music in general, all right?

Music, in general, as we gather in worship, is meant to engage us in a different

way than simply just maybe sitting during this time and listening.

Music is meant to engage our minds.

We can and will think about the words that are on the screen or in the hymnal

or in the book or that we're singing.

We're engaging with the thoughts that we're having as we're singing those songs

and what it means. We're engaging, our bodies are being engaged as well.

We are standing or we're sitting or we're kneeling in a posture of prayer.

Some of us may raise our hands in a posture of praise or in a posture of surrender to the Lord.

We may clap at certain moments. We may get very emotional.

We may be very quiet, right? But music and singing is meant to engage us as whole people.

It engages our mind as we think, it engages our speech as we sing,

it engages our body as we move or have a specific posture, it engages our emotions.

Music is meant to touch a different part of us than reading a book does,

or than just listening to some guy talk, right?

And we often are like, well, wow, I'm, you know, here we are singing.

I can't get emotional because then I can't think straight, right?

Or then I can't learn, or then I can't engage these different aspects of worship

together, but what I wanna tell you is here, and look, God made us as emotional people, right?

Our, God made us as people that feel things.

We feel compassion, and we feel love, and we feel kindness, we feel anger,

we feel frustration, and God has given us emotions as a way for us to engage

with the world around us, and our

emotions can be sanctified and used for righteous and kingdom purposes.

And they can also obviously be used for unrighteous purposes.

But regardless, right, when we stand together and sing as a group and as a community,

we are experiencing a holistic act of worship.

We stand and we sing together, we're all following along with the same words,

singing the same chorus, following our worship leaders up here.

We do it in community as a unified proclamation.

Just think about that for a moment.

Right now, there's one guy standing on the stage, proclaiming,

beginning to proclaim the Word of God out into the community.

But you take that same idea and you flip it.

And when we stand to sing and when we begin to sing about the character of God, about the nature of God,

about what God is doing in us, what God is doing through us,

we take it and we change it from one guy speaking to the whole,

to the whole speaking to him, right?

Singing actually becomes a unified proclamation of the gospel.

It becomes a unified proclamation of the truth of God's Word.

It allows us to do something together to, in one voice, proclaim what we believe,

who we believe in, and what we intend to do about it.

For instance, one of the songs that we sang this morning, right,

had this, had this verse in it.

Jesus, we are here. We are here for you.

We're gathered in this place to honor you, to worship you in spirit and in truth.

Oh Jesus, we are here for you.

And it can become easy to sometimes go through the motion of the songs that

we sing, even as a unified whole, without taking a moment and recognizing what

is actually happening in the singing of the song.

That we're making a proclamation to the Lord,

we're gathering in unity about that thing, we communally declare our worship

as we all will in heaven one day.

I often hear people say, yeah, you know, I just like coming to hear the sermon and hear the teaching.

I'm not really into the whole singing and worship thing and stuff like that.

And what I tell you is like, one, the preaching ain't that good,

right? to only come for that.

And number two is like, hey, listen, if, if you, right, if there is a piece

of you, it's like, well, I mean, I don't really like singing.

I'm gonna tell you right now, you're not gonna like heaven very much.

You're not, right? Because the scripture is pretty clear, right?

That even now, as we sit in this room together, that there is an unending hymn

that is echoing in the throne room of heaven, right?

That the angels and the saints over and over and over again are singing in one

unified voice in proclamation, Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty,

who was and is and is to come, right?

That worship, right, singing, right, is a primary activity of our eternal existence.

And so what we do when we gather and we sing in a unified voice is like,

hey, listen, this is, we're practicing for heaven. Let's get it right, okay?

We are practicing for heaven and God indeed is worthy.

We see Scripture, we see Scripture, all over Scripture, the use of singing.

The use of singing to proclaim to God the content of our heart and even our emotions.

Probably the most famous part of all Scripture where you see singing is,

we'll just say, the whole book of Psalms, right?

Was an ancient song book.

Those were meant to be sung. They were meant to be used in the midst of communal worship.

