Earnest Expectation

Christmas is a wonderful time of year to consider hope, as we celebrate the birth of Christ. His birth was the culmination of millennia of hope, as the promises of God were fulfilled. However, many missed the promise of His coming and did not find the hope in which they should have delighted with all that they were… they missed it because they did not understand the nature of the promises, nor the nature of the hope itself. They saw the promises of God through the lens of their own imagination rather than through what God had told them was coming. It is a common problem even today. We have far more light of revelation than did the people of Jesus' day, and yet even so there is no lack of people who fail to understand the reason for His coming and the hope that it brings us for eternity. They insist on making His promises about the now, about this physical world of sin, and about the merely fleshly enjoyments which it offers them When we speak of Christmas and hope, it
is often perverted in people's minds to mean a time of happiness brought on by lights and music, family and fun… not one of those things by themselves is the reason for our hope. The reason for our hope is the promise of God. It is the promise that His plan is going along as He has intended and that He will finally complete what He has begun in the coming of Christ the first time. We celebrate in hope because God can be trusted, and even the earth knows that fact. It is why the scripture says that the whole earth groans waiting for the promised revelation and consummation of God's full promise to us; the promise of restoration.