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

We have travelled home, we have made some preparations, and now we settle in for the last run up to Christmas.

Christmas Carols: Missionary Music

Read: Colossians 3:12 - 17

What is your favourite Christmas carol? I wonder how much you know about it… when it was written, was it written as a Christmas hymn or just became that… Did you know that a lot of Christmas carols have two languages? You may be thinking, “Yes I did know that a lot of them use Latin words - gloria, excelsis, and so on”. Well you can take your smarty pants off for a while. What I am referring to are the languages of fun and faith.

Some people just like to sing them for that nostalgia and the warm-fuzzies that they bring, others sing them as a hymn and psalm to the Creator of the world. But do we know the difference?

You may know Greg Lake’s “I believe in Father Christmas” - at this point there are some of you spitting fury at his so-called ‘anti-Christian song’ - but what about It Came Upon the Midnight Clear? A classic carol? What if I was to tell you that the writer was a Unitarian who denied the divinity of Christ… surely this is as anti-Christ as Greg Lake…

Does it really matter who is singing it or even how it is sung,? I would go as far as saying the words are what matters most. These are words that people will sing with their lips year in year out, so it is an opportunity to let them impact their heart. It is an opportunity for the Christian to praise and the non-Christian hear of a Christ who has come to bring Joy to this world. Pray for ALL carol singing this year.