And even within those psalms, we see the writer of those psalms proclaiming

that the way in which they are engaging with God is through song.

And for instance, in Psalm 51, verse 14, David says, Lord, my tongue will sing

an unending song of your righteousness.

In Psalm 59, verse 16, David goes on to say this, he says, But I,

Lord, I will sing of your strength.

I will sing of your strength. In the morning, I will sing of your love.

For you are my fortress in times of trouble.

It's not just in the Psalms that we see that. We see this in the gospel too.

If you want to jump into any of the aspects of the gospel where we see this

Christmas story, the pre-Christmas story, the Advent story,

we see that two significant figures in the gospel stories, Mary,

the mother of Jesus, and Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist,

both have recorded their own songs that they sang at the news that they were

to be parents and that it was a miraculous conception.

You have Mary's song, You have Zechariah's song where they proclaimed in the

midst of a situation that was like, ooh, geez, Mary, I'm young,

I'm unwed, I am a virgin, miraculously I'm pregnant.

There's a lot of emotions going on here.

But that out of the honesty of her situation, right? She sang a song to the Lord.

Make me faithful to the task, Lord. And Zechariah in the same way that he sang

out of the midst of a situation that was just so confusing for him and his wife.

You see, we often think that singing is,

at least in church, singing is the thing that we do in order to fill space or

get us kind of emotionally ready for the sermon, right?

Like I gotta just, we gotta build up the emotion so that you're ready for the

main part of the message or main part of the service.

But listen, we have to, we have to begin to eliminate that type of thinking

from our mind and understand the,

understand worship as not just, as not something that just warms us up for the

main part of our Sunday morning experience, which is the message,

but that it is, that it is a holistic flow of God's, God's speaking to us and

our response back to Him.

Singing together is not the lesser of the things that we do together on a Sunday morning.

Understand that when we sing, we unite together in one voice in praise of God.

We witness to and proclaim the work He has done and will do.

We give expression to the situations and circumstances of our hearts and our

lives, and we ask God to respond in that moment, to show himself to us,

to reveal his character,

to prove his faithfulness to us.

Now, many of the songs that we sing are wrapped up in some sort of faith tradition for us.

That's why at certain times, and I can set my watch to it, right?

I know exactly when the room is about to get loud with a song that we sing, right?

And normally, right? Normally, what happens is certain songs get sung a lot louder.

Have you noticed that? Have you noticed that there seems to be a lot more participation

when we engage in singing a certain song or another song?

Have you noticed that? Yes? Just me? Nod your head yes.

Okay, you've noticed that. Great.

What are those songs? Well, normally those songs are the songs that have been

deeply rooted or seeded in the faith tradition of the people that are singing them.

They're songs that they have sang for years and years and years and years and

years and years and years. Right?

They are songs that your faith was built upon or in the midst of.

Right? And that when you hear those first few chords or you see those first few lyrics, right?

The seating of faithfulness that that represents in you,

it like wells up and wells out of you and you just can't not sing with all of

your heart because of the remembrance of God's goodness in you through it.

Perhaps the greatest chunk of kind of like traditional music that Christians

have sung over time and that they usually sing really loudly are the hymns and

carols that we sing around Christmas time.

Right? I bet you, I could stand you all up right now, no lyrics on the screen,

no hymnals in your hands and ask you to sing Silent Night or Joy to the World

or Hark the Herald Angels, right?

And we wouldn't, you wouldn't need any direction, right?

Because there's something about the way that those songs have been sung and

utilized in the formation of our faith and the celebration of Christmas over

the years, that they're just, they're a deep part of who we are as people of faith.

Conversely, many of us have spent so much time singing those songs over such

a long period of time that we may not have spent much time actually thinking

about or engaging with the thing that we're actually, what are we actually singing?

We hear the tune, we know the words, we sing it, we're not actually engaging

with the act of proclamation or the act of worship in that moment.

And if you're wondering, like, well, I wonder why that is, because if I were

to say to you something right now, like, well, tell me what the major spiritual

lesson or theme in Silent Night is.

