In 2003 there was a song by the great intellectuals and philosophers of our age, the Black Eyed Peas, called, “Where is the Love?”  It was a global phenomenon.  It topped the charts in 13 countries.  Several years ago, the band reunited to update the song by changing a few lyrics.  Some of the lyrics to the song go like this,
 
People killin' people dyin'
Children hurtin', I hear them cryin'
Could you practice what you preach?
Would you turn the other cheek?
Father, Father, Father help us
Send some guidance from above
'Cause people got me, got me questioning
(Where's the love)
(Where's the love)
…
Every time I look up, every time I look down
No one's on a common ground
And if you never speak truth then you never know how love sounds
And if you never know love then you never know God, wow
(Where's the love)
Where's the love y'all? I don't, I don't know
Where's the truth y'all? I don't know
…
I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders
As I'm gettin' older y'all people gets colder
Most of us only care about money makin'
Selfishness got us followin' the wrong direction
Wrong information always shown by the media
Negative images is the main criteria
Infecting the young minds faster than bacteria
Kids wanna act like what they see in the cinemas
What happened to the love and the values of humanity?
What happened to the love and the fairness and equality?
Instead of spreading love we're spreading animosity
Lack of understanding leading us away from unity
(Where's the love)
 
On Youtube the newer version of the song has over 55 million views & counting.  In the comments section it was interesting to read what people have said about the song.  Consider but a small sampling: 
 

• 2021, December 8th. Song still relevant and little to nothing in this world's changing.
• This song gets sadder than sadder everytime. I hope there will come a time that we don’t need a song like this to remind us to love one another
• I keep watching this over and over every week. I can’t stop tearing up. Every time. We need to change. We all need to sing together.
• I hope my generation is the one who actually changes things for our human race.
• Together we have to make sure that there is more love in the world and that is why you have to open your mouth. Together we are strong!
• Something is wrong with this world

 
What is interesting is how so many people recognize there is something fundamentally wrong with us and our world. We know we are broken. We know there is something terribly askew with the soul of the human race – from which injustice, war, hate, fear, anxiety, and death spring. We know that these things ought not be, otherwise we would not expend such energy to denounce them and dispel them from our world.
 
What is this concern we have within our souls of our wretchedness?  What is it stirring within us that craves the good, the beautiful, and wholeness? What drives us to yearn for Love in a world gone mad?
 
A large part of the answer, a central part of the answer, to these questions lies in who we are and what we were made for. These yearnings, these stirrings, these cravings are the desires of a sojourners heart homesick for their home-country. They are the steady primordial rhythm stretching from Eden within us calling us back to our True Home. We want wholeness and joy because we know, even if we haven’t thought about it, those are the things we and our world were made for. We crave the good and the beautiful because they are what the world was and is intended to display. We desire Love because it is what we were created to experience in endless bounties at a table not our own. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) spoke of such deep seeded desires within our human experience when he said,
 
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.”[1]
 
Our quest for Love, within and without, is ultimately a quest to see realized the original beauty, goodness, and harmony of the Created Order. We were made for more, and although we suppress this Truth, it is the Ultimate Reality of our existence (Romans 1 and 2). We long for Love to inhabit this world and to wash over us and among us precisely because it was intended to do so. We know that the earthly experiences of Love we share are only approximations of this Grander Vision, yet all too often we seek such realization through the mundanities of earthly life. We seek love in all the wrong places.
 
SEEKING LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES
We all too often seek Love through a myriad of mundane delights. We look to a lover, a drug, a drink, a job, a marriage, a child, or some other terrestrial pleasure to fulfill our deepest longings. For many of us our understanding of Love has become nothing more than a proverbial junk drawer that we throw anything we want into or extract from in the hopes that it will generate the necessary interest we need to have meaning and identity. This can become a reality in our lives through a variety of approaches we take to achieving Love. Consider but three dominate approaches in our world today:   
 
SYNTHETIC APPROACH: Some of us seek a synthetic approach to Love. We try to manufacture it in the lab of our emotions. It becomes the quest to drum up emotional bliss, perpetual romance, or incessant arousal. It is an idealized and highly subjective dream of love that we apply to our personal relationships. This can either take the Disney approach or the HBO approach. With Disney it is the belief that Love is just a constant sentimentality and tearless romance while HBO is a self-gratifying, marketable, excess of passion.
 
Both approaches are hollow because they do not take seriously the earthliness, imperfections, and delights of real hearts and minds. These tactics are trying to harvest Love without ever having cultivated it. 
 
EXCESS APPROACH: Another path many of us seek to touch Love is through excessive consumption.  Love becomes eating, not dining; it becomes a conquest, not a dance; it becomes friction, not intimacy. Through self-indulgence one partakes in emotional cannibalism, the devouring of people in the name of “love.” This can take multiple approaches: from constantly cycling through an endless stream of memoryless relationships, to tasting the endless pleasures of one-night stands, to heedlessly and compulsively clinging to feckless lovers, to partaking in self-induced bestially arousal.
 
