Lamentations 5:20-21  Why do you forget us forever, why do you forsake us for so many days? Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored! Renew our days as of old.

While nostalgia for the "good old days" is frequently misguided, for Israel the "days of old" for which they yearned were usually the days of the Exodus. Those truly were good days when the Lord, in His mercy, rescued his people from slavery. In Lamentations, they cry out to God following the destruction of Jerusalem and exile to Babylon. Remember us! Restore us! Renew us!

We don't always need to be happy. There is room for lament in the believer's life. We cry out to God in tears, with shattered hearts. We beat on heaven's door. In his own time and way, our Father will answer. His immediate answer, however, will always be Christ with us, for us, in us. Bit by bit, Jesus will renew our darkened hopes with the light of his healing love.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Psalm 104:30  When you send forth your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.

If we put the opening chapter of the Bible to music, it would sound like Psalm 104. In this song, the poet praises God for everything from winged angels to wild donkeys. He also reminds us of something we often forget: creation is not independent. Were God to cease speaking everything into ongoing existence, it would vanish into non-existence. Creation is wholly dependent upon the Creator. Rain falls because God sends it. The sun shines because God makes it. We breathe and walk and talk because the Word of God makes us so. Every tiny aspect of creation hinges on God's Spirit creating and renewing.

At Christmas, we celebrate God taking into himself. God with eyes and ears and tiny toes. You see, it wasn't enough for the Lord to be Creator; to save us, he needed to become a creature, too. So he did, gladly and graciously, to renew us as his own.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Psalm 51:10  Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

The Hebrew word that David uses for "create," bara, always has God as its subject. We today might say an artist or musician "created" something, but the Hebrews didn't speak that way. God alone can bara. And that reveals a vital truth: there's only one way to get a clean heart and a renewed spirit. It's not by praying, fasting or confessing. None of that will somehow magically cause a new heart or right spirit to sprout within us. God renews us by this Son and Spirit. He alone gives us a new genesis, a fresh start.

That's helpful to remember in Advent. Should we pray? Yes. Fast? If we wish. Confess? Of course. But we don't self-create new hearts or autogenerate right spirits. The Maker of heaven and earth, our dear Father, does that for us because he positively delights in filling us to overflowing with his gracious gifts in Jesus Christ.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Luke 1:45  And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.

It was almost as much a miracle that Mary believed that she would conceive as was the conception a miracle itself. Virginity and baby-making are mutually exclusive categories. We know this. Mary knew this. So, rightly does her relative Elizabeth exclaim, "Blessed is she who believed." And therefore, is the dead giveaway as to how Mary believed: she received the blessed gift of faith. Belief isn't some latent power we stir up within us; it is trust given to us by the Holy Spirit. "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3).

Mary said, "Let it be to me according to your word" by that same Spirit's power (Luke 1:38). And so we do. The Son conceived in her is "born in us today," that is, takes up residence in our hearts, by faith conceived through the blessed work of the Spirit.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Jeremiah 17:5,7  Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength....Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.

Jeremiah paints a vivid picture of contrast between the man-truster and the God-truster. If those are real words. To trust in humanity is to be "like a shrub in the desert" of an uninhabited salt waste (17:6). A dismal existence, indeed. To trust in the Lord, however, is to be "like a tree planted by water," which keeps green leaves and sprouts fruit even in drought (17:8). And notice: there is no third option. We trust in God or we trust in humanity; we lean on heaven or we lean on earth.

Strictly speaking, there are no unbelievers; we all believe in something or someone. Our heavenly Father calls us to trust him, for he is trustworthy, gracious, merciful, perfect - everything humanity is not. Planted in the baptismal water of Christ, enlivened by him, we are blessed and fruitful, for we are joined to him who is Life itself.
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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,

Genesis 12:3   I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.
 

Was this a great big joke? There was Abram, seventy-five years old, and Sarai, ten years his junior. Two old folks, God tells this couple, who haven't filled a single crib, that their descendants will fill an entire nation. And as if that wasn't humorous enough, he added that through one of their offspring, the whole world would be blessed. A quarter-century later, when Sarah was ready to change the diapers of her son, she named him, most fittingly, "Laughter," or as we know him, "Isaac."

God has this tendency, at crucial moments in history, to center our hopes on an unlikely birth of an unlikely child from an unlikely mother. Isaac from Sarah. Samuel from Hannah. And Jesus from Mary. All these boys were blessings in their own way, but Jesus is divine blessing incarnate - born for us and in us to fill us with joyous laughter.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,
 

Genesis 1:28:  And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."
 

When God blesses, he's not treating people like they just sneezed. Nor is he shrugging his shoulders, as if to say, "Well, I really hope things work out for you." A blessing is not a wish; it's a divine word that actually does things. Accomplishes reality. All the verbs of this verse - being fruitful, multiplying, filling, etc. - will not be human trophies but divine gifts. Solely by His word of blessing do these things happen.

To hear the Father's word in Jesus is to be blanketed with blessings. His word of blood-bought pardon conceives faith in us. His word of resurrection life sparks new life in us. Like rain upon droughted soil, his powerful words fall into our weary lives, bringing a harvest of hope and joy.

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Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,