You'd be like, there's a lesson in that song?

There's a theme in that? I thought it was just a song we sung.

I thought it was just the last one we sung on Christmas Eve before we blow the candles out.

So we get engaged emotionally with these songs,

which is a really good thing, and we want to do that, but we also need to engage

our hearts and we need to engage our minds so that we can align ourselves with

the messages that we are proclaiming out of our mouths without just doing it as,

you know, kind of like a spiritual robot on any given day.

And in all cases, we need to consider what God has to say to us as we wrestle

with the scriptures that those songs reflect.

That was all an introduction to...

My watch is broken. So that was all an introduction to this series,

this little mini sermon series that we're going to do during the Advent series

or during the Advent season, which will be on the carols, not the carol majacks.

Although, you know, we love Carol and we honor her, but the carols that we sing, okay?

Things like Joy to the World, right?

Things like O Come, O Come, Emmanuel or O Holy Night or Silent Night.

Like what, okay, what do we actually sing?

And what scripture or lessons are being proclaimed there?

And I want you to be, I want to be really clear about this before we go.

Any further is that we're not studying the songs themselves.

Okay. We don't, we don't, we don't, we don't study the song.

The song, the song, the song is not inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Right.

The song itself is not scripture, but there are, there are deep scriptural themes within these songs.

And so we're going to talk a lot about the songs, but the point is not to dissect

the song and get a lesson from the song itself.

The point is to say is, hey, look, there was a certain point where this song

was written about this scriptural theme, about this idea, and look at all of

the ways in which scripture proclaims this thing.

And so we're kind of using them to help guide us through the scriptures that

are present, available, used in the Advent season.

So, are you ready? Are we ready? Okay.

Today we're gonna talk about, we're gonna talk about the themes and songs around.

We're gonna talk about the scriptural themes and principles around this ancient

Christmas carol, it's really an ancient Christmas hymn, named O Come O Come Emmanuel, right?

O Come O Come Emmanuel, right? And Pastor Luke's gonna come up here and sing

it for us, so that we make sure everyone has a clear picture of it.

O come, O come, Emmanuel.

This is some brief history on the song itself. It originally appeared in kind

of like the, in Christian life and in Christendom, in the church around the

eighth or ninth century.

And the original song was written in an ancient form of Latin.

So it was a Latin song, translated into both Greek and English as the,

as we, you know, entered into the 21st century and how we see it now.

There is no known author to this song.

The best guess we have to the person or persons that wrote,

O Come O Come Emmanuel is that it came from some group of monks who who would

use it in worship as a form of praying.

And we're gonna talk about how even the nature of the song, it is as much a

proclamation of a song as it is a deeply rooted prayer.

And even a, I would even say a pattern for the way in which we pray in the midst

of difficult circumstances when we're trying to hold on to hope.

Because even the words there of the main song, "'O Come, O Come,

Emmanuel' is a plea to God's people.

That the Lord would show up in the midst of your circumstances, right where you are.

And the song is written that way. Now, what is significant about the hymn and

what truths does it point to as we sing it?

And you can probably guess that as soon as the sermon is over,

we are going to sing it together, all right?

We are going to sing all these hymns together. Like I said, it's not technically a carol,

but rather a hymn written, it was written based off a set of traditional prayers

that the church, that the church used to celebrate,

the titles of the coming Messiah that were laid out in pretty long form in the prophecy of Isaiah.

And if you've been around the church during Christmas time at all,

you'll hear that we, a lot of reading comes out of the, the book of Isaiah,

a really large prophetic book in the middle of your Bible.

And, and it's, it's, they call Isaiah the messianic prophet because he, he wrote pretty,

pretty extensively about the coming Messiah that would set the people of God

free from their captivity, free from their bondage.

And free from the control of what oppressed them.

And along his prophecy and along his life, he would proclaim specific titles

that the Messiah would have.

And these titles that the Messiah had,

were, they were used, they were used and kind of drawn out of the book of Isaiah

and used as the formation of prayers within Christian worship throughout the church.