In all these methods the goal is the same, the quest for an excess of cathartic experience that is believed to satiate the deepest longings of the heart. But they all fail, otherwise there would not be a need for continual gluttonous consumption nor yawnish repetition with repeated results. As Albert Camus’ (1913-1960) character Clamence penitently says in the novel The Fall,
 
“Because I longed for eternal life, I went to be with harlots and drank for nights on end. In the morning, to be sure, my mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the mortal state.”[2]
 
These paths of excess do not fulfill us because they are not what we are ultimately seeking. We are seeking a deeper and higher love that is not extinguished in a moment, not relegated to mere touch, and not riddled with anxiousness. The Love we seek through these things is one of True Peace, True Identity, and True Acceptance.
 
DETACHMENT APPROACH: Another approach to Love prominent in among us is to simply say love is illusory or not worth the heartache. The ancient sages of Eastern philosophy and religion, like The Buddha and Lao Tzu, and the Ancient Greek Stoic philosophers, would be in this camp. For example, The Buddha (c. 400s B.C.) said,
 
“Good men, at all times, surrender in truth all attachments.  The holy spend not idle words on things of desire.  When pleasure or pain comes to them, the wise feel above pleasure and pain.”[3]
 
The point is that to achieve peace, tranquility, and happiness, one must detach oneself from all emotion and commitments.  We are creatures with thousands of wounds to our souls, brought on by mothers, fathers, siblings, extended relatives, friends, church members, significant others, husbands, and wives. So, to be happy all we need to do is keep our heart from every fully committing to anything or anyone so as to never suffer anxiety or pain.  In order that we be not destroyed by love we seek suppression and resistance to all love.
 
But again, this approach does not work. The road of safety is not the road of Love. Love is dangerous because love takes risks. To “preserve love” but suppressing it is to lose the real thing and only leads to a hardening and inevitable coldness of heart and soul. In short, it makes us at most inhuman, and at worst, a demon. As Lewis said,
 
“The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”[4]
 
THE ACTIVE, TANGIBLE, LIFE-GIVING REALITY OF TRUE LOVE
Our ways of love are broken and worn paths of disappointment. We spend exorbitant amounts of time marching for Love, singing about Love, and little time actually finding it. A central reason for this is because we fail to order our loves. As one author put it, “[The] issue is not that greatness of our earthly loves; it is the smallness of our love to God.”[5] The core problem we have is like so many others, we want the system of the Garden of Eden without the source of the Gardener. Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) declared,  
 
“[It] is God who frees us from any fear that he can fail to satisfy anyone to whom He becomes known; it is God who wants himself to be loved, not in order to gain any reward for himself but to give to those who love him an eternal reward—namely himself, the object of their love.”[6]
 
The types of earthly love we seek are only approximations of the True Love the deepest parts of our souls are longing for.  We are seeking an eternal reward, God Himself, who is the object of our love, even in the midst of looking for it in all the wrong places. Again, I am reminded of Camus, “Because I longed for eternal life, I went to be with harlots and drank for nights on end.”
 
The Eternal Life, this Eternal Reward, is the Love we are seeking after. Gloriously, Beautifully, Amazingly, such Love is known and knowable. Such Love came down to us precisely for us. Such Love is not a fantasy, not a dream, not bound in fakery, excess, or detachment. It is found incarnationally right at the beginning of the First Advent.
 
Before closing, I want to consider the power of all this by briefly dwelling on this passage in 1 John. Consider these words,
 
9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
1 John 4:9-11
 
There is so much richness to this passage that it could have an entire series of messages. However, for the sake of brevity, I just want to bring to light several key points about the nature of True Love that emanates from these words.
 
First, true love moves tangibly and selflessly for others: Love is something manifest (v. 9) and sent (v. 9 and 10) in and among us (v. 9, 10, 11).  Love is a substantial active reality; it is not static nor merely fantasized about. It is not synthetic but genuine and raw. As Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) said, 
 
“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all…. But active love is labor and fortitude….”[7]
 
Love as a theory or a fantasy is not love. Love that sits still is not love.  True love is gritty, palpable, messy, and dynamic. Love loves. This is perfectly displayed in the First Advent. God, in His infinity takes on finitude, in His majesty takes on bareness, and in His transcendence takes on humility. God doesn’t just talk about displaying lovingkindness, service, and sacrifice, He embodies them incarnationally into space and time and with selfless abandon offers them to an unworthy and hellishly self-centered people. J.I. Packer (1926-2020) put it powerfully,  
 
“God loves creatures who have become unlovely and (one would have thought) unlovable.  There was nothing whatever in the objects of his love to call it forth; nothing in us could attract or prompt it….  God loves people because he has chosen to love them…and no reason for his love can be given except his own sovereign good pleasure.”[8]
 
Second, true love seeks the lifegiving good of others: Love is something that has an intended purpose within it, which is inherently to display and desire the best for others. Love has its reasons, so to speak.[9] It is not merely about seeking the sentimentality of others, nor is it about drumming up forms of likeability among people, nor is it even about mere affections of affirmation. True Love has a goal, which is to make the world right by displaying rightness. Love desires the Good (with a capital “G”). As John says, God came not to just give us feelings but to accomplish something: He came “so that we might live through him” (v. 9) and to “be the propitiation for our sins” (v. 10). As theologian Thomas Oden (1931-2016) has said,
 
“God’s love reveals the divine determination to hold in personal communion all creatures capable of enjoying this communion.”[10]
 
In short God came at the First Advent to seek the Supreme Good for us, which is eternal life at the expense of His self-sacrifice.
 
Think of the implications of this.
 
