At Home In Advent

The following words for reflection are taken and adapted from “At Home In Advent - A domestic journey from Advent to Epiphany” from Gordon Giles (BRF - Bible Reading Fellowship). The entire book is available from Eden.co.uk and would be recommended to get a fuller experience of this time of devotion and meditation.

The purpose of these devotional is to give you something of an everyday object or motion which can focus our thinking through Advent. There are 3 sections:

Travelling in Advent
At Home in Advent
The run up to Christmas

This is a journey…

Car: going our own way

Read: Isaiah 53:1 - 7

Would you want to place your family in a metal box, move this box at up to 70 mph and then place this fast moving box amongst other fast moving boxes?

However, isn’t this what we do every time we drive?

We enjoy the freedom of this - and we can moan a bit when we don’t have it - but we don’t always think about the responsibility of this freedom.

We perform safety checks. We have MOTs. There are road safety signs and limits… but do we always follow them?

Isaiah writes of a people who have decided to go their own way, and this is mirrored in our lives through sin-separation from God. Road rage may be a modern terminology, but the human drive behind it is as old as a tree in a garden. And to conquer that would be impossible for us in our pride.

However one would come as a ‘suffering servant’ to offer us a new path.

Which freedoms have you missed most from the recent months through lockdown?

Have you felt further from God or closer to Him?

Reflect on what Christ has done for us that we can now follow His way rather than our own way.

Pray for all on our roads today.