So you would think of it, okay, we have the book of Isaiah.

It speaks eloquently, powerfully, and passionately about the coming of the Messiah.

But the Messiah just ends up being, Messiah is just one term or title that Isaiah

uses to describe the one that will to come.

He also uses terms like the one of wisdom.

The one who is the Lord, the one who is the root of Jesse, the one who is the

key of David, the rising sun or the day spring, the one who is the king of nations,

the one who is Emmanuel,

or is with us.

These things in the ancient church as they were used in prayers were called the Oh, antiphones.

They were proclamations that were prayed every day, seven days before Christmas,

every day a new one was to be prayed.

They were a way to sing through or to celebrate and proclaim that the Messiah

was coming. but not just that the Messiah was coming, but that he was coming in a certain way.

That he was coming to represent certain things. That he was coming to fulfill certain promises.

That he was coming to bring with him certain things.

That he was coming to bring all things to a culmination in himself.

That the Messiah was coming as not just one who was promised on the clouds,

but that he was coming and he would, that he would be robed with wisdom.

We see this in Isaiah chapter 11. That he would be truly God from God.

That he would be the Adonai, O Adonai or O Lord in Isaiah chapter 11.

That he would be the root of Jesse. That he would be coming out of the house and lineage of Jesse.

That he would be coming, that he would be the key to David's kingdom,

that he would be the day spring or the rising sun, that everything that was

in darkness, Jesus would bring to illumination by being the light that bring darkness to the world,

that he was coming not just as a king of the Jews, but he as he was coming as

O rex gentium, the king of the nation,

king to both Jew and Gentile, and that he was coming as O Emmanuel,

not a God that stands far off from his creation in the midst of their pain,

in the midst of their suffering, in the midst of the hopelessness that they would be experiencing,

but that the Messiah would be coming as O Emmanuel,

a God who comes off of the proverbial throne and takes on flesh to be with those whom he loves.

God with us.

Of course, these ancient prayers, they actually looked and sounded a little bit like this.

So like, for instance, on the day where the ancient prayer or the antiphon was

prayed about wisdom, they would start the whole church service with this prayer.

Oh, wisdom of our God most high, guiding creation with power and love,

Come to teach us the path of knowledge.

Or the next one, O Adonai, O Lord, O leader of the house of Israel,

giver of the law to Moses on Sinai, come to rescue us with your mighty power.

O root of Jesse's stem, sign of God's love for his people, come to save us without delay.

O key of David, opening the gates of God's eternal kingdom, come and free us

from being prisoners of darkness.

O radiant dawn, O rising sun, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice,

come and shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death.

And these, so these prayers would be prayed and they would be sung in the midst

of the community to help give a additional or more complex or more deep and

interwoven with all of prophetic scripture,

an idea of a picture of the hopefulness of who God was coming to be in the Messiah.

It was meant to say that, hey, Jesus is not just a man that's coming to be a inspiring teacher,

lessons to change your life forever, but no, he was coming with wisdom and power

and glory to make all things right.

Not by standing far off and staying away from the mess that sin has created,

but by entering the mess that sin has created and He Himself being with us to make it right.

What's interesting here is how brilliant and I would say artistic,

Christians have been throughout history in many ways. Of course,

I think you all know this, but these prayers were sung in this particular order.

The order never changed, okay?

And everyone knows what an acrostic is, right?

Like you have a sentence and the first letter of the sentence,

if you pull out the first letters of all the sentences, right,

they spell a word, right.

And, and there have been times where, or there are times where even in scripture,

right, the psalmists in writing poetry would use an acrostic to, to, to convey a point.

And even within our, even within the history of the church here,

this happens but what they did here is they made actually an acrostic out of

the antiphones and to make it even more confusing for us 21st century eggheads here,

who think in all like engineering type A terms, right?

They took the acrostic and they did it backwards, right?

And so the acrostic of this prayer service ended up being this word, arrow cross.

If you read it backwards, it's Sapientia Adonai, the rising sun, the key of David,

the king of the nations, and O Emmanuel, or Emmanuel at the end.