To seek the “The Good” for another is to acknowledge that such a person does not in fact have The Good. You will not receive what you do not believe you are missing or need. Furthermore, it acknowledges there is an Ultimate Rightness to the way the world ought to be. A central goal of True Love is to reveal to us our need in something far more beautiful and far more transcendent than all our earthy means of acceptance and assurance. This fundamentally means that Love seeks an objective Truth for our lives as opposed to mere subjective fulfillment or affirmation.
 
As an aside, this is why in the classical and biblical sense the word for “love” has been interchangeably known as “charity.”[11] This rich word has lost much of its beauty, because we equate it with merely alms giving, affection, and likeability, but it is so much more. It really is meant to get across a sense of giving and seeking to make right. 
 
Giving to ourselves and seeking our own good is intuitive to us.  While we may not always have an affection for ourselves and we may not even like ourselves, we inevitably will the good for ourselves.  This is where True Love resides. Love is willing the good for others and in others even at the expense of personal preference.  To will the good is to want not necessarily what they desire but what they need.  Thus, love intuitively, inherently, is deeply moral.  You cannot understand love without THE GOOD being understood.  To not know the good and yet will love is to be a ship without a compass. 
 
Our world doesn’t believe this.
 
Today love just is affirmation. “Love is love” as the tautology goes; nothing more than boundless acceptance with reckless abandon. Affirmation is approving of everything one does at the expense of The Good and The Beautiful and The Just.  But this is a lie. Love is not affirmation. True Love wars and it has anger. It abhors lies that destroy even through self-gratification and fights evil even when it is freely chosen. In the words of Rebecca Pippert (1949-present),
 
“[Real love] detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys…. [The] more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.”[12]
 
True Love does not exist in the absence of moral judgement but rather is sustained through it; it acknowledges the reality of the wretchedness and messiness of our lives not as a judicial sentencing of shame but as a call to recovery and transformation. This just is what God has done at the first Christmas. He declares our unloveliness as the true malady of our souls and then irrespectively descends into the midst of our malaise to redeem us and reforge us into the images of love.  
 
True Love does not exclude the True and the Good but expresses them incarnationally. 
 
True Love Transforms & Displays: John says, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (v. 11). Those that recognize the degree to which they have been forgive and loved are able to greater degrees forgive and love. They are both empowered and humbled when they come face to face with the stark reality that they deserve all wrath and yet receive overwhelming abundance.
 
The Manger, in many ways stands as the beginning cornerstone of the Gospel, is coated with the humble nature of God.  What humility, what boundless self-giving, what unimaginable compassion, for the Infinite One to stoop to our level with infinite grace and unyielding adoration for poor wretches. What inexhaustible abandon God displays to us by taking on our nature only to be mocked by our egos and murdered by our knives. 
 
The Incarnation in nothing short than a full fledge doctrine of humility.   
 
You cannot look at the First Advent and not be changed. To do so is to not see or hear it truly. To touch and taste and then turn from it is to be little more than a devil. The true soul that sees such splendor cannot but be overcome by it and seek to display it through the living of one’s life.
 
By way of example, in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov there is a woman who is terribly troubled and fearful over losing her faith. She is despondent and beseeches a priest to answer her inquiries into how she can attain once again the faith of her childhood. The exchange goes like this,  
 
The Woman: “How—how can I get back my faith? But I only believed when I was a little child, mechanically, without thinking of anything. How, how is one to prove it? I have come now to lay my soul before you and to ask you about it…. How can I prove it? How can I convince myself? Oh, how unhappy I am! I stand and look about me and see that scarcely any one else cares; no on troubles his head about it, and I’m the only one who can’t stand it. It’s deadly—deadly!”
 
The Priest: “No doubt. But there no proving it, through you can be convinced of it.”
 
The Woman: “How?”
 
The Priest: “By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”[13]
 
There is so much to say to this but let this seep inwardly. This is Truth. Let it just be said, that for the Love from God to be made real it must be made manifest.
 
CLOSING
Christmas, and the Advent Season, although embodying the beauty of peace, reflection, and joy tends to devolve into a fast-paced marathon of busyness, debt, and excess. The Season easily becomes everything that it preaches against. We need a reassessment. We need to slow down, meditate on, and reside in the Reality of the Season we are in.
 
We need to be reminded that when Christmas came, it pierced the seams of this pitiable grey world with the colorful rays of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. When Christmas came it was on that day that a conquest was launched from Heaven to destroy the powers of indifference, rebellion, and anxiety in the souls of Man so that passion, peace, and pleasure could once again rule in them. It was that day that made possible the transformation of saints out of pagans, of faithful followers out of foreigners, of believers out of skeptics, and of lovers out of haters. This happened through the power of a hope filled, peace infused, joy saturated Love.

