Come, Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set Thy people free
From our fears and sins release us
Let us find our rest in Thee.
The people of Israel had been waiting…while in captivity in Babylon, through their rebuilding of their homeland, during the Roman occupation.
Messiah?! When are You coming to deliver us?
And they waited, and they waited; some still wait today.
God didn’t just want to deliver His people again from their physical fears and oppression.
He wanted to save them, from the inside out. To set them free within.
His plan was and is Jesus. Immanuel, God with us.
When the waiting is long, we tend to get fixed on how we think things should be when we get our answer to our prayer, don’t we? We begin to picture it in our minds, and expect it in our hearts.
But God doesn’t like being boxed in by human expectations.
For He is bigger than that, uncontainable in His Godness.
Yet, in the long awaited unfurling of His plan, He contained Himself within Mary, in a act that set off a chain reaction for the rest of time into eternity.
He demonstrated God could live within man…by the power of the Holy Spirit.
God acted so we could know God can be with us. Not just with, but within us. Always.
Apart from God Himself, i believe no one understood this miracle more than Mary.
God extended an invitation to Mary, allowing Jesus to move in.
That same invitation is available for us all.
The wait may have been long, but what a present awaits us, freshly opened Christmas eve.
God’s presence was the present the world had been waiting for.
His embrace is the grace of the gift of God with us, not the familiar of God set apart the world had become accustomed to.
Mary carried Jesus for 9 months, waiting and longing for the day she would meet her Messiah dace to face. I am sure Mary was also inwardly terrified at the wonder of it all. The God she worshipped living with her, to be born to live in the community He came to bring into His embrace.
The embrace is the point of the wait.
When we haven’t seen a loved one for a long time, there is something about that embrace we share when we are reunited.
That is the exact embrace God delivered & offered us all on Christmas Eve:
Come, I am waiting for you.
I am with you.
I love you.
Welcome Home.
#TheWhenSeries
#AdventuresinAdvent
KARLA LEES 