An arrow cross is meant, the literal translation of that acrostic is,

I will be present tomorrow.

Okay, hold that there for a second, leave this up on the screen for me for just a second.

All of these pre-Christmas chants in the O antiphones,

the hymn, O come, O come, Emmanuel, the acrostic organization of them points

to this one main theme, this one main idea, and that is this,

is that God is with us.

That God is present with us and offers us hope for tomorrow in the midst of

the darkness and brokenness of the circumstances that we are facing today.

Because many of you, I get this, many of you might find yourself here today

in the midst of circumstances that leave you kind of asking the proverbial question,

maybe you're asking it in your head, maybe you want to scream it out loud right

now at me because of the, because of whatever it is that you're experiencing

by saying like, God is with us?

Like, really? Like, really?

Because what I'm dealing with now, what I am experiencing,

what I am walking through, what life looks like right now,

I feel awfully alone, and it's difficult for me to have any type of like confidence

that God himself is actually with me.

And if that's where you're at this morning, if that is the place where you are

at this morning, I want you to like I wanna honor and give you the space to feel that.

Because I do believe that's real. I do believe we get into circumstances and experiences.

We have situations of our lives where we look at the proverbial bleakness of what we're looking at.

And we're like, Lord, I really wanna believe that you're here and you're present

and in the midst of all of this. but the darkness is so dark that it's hard

for me to see even the light.

That the situation seems so hopeless that I'm having a difficult time grabbing

onto any semblance of hope for the future.

And I would also want to say that if that's where you're at,

that the whole Advent season, the whole Christmas season, if you want to look at it that way,

is about looking forward to the time, to the moment,

to the revelation that the promise of God's hope restoring all things comes

true in the person of Jesus Christ.

That in the midst of all your hopelessness, that in the midst of all your darkness,

that in the midst of feeling alone, the season of Advent is the slow,

somewhat perilous,

progressively going from the darkest of darks to the lightest of lights that

the presence of Jesus Christ with us provides.

The season of Advent is meant to take us from the midst of the reality of our

experiences where we think that

things cannot possibly get any worse and they're not getting any better.

And the overwhelming message that is proclaimed is that yes,

on your own things will not get any better, but don't worry because rejoice, rejoice.

God is with us. Jesus has come.

Emmanuel is here.

Now, O come, O come, Emmanuel is not the same type of song as joy to the world, right?

Which exclaims the exuberance of the finality of the coming of Jesus.

It is pure and inexpressible joy, right? Captain obvious, right?

Joy to the world. The Lord has come.

Let earth receive her King.

Rather, O come, O come, Emmanuel sounds and functions,

More like a prayer than it does the exuberant singing of a final,

of the final revelation of Jesus Christ and joy to the world.

O come, O come, Emmanuel sits over here, kind of at the beginning of the story.

It sounds more like a desperate whisper. O come.

O come. Oh, come Lord Jesus, I need you now.

And maybe it doesn't even sound so much like a desperate whisper in your life.

Maybe it's more like an exasperated scream.

Oh, come Lord Jesus, be with us now.

Maybe it sounds like a desperate whisper. Maybe it sounds like an exasperated scream.

But each stanza of this song relays and wrestles with this ridiculous dichotomy

of being able to see hope in the midst of our relationship with Jesus.

Now, this is the most ancient form or most ancient like translation of the song.

So the verses are going to look a little bit different from you,

but even look at the way that the song progresses.

Then we're going to talk about the scripture that undergirds all of this.

Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.

Israel is in bond, the people are in bondage. They are in chains. They are enslaved.

Their situation is bleak and hopeless. There is nothing for them to look forward to.

Their future is rooted in slavery.

O come, O come, Emmanuel. Ransom us as we are captive, the people of God.

We mourn in lonely exile here.

Until.

Until the Son of God appears.

And now we rejoice and we rejoice for God is with us and he shall come to us as his people.

The next verse, O come thou rod of Jesse, free.

Free thine own from Satan's tyranny.