___________________________________________________________
[1] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity in The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2017), pg. 114
[2] Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1984), pg. 102
[3] The Dhammapada, trans. by Jaun Mascaro (United Kingdom, 2004), pg. 180
[4] Lewis, The Four Loves, pg. 121
[5] Joe Rigney, Lewis on the Christian Life: Becoming Truly Human in the Presence of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), pg. 233
[6] Saint Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford, NY: Oxford Press, 1997), pg. 22
[7] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, NY: Barnes & Nobles Classics, 2004), pg. 61
[8] J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1993), pg. 124
[9]   Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 231-234
[10] Thomas Oden, The Living God: Systematic Theology Vol. 1 (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1992), pg. 118
[11] Consider: C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity in The Complete C.S. Lewis: Signature Classics (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2002), pg. 109-114; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Question 23
[12] Rebecca M. Pippert, Hope Has Its Reasons: The Search to Satisfy Our Deepest Longings (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001), pg. 99-101
[13] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York, NY: Barnes & Nobles Classics, 2004), pg. 61

The Christmas season is a time of great delight for many people.  It is a time of lights, festivities, and feasting; a time of laughing and memory-making with family and friends; and a time of giving and receiving without reservation. As the Andy Williams song goes, for many of us, “It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” But in all honesty, there is some degree of tragedy in all this seasonal excitement – for far too often it is deeply synthetic. It can become a spray-tanned bliss that lacks any real durability beyond December 25th. In many ways, it is just gilded over nostalgia and joviality. For all the holly and jolly many know that when the radio stations go back to “normal” and the tinsel and lights are stored away, they will be faced once again with an abiding dissatisfaction and uneasiness with life. 
 
For many, life will go back to a version of C.S. Lewis’ land of Narnia, where it is always winter and never Christmas. Just like Williams’ song, many will go on experiencing the wonder of Christmas episodically: nothing more than a wistful camping ground along the journey of an otherwise hectic, monotonous, and anxious life. This ought not be. Christmas should be carried within us on the daily, steadily, and subtly transforming us by its true Beauty. It should awaken in us an ever-growing sense of wonder, delight, and purpose throughout our lives just as it did for those who were given its original message.
 
When Christmas first came to the bewildered yet enthralled shepherds, it was harkened by the angelic chorus as “good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10). It was seen centrally as the breakout of True Joy into this world; a return, if you will, of an abiding delight and restfulness that the human heart has hungered to taste again since the days of Eden.
 
STRIVING FOR DELIGHT THROUGH SHADOWS
The human soul longs for joy. In fact, it can be strongly argued that joy stands at the center of our life’s desires. It could even be provocatively said, it is what we are made for. The author of Ecclesiastes (900s B.C.) said long ago,
 
God keeps [Man] occupied with joy in his heart…. [and] man has nothing better under the sun but to eat and drink and be joyful….
Ecclesiastes 5:18-20 and 8:15
 
For the classical Greek and Roman thinker’s joy (or happiness [Greek: eudaimonia]) was the chief end or aim of all man’s purposes.[1] Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) affirmed that,
 
“[Happiness is] the most choiceworthy of all things while not counting it as one of those things […]  [It is] complete and self-sufficient, and is, therefore, the end of actions.”[2]
 
Centuries later Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) declared,  
 
“What all agree upon is that they want to be happy, just as they would concur, if asked, that they want to experience joy and would call that joy the happy life. Even if one person pursued it in one way, and another in a different way, yet there is one goal which all are striving to attain, namely to experience joy.”[3]
 
What Ecclesiastes, Aristotle, and Augustine bring to light is what we all know deep within: we long for joy and happiness. In fact, everything we do in life – from our careers to our relationships to our product purchases to our extracurricular activities to our law making – centers around the desire to find fulfillment and happiness. We strive for delight. However, often we fail to realize that the variety of paths we take to attain Joy all too often miss the Real Thing. Far too regularly we become lost in finding True Joy amid a sea of lesser goods (and artificial ones) that divert and even enslave us. This is no truer than in our present age.
 
If you do a Google search on “How to Be Happy?” you will get a myriad of websites and blog posts on the topic.  One of the most notable is an extensive article[4] from the New York Times’ Guides for Living Smarter page which advises on the various methods of how to craft happiness in one’s life.  The author states at the beginning,
 
“Everyone has the power to make small changes in our behavior, our surroundings, and our relationships that can help set us on course for a happier life.” 
 
They then proceed to give an extensive listing of what modern behavioral scientists say are the keys to unlocking happiness, which can be boiled down to the following:
 
Ø  Conquering negative thinking
Ø  Controlled breathing
Ø  Rewriting your life story
Ø  Physical exercise
Ø  Practicing optimism
Ø  Finding your happy place
Ø  Spending time in nature
Ø  Decluttering your environment
Ø  Getting enough sleep and sex
Ø  Spending time with happy people
Ø  Getting pets
Ø  Finding purpose at work
Ø  Being generous to others
Ø  Volunteering
Ø  Giving yourself a break
 
Take a moment and think on these. Many of them are noble goals and all of them do affect mental, emotional, and physical health and wellbeing – so in that regard, they are not inappropriate. But think about what the overall message of the list is: Happiness is all about getting control of your life in such a way that your circumstances remain favorable.  The ball is in your court if you want happiness – you have the power to just generate happiness through certain persona steps.  
 
Do you realize how shallow and ridiculous such a vision of happiness is? 
 
This vision of happiness is deeply subjective and deeply circumstantial; it is wholly shaped by the attainment of certain people, things, or environments.    Most humans in the history of the world have never had access to a quarter of the options listed.  How many Medieval peasants do you know could “rewrite their life story” or “give themselves a break” amid strict social hierarchies and backbreaking labor conditions? How many third-world peoples do you know that can afford to “declutter their environments” or “conquer negative thinking” amid endless famine and disease?
 
These strategies are vacuous because they only address the surface of true joy and happiness. Consider the fact, for example, that in the entire article of over 5,000 words neither “faith” nor “God” is once mentioned. That speaks volumes.
 
