An Advent Journey - 16th December

Read: Haggai 1 vs 1-15

What are you hoping to get for Christmas? I can still remember as a child that feeling of going to bed on Christmas Eve. There really was no other night in the whole year like it … that sense of sheer expectation.

When the people returned from exile in Babylon, to Jerusalem, it was a moment of huge expectation. Some of the elderly people had childhood memories of what life in Jerusalem was like before the exile (70 years earlier) and all around there was optimism, some looked forward to things ‘getting back to normal’ others dared to hope that even better times lay ahead.

But when it actually happened, when the people actually got their feet back on Jerusalem’s streets it all turned out to be really quite disappointing. Work on the temple ground to a halt and by the time a prophet called Haggai began to preach (around 520BC) so much of what the people had hoped for had simply not happened. As Haggai put it ‘You expected much, but see it turned out to be little’ (v. 9).

So what had gone wrong? In today’s reading Haggai challenges the people to rethink their hopes and to rethink their priorities. Their mad dash to ‘get back to normal’ had been marked by immersing themselves in a busyness to get their own houses and their own lives back into order (v. 9) but at the same time God’s house had remained a ruin.

2020 has been a tough year. One email in my inbox this morning put it this way ‘It has been a hard year for everyone’. As we look to Christmas and beyond we will have our different hopes, different sense of expectation. What do you hope for in 2021? A return to ‘normal’, better times? Haggai encourages us to get fix our eyes on the Lord in the midst of this onward journey. He always has a way forward for His people. New things He wants to give. But we can we close Him in the midst of all our plans, our concerns, our busyness, our desire to get back in control, and we can end of up very disappointed. 

This Christmas comes to us as an invitation to place our hopes in the One who is always faithful and who never fails those who trust in Him.

Prayer: Father your faithfulness is great. Please help to hope in you as I look to this Christmas and the days, God willing, that lie ahead. Amen.