That's bleak, right? free us from the tyranny of our enemy, from the depths,

Lord, from the depths of hell,

thy people would you save and give us victory over the grave.

And we rejoice. And we rejoice because God is with us, Emmanuel, and he shall come to us.

Oh, come thou day spring, come and cheer, give us cheer.

Our spirits by thine advent here disperse, Lord, the gloomy clouds of night,

and death's dark shadows put to flight.

Is that your life right now?

You feel that here as more than just a song that's sang, that's sung,

but that as a cry or prayer of our hearts.

Oh, day spring. Oh, oh, oh Messiah that brings light in the midst of our darkness.

Would you disperse the gloomy clouds of night that surround us and,

and death's dark shadows put them to flight.

And each stanza of the song goes like this.

The situation is bleak. Everything is dark.

There is no hope, but Lord, you are with us.

You will send the darkness away.

You will bring us into hope and future.

See, the reality of the Christian life is that we live currently now.

In what some have come to describe the, this phrase the already and the not yet.

Right now, as we express faith in Jesus Christ, we live in the already and the

not yet. What do I mean by that?

Well, we sit as ones who have expressed faith in Jesus Christ in the overwhelming

joy of being fully redeemed by Him, right?

Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, Ephesians chapter 1,

verse 7 and 8, he says, in Him we have redemption through His blood,

the forgiveness of our sins in accordance with God's grace that He has lavished

on us with all wisdom and all understanding. We have been redeemed.

We have been forgiven of our sins.

All of that is a measure and gift of God's grace and He is lavishing His love

on us through Jesus Christ.

We are now sitting in that position of being forgiven and redeemed through the blood of Jesus Christ.

It is who we are as disciples of Jesus.

We have now, in this very moment, by faith in Jesus, we receive the overwhelming

grace of God's gift to us in Jesus Christ.

His love extraordinarily demonstrated to us through Him.

We've been studying the book of Romans the last couple of months,

and both in Romans chapter 4 and Romans chapter 5, we hear these words.

Paul says that He, that Jesus Christ, He was delivered over to death for our

sins, and He was raised to life for our justification.

That God has demonstrated His love for us in this.

That while we were still sinners, that Christ has died for us.

We stand in a position by faith in Jesus Christ of being the very righteousness of God.

And we walk around with this new identity, no longer being slaves to sin,

but now we are partakers in the promise of God for eternal life through the

righteousness of Jesus.

It's who we are right now in this very moment.

It's already happening. We are already redeemed. We are already justified.

We are already forgiven. We are already made new. We are already set free. We are already freed.

We are already healed. We are already new creations.

And at the same time, there is so much that has not yet come to full fulfillment in our lives.

We live in the middle of what Christ has already done and what has not yet happened.

At the same time we, that we walk in the justification and redemption and the

forgiveness of our sins through Jesus Christ, we also at the same time,

we both inwardly or actually outwardly writhe in the pain and brokenness that

sin has brought upon this world.

Upon the creation of God, upon our lives, upon our families,

upon our relationships, upon our, upon our, upon everything.

Sin has broken everything. There is nothing that has not been touched by it.

And we sit in the reality of that every single day as ones who have been like

snatched from the fire, the word says.

Paul reflects this in Romans chapter eight.

He starts in verse 23. He says this, he says that we groan inwardly.

We groan inwardly as we await our full adoption as children of God.

Even though, he says in verse 18, we have already been given the Holy Spirit

as a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance to new life.

He said, hey, look, in verse, well, let's just go there. Don't take my word

for it. Let's look at the word, right?

Okay, Romans chapter eight.

Look at verse 22. This isn't going to be up on the screen because we didn't

plan this. So Romans chapter eight, verse 22.

Actually, just go to verse 18. Romans chapter eight, verse 18. We'll start there.

You want to know how Paul describes this already? You've already been redeemed.

You've already been saved. You're already the righteousness of God,

but man, life is just like putting it to you, hard, difficult,

broken, hopeless, dark.

And he says, he says, look, I consider, I consider that our present sufferings,

are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

For the creation, it was subjected to its own frustration, not by its own choice,

but by the will of the one who subjected it, right?