The tragedy of post-modern Man is he has bought hook, line, and sinker the illusion that he can find wisdom, identity, and happiness without the Transcendent Source sustaining them. Instead, he has settled for a menagerie of lesser goods to tantalize his longings. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) set it forth candidly,
 
“[Man] wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it? The best thing would be to make himself immortal, but as he cannot do that, he has decided to stop himself thinking about it […] That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle … [for that is] all men have been able to devise for attaining happiness.”[5]
 
The best we can do to attain happiness, Pascal says, is diversion: “hustle and bustle.” How true this is given the extensive list of behavioral research above. We must have busyness and mindless distractions to keep us “happy.” But they aren’t achieving true happiness for us, they are just amusing us and suppressing our deeper angst.
 
A truism can be found here: a person that increases their diversions reveals the increase of their unhappiness. Put another way, more diversion equals more unhappiness, and more unhappiness equals more diversion. Statistically speaking, we know this is true. We are the most distracted and amusement-seeking culture to inhabit the globe.[6] At the same time, we are sustainedly the most unhappy, most worried, and most purposeless generation of humans to exist, despite having more options, more gadgets, and freedoms than any of our ancestors.[7]
 
Why are we so consumed with diversion and unhappiness?
 
The answer lies within our souls. “The best thing [to attain happiness],” Pascal says, “would be [for Man] to make himself immortal,” but because Man can’t do that, “he has decided to stop himself thinking about it.” In other words, we recognize life and it’s pleasures are like chaff in the wind. We are creatures that have far less control over our lives than we care to imagine, are far more fragile and transient than we care to acknowledge, and far more ignorant and uncertain than we care to think. To compensate for all of this we are driven to be tantalized and enthralled by an endless stream of novelties to keep ourselves from thinking about such things. But none of the novelties really staves off what we deeply know to be true about ourselves and our lives. We are jovial in the moment of a joke or a silly TikTok video only to turn back as sullen as Jacob Marley to the mediocrity of our lives.  We become imprisoned to the increasing “law of diminishing return” [8] as C.S. Lewis called it, which is an ever-growing consumption of novelty to satiate our ever-increasing apathy and insecurity.
 
This sounds bleak, and it is, in the absence of any real Ultimate Meaning or Truth.
 
THE DEEP, DURABLE, DELIGHT OF TRUE JOY
The central problem with our modern understanding of joy is that we equate it with laughter and smiles. But these are circumstantial and reactionary. The problem is much deeper in us and until we recognize that, no amount of surface-level sanitization will fix our sickness. 

The solution for our malady must come from beyond us rather than generated within us. It cannot be grounded in our souls because our souls are themselves in need of remedy. Augustine long ago spoke powerfully on this point in his Confessions, where he detailed the journey of his restless young life trying to seek Ultimate Happiness. He sought it in entertainment, in friends, in lovers, in learning, in love, in lust, in excess, in food, and all the rest. His life was one of perpetual pleasure-seeking. Finally, coming to see that all these things are lesser goods (or pure distractions) that do not satisfy, he said,   
 
“The [truly] happy life is joy based on the truth [and] this is joy ground in God, who [is] the truth…. [The] human mind…in its miserable condition…will be happy if it comes to find joy only in that truth by which all things are true—without any distraction interfering.’”[9]    
 
Augustine brings forth a profound fact: true happiness is grounded in Truth, and until that Truth is grasped, we will stay miserable and distracted. Our souls seek happiness because we were made for happiness, and to be made implies there is an objective meaning and purpose to why we live, move, and have our being. Our lives are not our own for we were made for more. We were made to enjoy one another and to be enjoyed and to find Ultimate Enjoyment in the One Who is Joy itself. Sex, power, money, alcohol, sports, video games, social media, meditation, self-organizing, friends, family, boyfriends, girlfriends, marriage, kids, and the like are not going to give us true abiding happiness because they are but shadows of the deeper longing of our souls. These things, in their proper order, are not bad, and they are not insignificant soul-forming things, but they are not the Source of All Things. They are faint echoes of a far Greater Rhythm our souls are seeking after, and it is only when the rhythm of our lives aligns with that Greater Chorus, can we truly live in beauty and meaning. The Puritan theologian Richard Sibbes (1577-1635) said it this way,
 
“God hath joined these two together, as one chief end and good. The one, that he might be glorified; the other, that we might be happy. And both these are attained by honoring and serving him…. Thus our happiness and God’s chief end agree together…. [Our] salvation and happiness is within the glory of God, and we live to Christ, not only in serving him, but in seeking our own souls; and what a sweetness is this in God, that in seeking our own good we should glorify him.”[10]
 
The great American revivalist and theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) would dovetail off such words when he declared,
 
"True saints have their minds, in the first place, inexpressibly pleased and delighted with the sweet ideas of the glorious and amiable nature of the things of God. And this is the spring of all their delights, and the cream of all their pleasures: it is the joy of their joy."[11]
 
Centuries later C.S. Lewis would bring forth the splendor of this truth by saying, 
 
“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”[12]
 
The Joy described by Augustine, Sibbes, Edwards, Lewis and the like is far beyond the circumstantial self-help-ism approaches of our modern times. What they are showing us is profound: Joy is not our inability to cry or mourn nor is it our ability to think positively or always smile and joke; it is not us seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses; rather, True Joy is a deep, durable, delight[13] that pierces circumstances and transcends emotional capriciousness. It is a state of being, not a state of mere feeling, that is bound inextricably to the objectivity of meaning, purpose, and hope.  
 
