Why Do We Need an Advent Season for Our Faith to Grow?

Every Advent season displays God’s deep love for his creation. Advent provides creation with a method using Jesus’ life and teachings.   Creation can now approach his father while defining a way to grow spiritually as baptized disciples.

Advent allows Christians time to watch and grasp the many ways God breaks into history simply to let his people know the ways the Lord is still our God and we are still his people. Advent affords us opportunities  to reflect on the longing and hope that signaled Christ’s birth just as it beckons us today to look forward  to Jesus’ return at history’s conclusion.

The Advent season sounds a strong song for Jesus’ birth, while revealing highlights on the moral posture on which rests our Christian future. Most of the New Testament authors like the early Church itself,  lived with this strong anticipation.

As we know, Advent is filled with Christ’s comings:  as the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes freeing us from sins that entrap our beating hearts, to those sins that ensnarl our wills forcing us down life’s less traveled roads.

As the opening Sunday of the Advent season reminds us, the Spirit of Advent moves us away from a business-as-usual attitude to a Christian sense of aliveness. Both our religious  and our personal history are straight-lines but we often  see them  as filled with terror.

As redeemed Christians we are convinced of Christ’s faithfulness, and Christ’s encouragement to stay awake so that we remain alert as we live our daily lives. If we need mercy, we ask because we know God always wants to forgive rather than punish.

The Advent Season is a two-fold challenge:  we look back to the Jesus of history and look forward to the Christ to come – making our present a gifted moment filled with hope!

O COME! O COME! EMMANUEL AND RANSOM CAPTIVE ISRAEL !!!