All of creation was subjected to the curse of sin, is subjected to the curse

of sin, is what Paul is saying.

But by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope, verse 21,

that creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought

into the glorious freedom of the children of God, verse 22.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth

right up to the present time.

Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit,

grown inwardly, as we eagerly await for our adoption as children,

the redemption of our bodies, for in this hope, we are saved.",

What is Paul saying here?

He's saying, hey, look, we recognize that you are suffering.

We recognize that you are experiencing hardship and brokenness.

We should not be surprised by it, Paul says.

Paul says that the whole of creation, every bit of the fabric of humanity,

even the created world itself, is broken because of the curse of sin.

And so the creation itself groans inwardly, waiting for the return of Jesus

so that even it can be restored.

To the fullness of its purpose under God.

But you and I, yes, we wait and groan inwardly for our full adoption as children of God.

But you have been given the gift of the Holy Spirit as a deposit in you,

a first fruits of your coming redemption.

So the Lord says, by faith in Jesus Christ, you have received the presence of

the Holy Spirit in your life.

Receiving the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life through faith in Jesus

is not a golden ticket to a life that is devoid of suffering.

What the Holy Spirit is, is a deposit guaranteeing that your suffering in this

life will not be in vain and is not worth comparing to the incomparable glory

that will be revealed in us when Jesus returns.

All right? And so Advent is all about sitting in that space of like I already

have everything that the Lord has promised me in Jesus Christ.

And now I am eagerly awaiting for the coming fulfillment when he returns a second

time, where everything, truly everything, everything that has been broken,

everything that has been destroyed,

every situation that looks only hopeless and dark is infused with the hope of Jesus.

And the light of Jesus Christ makes everything that we thought was gone, new again.

God is with us.

Emmanuel, the Advent season helps us to fix our eyes,

helps us to fix our eyes,

on a future that has been promised to us in Jesus Christ, no matter how far

away it may seem from our current circumstances.

I'm going to end with this scripture from the epistle, 1 Peter,

because it kind of, it fully kind of encapsulates the reality of us sitting

in the already and not yet.

The glory of what has been offered to us by faith in Jesus Christ,

but also the hopeful promise and fulfillment of what is coming in Jesus Christ.

There's both here, okay? There's both suffering and promise.

There's both darkness and hope.

Hear this from 1 Peter 1, verses 3-9.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope through the

resurrection of Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish,

spoil, or fade away,

kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until

the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

And in this, you greatly rejoice.

Though now, for a little while, you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials.

These have come so that your faith of greater worth than gold,

which perishes, even though it's refined by the fire,

may be proved genuine and may result in praise,

glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

Though you have not seen him, you love him.

And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with

an inexpressible and glorious joy.

For you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

In this, you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while,

you have had to suffer grief of all kinds of trials.

We rejoice even in the midst of the trial we are experiencing because we know

that promise of God in Jesus Christ is on the horizon,

and all things that have brought us only hopelessness will now bring us hope.

God is with us. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, it is you and you alone that sees every bit of the brokenness of our world,

that sees every instance of of hopelessness and darkness and pain that we experience.

Would I thank you that you have given us not some pie in the sky hope.

Not some sentiment of just like, hey, just think more positive.

Just paste a smile on your face. Just fake it till you make it.

But Lord, you have, you have rooted deeply in your word that,

though you may suffer trials of all kinds of all kinds right now,

they do not compare to the glory that will be revealed in you.

Because the promise of the coming of Jesus,

the promise that we will be fulfilled with hope is a promise that will make

all things new, is a promise that will redeem and restore all of creation.

Lord, we are experiencing the joy of our salvation now in this very moment,

even as we are also experiencing the pain of difficult circumstances,

knowing Lord that you are with us.

Lord, let the Advent season, let the Christmas season be a continual proclamation

of the hope that we have, that Jesus is coming,

that Jesus is with us, and that we are not abandoned to the grave.

In Jesus name, Amen.