True Joy is the unique affection we possess (or rather can possess) because it requires the totality of our being to experience it.[14] It requires the use of our heart, soul, mind, and strength to actualize it. You see, it is possible to understand something without having any happiness in it (i.e. understanding how cancer works). It is also possible to be happy in something without understanding it (i.e. being moved by the beat of a song without carefully listening to the lyrics). It is even possible to act upon things without any true thought or emotion (i.e. the simple act of blinking or walking without thinking). For many of us, we live our lives in these ways. We act without thinking, we think without acting, we feel without thinking, and think without feeling. Many of our relationships are like this. We go through life detached, distracted, and depressed. But Joy, true Joy, is different. 
 
True Joy, Advent Joy, is the wonderful symmetry of knowing, feeling, and acting. It is a deep abiding resting satisfaction of life that finds its anchorage in the beauty, love, and promises of God.[15] It is not frothy or fickle, but a refreshing fervent maturity of longing and rest indwelling our soul.  This type of Joy is rooted fundamentally and inextricably with the Hope and Peace we have discussed in our Advent Series. It is linked to the First and Second Advent, which are assurances of the love, justice, promises, and plans of a God Who is the Father, Lord, and Lover of our souls.    
 
It is this kind of Joy that can sustain a people in the midst of a world gone mad in its darkness. It is the kind of Joy that came upon the Israelites after they crossed the Red Sea and faced a bleak wilderness of wandering, and yet sang and rejoiced in the Lord (Exodus 15; Psalm 105:43). It is this kind of Joy the Apostle Paul proclaimed he had and desired for the Christians in Philippi (Philippians 1:4, 1:25, 2:2, 2:29, 3:1, 4:1) even though he was writing with shackles in a prison cell. It is this kind of Joy the Apostle Peter and James encouraged the fledgling Christians of Asia Minor with even in the face of immense trials and persecutions (James 1:2; 1 Peter 1:6-9). It is this Joy that Jesus said His disciples could rejoice in even though they would be reviled and persecuted (Matthew 5:11-12). It is such Joy that He Himself exemplified when He stood in the face of the vilest of accusations, beatings, and eventual murder; to the degree that it could be said paradoxically that the cross itself was “the joy set before Him” (Hebrews 12:2). And it is such Joy that broke forth into our world 2,000 years ago and is offered to us now and forever more by Him Who says, “My joy may be in you… that your joy may be full” (John 15:11).

Joy to the World, the Savior reigns!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.
Joy To The World, Isaac Watts (1719)

_____________________________________________________
[1] Clerk Shaw, Ancient Ethics, https://iep.utm.edu/a-ethics/. It should also be noted that the word “happy” as we moderns think of it is not the same kind of thing the pre-moderns thought of. The word “happy” in Greek is eudaimonia, which has this understanding of the condition of contentedness and completion in life that is found when one lives virtuously.  In short, happiness is a product of living the good and virtuous life and coming into accordance with your purpose and meaning. It is this understanding of “happiness” that the ancients, medievalists, and early modernists spoke about – as in when the American Declaration of Independence speaks of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
[2] Aristotle, Nichomecean Ethics (pg. 10 in pdf) https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/aristotle/Ethics.pdf
[3] Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), pg. 198-199
[4] Tara Parker-Pope, How to Be Happy (October 8, 2020) https://www.nytimes.com/guides/well/how-to-be-happy
[5] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 171-173
[6] The lost art of concentration: being distracted in a digital world (2018) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/14/the-lost-art-of-concentration-being-distracted-in-a-digital-world; Udemy In Depth: 2018 Workplace Distraction Report (2018) https://research.udemy.com/research_report/udemy-depth-2018-workplace-distraction-report/; Abundance of information narrows our collective attention span (2019) https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/490177
[7] Survey: Americans reach a record level of unhappiness (Feb, 2018) https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/survey-americans-reach-a-record-level-of-unhappiness; Americans are getting more miserable, and there’s data to prove it (Washington Post, March 2019) https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/22/americans-are-getting-more-miserable-theres-data-prove-it/
[8] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters in Signature Classics (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2003), pg. 257-259
[9] Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008), pg. 198-200
[10] Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, ed. with mem. by A.B. Grosart (United Kingdom, n.p, 1863), pg. 298-299
[11] Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, Part III
[12] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pg. 53-54
[13] This phrasing is taken from Sam Storms’ blog post For Joy (2 Cor. 1:23-2:4) https://www.samstorms.org/all-articles/post/for-joy--2-cor--1:23-2:4-
[14] A good discussion on this point comes from Sam Storms’ article post 10 Things You Should Know About Joy, accessed from https://www.samstorms.org/all-articles/post/article-10-things-you-should-know-about-joy
[15] An excellent discussion on the topic of “Joy” is the chapter on the subject in Dane C. Ortlund’s book Edwards On The Christian Life: Alive To The Beauty of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2014), pg. 75-88

If there is one word to describe the current state of our world it is “restless.” We are restless souls in restless relationships in a land of restless circumstances. We are told by the statisticians that social unrest is up 244% globally all the while 20% of us suffer from some form of anxiety disorder and expend over $240 billion a year in mental health services.[1] Is it any wonder that the Bible constantly characterizes Humanity as a frothing sea of chaos and sin from whence beasts immerge?[2]
 
We crave sanity and serenity for our world gone mad. We long for peace. We sing about it, dream about it, write about it, march for it, and craft legislation to achieve it. We cry “peace, peace” for our planet, nations, communities, families, and souls, and yet, just as in the time of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, “there is no peace.”[3] In fact, the march away from peace only seems to be increasing. Why do we fail to achieve what we long for? This is a perennial question.
 
