20 When your children
ask you in time to come,
“What is the meaning of
the decrees and the statutes …
that the Lord our God
has commanded you?”
21 then you shall say to your children,
“We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt,
but the Lord brought us out of Egypt
with a mighty hand … [and] …
25 if we diligently observe
this entire commandment
before the Lord our God,
as he has commanded us,
we will be in the right.”
Deuteronomy 6
Do you remember the old-fashioned Advent Calendars?
Our family used to have them when I was a kid. There would be twenty-five "windows" on this cardboard calendar, numbered 1-25. On each successive day of December, little hearts would countdown to Christmas by opening a “window.” And inside each window was a verse of Scripture, pointing us to the coming of Christ.
Well … this is my online Advent calendar for you! It’s part of our countdown to Christmas. It’s also part of our continuing focus on hope.
For the next several weeks, each of these Scripture passages and devotions will point us toward the hope that dawned in this darkened world through the coming of the Christ child. And we'll start this journey with prophecy!
Did you know that hundreds of years of prophecy pointed -- with specificity -- to the coming of Israel's long-promised Messiah?
Over the course of the coming months, we’ll refer back to understanding prophecy as a powerful tool in evangelism. Why is this so? Because while people may think they can explain away passages written after Jesus' death as just propaganda written by deceived and deceiving followers, it's harder to explain away prophecies written 1500 years before Jesus' birth! (Especially when they are so accurate and specific.)
So … like it was with my old Advent Calendars, we’re going to open a window each day and take a look at the prophecies that would portend the hope found in Jesus’ birth.
And here in the beginning of this part of the journey, I want to remind you of why we’re studying hope. Why? Because as the Apostle tells us – 1 Peter 3:15 – you are to be “always … ready to give a defense … for the hope that is in you.”
Hope!
Our hope surely blesses us.
But in addition, God wants to use our hope to bless the world. In other words, we are called to share our hope and faith and joy with a cynical, disillusioned world. And we call that evangelism.
Now, too many Christians shy away from evangelism … which is why I turn back to the Advent Calendars. How many of us have shared our faith with a child?
In Deuteronomy 6, our lesson for today, God told parents to be prepared to “always be ready to give a defense … for the hope that is in you.” He said it like this. He said, “When your children ask you in time to come, ‘What is the meaning of …”, essentially, all this stuff about God, then we are to share the stories of faith. Israel shared the stories about the Exodus and their freedom from Egypt. Christians are to share the stories about Jesus and our freedom from sin.
My parents did that with me – in part, by opening Advent Calendar windows for twenty-five consecutive December days. And I did it with my kids – in similar and different ways. And my children are already talking about how they will share their faith with their kids.
That’s evangelism! And it can be pretty simple. All we have to do is open a “window” and point others to something bigger than ourselves.
In Christ’s Love,
a guy who remembers
one Advent Calendar
being connected to candy –
open a window, get a treat
(We made sure that we
never missed a day!)
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