The season has begun. Specifically, the season of complaining that the world has forgotten “the reason for the season.” It’s true, of course, but the “reason” many want restored often has more in common with Hallmark than with Christ. While celebration, family, and friendship are essential aspects of the holiday season as culturally practiced, the church calendar offers the season of Advent as a way of preparing our hearts and minds for the feast of Christmas.

Essential to the season of Advent is remembering and rehearsing the Story of Scripture, particularly those parts that promise salvation. To that end of remembering, Michael Card’s album The Promise is a staple in the Stonestreet household this time of year. The more musically gifted in our home, of which I am not one, also commit time to listen again to Handel’s brilliant oratorio, Messiah.

The brilliant and witty G.K. Chesterton was a big fan of Christmas. In 2023, Ryan Whitaker Smith wrote Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton, a delightful mix of essays, articles, poems, and meditations. Closer to Christmas Day, don’t forget about Tolkien’s Letters from Father Christmas.

For those interested in going deeper, the 2024 book by Rhyne R. Putman, Conceived by the Holy Spirit: The Virgin Birth in Scripture and Theology, is one of the rare works for both laity and theological professionals. In it, Putman describes Advent and the birth of Christ by reaching across the Scriptures and into various elements of the Christian walk.

Daniel Spanjer’s Advent is the Story: Seeing the Nativity Throughout Scripture combines rich theology with a day-by-day reading list for the entire month. From the first chapters of Genesis to the concluding verses of Revelation, Spanjer describes “Christmas as worldview”:

The history of the universe is a story with a specific plot. It began with a garden of beauty and goodness. … [God] will bring the universe to completion as it was designed—Yahweh’s permanent, eternal home among his people.

Dan Darling’s 2019 book, The Characters of Christmas: The Unlikely People Caught Up in the Story of Jesus, challenges those too familiar with the Nativity story. Darling reminds readers how God used ordinary people to do the extraordinary, including Joseph and Mary, Zechariah and Elizabeth, and Simeon and Anna. As Darling described it:

This is the real story of Christmas, the heart of Christianity: brokenness and new birth. The same God who birthed life into Sarah’s dead womb had breathed life into Elizabeth and Mary. And this baby, Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, breathes new birth into His people.

Yes, the season is bigger than commercialism and decorations, but it is even more than time with family and friends. Everything that matters ultimately finds its significance in the Work God is doing in His world.

Advent is to remind us of God’s redemption. As Mary sang in the Magnificat:

[H]e has brought down the mighty from their thrones

and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with

good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped his

servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, as he spoke to our

fathers, to Abraham and to his offspring forever.

Source