Saint Augustine (354-430 A.D.) long ago asked the same question and concluded that answering such a question involves us considering the very nature of our hearts. He said, 
 
“[There are two] movements of the heart [which] are two loves. [The first one] is the uncleanness of our own spirit, which like a flood-tide sweeps us down, in love with restless cares... [The second] is the holiness of [God’s] Spirit, which bears us upwards in a love for peace beyond all care.””[4]
 
In other words, Augustine recognized that any discussion on the restlessness of Man (or solutions to it) is going to necessarily involve a discussion on the heart of Man. He argued that Man has two essential movements of the heart.  These movements are the gravitas of our affections – our love. What we live for is what we love and what we love fundamentally grounds and guides our lives.
 
THE QUEST FOR PEACE THROUGH EARTHY CARES
The first type of movement of the heart, Augustine argued, was earthy in nature; it is the “uncleanness of our own spirit” that “sweeps down” our affections. Such a movement is a gravitational pull to seek and fill our lives with “restless cares;” those things that inherently have no capacity to sustain our inner longings. If you want a biblical equivalency of what he is saying, it is that we seek after and craft “broken cisterns that can’t hold water” to fulfill our lives (Jeremiah 2:13).
 
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) blisteringly asserted that such an earthy quest is really rooted in our failure to face our true selves,
 
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us. That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.”[5]
 
In frank terms, Pascal was saying we as humans really don’t want peace even when we say we do. We just want the artificial version of it. Deep down, he argued, we like complexity, we like hurriedness, we like noise, we like busyness, we like hassle, and we like drama. We love those things that “pull us down” to earth because there is something deeply wrong in the nature of our heart that wars against the “capture” of the Real Thing.
 
This is a truth we know is right.
 
We are told and even tell ourselves that the answer for our restless hearts is to be found through distraction and self-gratification – both of which are fool’s gold solutions. We think if we can just stop thinking about our lives or better yet, flood them with excesses, then we will achieve the harmony we desire. So, we chase for peace through a bottle or a drug; or we seek it through passing sexual encounters; or we pursue it through gorging our appetites; or we forge it out of a new self-made identity. Or perhaps, instead, we seek it through more subtle means: like through marriage, having kids, or making a family; or through procuring certain possessions or positions; or by consuming copious amounts of fun and entertainment; or through attaining the approval of friends and family. The list can go on, but the point is served. There are endless frothy “restless cares” that we think are the means to attaining peace; but all of them, at rock bottom, are incapable of being the lasting city in which our pilgrimaging hearts can find true rest.
 
These earthy cares can’t give us what we deeply want because that is not their purpose. They are not all bad things, but they are not and cannot be Ultimate things. Their purpose is part of a larger, grander, more beautiful tapestry of meaning and destiny. They are merely embers of a grander Flame we seek to find warmth and certainty from.
 
But we want to deny this and even, many times, rebel against it. Why? Because we know True Peace means letting go of self. It means surrender. It means acknowledging we are not in control. It means laying down our weapons of war upon the altars of forgiveness and humility. It means laying waste the fortresses we have built, and others have built, around our emotions and wills and yielding to a Power beyond and above us. As theologian D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) once said,  
 
“To be a peacemaker means that one must have an entirely new view of self….  Before one can be a peacemaker one really must be entirely delivered from self.”
 
PEACE IS A PERSON
Remember Augustine had said that the first movement of the heart was “the uncleanness of our own spirit” that sweeps us downward to the Earth, seeking in the Earth restless cares to satiate our restless hearts. So, in a very real sense, the issue we have in pursuing peace is the gravity of our heart. Consequently, there is another movement of the heart we must have that realigns our gaze from earth to something more. Augustine went on to say,
 
“[There are two] movements of the heart [which] are two loves…. [The second movement] is the holiness of [God’s] Spirit, which bears us upwards in a love for peace beyond all care.”[6]
 
To Augustine, the answer to the heart’s restlessness is “upwards.” It resides not upon the earth but in the heavens; not in the terrestrial but the celestial; not in Man but in God. And notice that that upwards view is a “love for peace.” One cannot love an abstract concept. Love only exists in the relation of mutual persons.
 
Our love is seeking the Ultimate Love which is itself Peace.
 
In other words, what we are seeking is not a concept, a theory, or an emotion, but a Person and that Person is the One in Whom we find true rest. It is no wonder therefore that Augustine begins his Confessions saying,
 
“Thou [oh God] hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in Thee.”[7]
 
The longings of his life resided in the Giver and Sustainer of his life. He understood, and we must understand now, that the quest for Peace is only completed by the One Who is Peace. This is why it is a fool’s errand to try and acquire peace in the absence of God. In cannot be done and won’t be done. The Apostle Paul put it like this,
 
[Christ] himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility
Ephesians 2:14
 
Peace is a Person, and that person is the author of our existence, which means He is our purpose giver, and He has destroyed the powers of hostility, which means He is our savior and destiny giver. This all means that if there is no quest to seek this Author, Sustainer, and Finisher of our purpose and destiny then we are hopelessly beating our fists in the air to attain True Peace. We cannot have it any other way because that just is the kind of World we live in. This World is not our own and we are not our own and until we realize this, we will never have rest. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) beautifully said it like this, 
 
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.[8]
 
THE SUPERIOR PEACE OF CHRISTMAS
The Christian understanding of peace is so far superior to the nutrition-less solutions touted about by our ever-disintegrating world. This superior Peace is what we celebrate at Christmas. It is at the heart of Christmas; it is what broke forth into Reality at Christmas. It is not just a song or a longing or a wish or a campaign, it is a living Reality we dwell in. Jesus said to His disciples before His arrest and execution,  
 
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.
John 14:17
 
His peace surpasses the worlds peace because it is not of this world for it made the world. It is a peace that is not capsized by the torrents of life’s circumstances nor ambushed and destroyed by restless anxieties; it is not a peace bound up in fuzzy sentimentalism, steamy hedonism, mystical estheticism, or mindless consumerism. The peace Jesus gives is a mighty fortress in which our souls can find habitation, knowing that the Creator and Commander of that fortress is for us, surrounding us, and sustaining us in all things.
 
In the Bible there are two main words used for peace: the Hebrew word shalom and the Greek word eirene.[9] These words get across the idea of “completeness” or “wholeness” or “harmony.” They encapsulate the kind of peace Christ says He gives us. It is not merely a sense or feeling of subjective serenity but an objective state of flourishing, wholeness, and delight in our identity, meaning, and destiny.[10] His shalom is us coming to understand what we were meant to be in Him and for Him. His shalom is a redefining of our definitions, a refining of our desires, a reforming of our relationships, a reordering of our passions – all working in their natural fruitful employment for the betterment of His Creation and for His glory.
 
This kind of Peace is what Isaiah longed for and prophesied would break into the world one day (Isaiah 9), it is what the angels exclaimed had come to the bewildered shepherds in the field in Bethlehem (Luke 2:14), and it is what John foresaw would cover all the realms of Creation at the dawn of the Second Advent (Revelation 19 and 20). This Peace is not something merely longed for but something that has come, is now among, and will be even more greatly manifest hereafter. It isn’t a wish; it is an abounding assurance that changes us. This is why the Apostle Paul, in the face of imprisonment, persecution, and death could write to the Church in Colossae,
 
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts…
Colossians 3:15
 
That word “rule” is the idea of an arbiter, umpire, judge, or decision maker.[11] Paul is saying, those in Christ should be a people in whom Peace is the central driving force for their entire lives. All their thoughts and actions and opinions should be shaped by and evaluated by the peace of Christ. Making decisions and forming relationships based upon hate, anxiety, doubt, and insecurity, is only allowing earthen vessels of miry clay to guide our lives. We are called to more. We are called to see life from the vantagepoint of Heaven.
 
When we know who made us, who saved us, who sustains us, and who gives us a name, we can have an assurance of completeness unmatched by anything this world can hope to give. The One Who does all these things is the Luminous Nazarene, who invaded our world 2,000 years ago through a crib, waging War on Death, Hell, and the Grave, that He might give us Peace.
 
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”[12]
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1863)

_____________________________________________________
[1] Antidepressant prescriptions up 6% https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/news/antidepressant-prescribing-up-6-since-2019#:~:text=Antidepressants%20%E2%80%9Chave%20been%20steadily%20increasing,months%20in%20the%20previous%20year; Symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder Among Adults: United States, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db378.htm;  Total U.S. expenditure for mental health services from 1986 to 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/252393/total-us-expenditure-for-mental-health-services/; Global Peace Index 2021: Measuring Peace In A Complex World, https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/GPI-2021-web-1.pdf
[2] The “sea” is that place from which chaotic and demonic beasts reside and emerge (Psalm 74:14; Job 40:25; Daniel 7; Revelation 13) and it also is the place from which human national and social sinfulness arises (Isaiah 57:20-21). Consider some of these sources on the biblical symbolism of the sea as restlessness, chaos, and a force that pushes against God’s will and creative designs: “Sea” entry in Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III, Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010), pg. 765; John J. Collins, The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), pg. 373-375
[3] Jeremiah 6:14, Jeremiah 8:11, Ezekiel 13:10 and 16
[4] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book XIII, translated by Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), pg. 347 
[5] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1993), pg. 173 
[6] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book XIII, translated by Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997), pg. 347 
[7] Saint Augustine, The Confessions, Book I, Infancy and Childhood
[8] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pg. 53-54
[9] Sources that go into biblical and theological depth on this topic of “peace” are: T.S. Hadjiev. “Peace.” Dictionary of the Old Testament Prophets, ed. Mark J. Boda and J. Gordon McConville (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Press, 2012), pg. 574-577; T.J. Geddert. “Peace.” Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pg. 604-605
[10] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (United Kingdom: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996), pg. 9-10
[11] R. Kent Hughes, Preach the Word Commentary: Philippians, Colossians, & Philemon (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), pg. 318
[12] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” (1863) 

It is Christmas time once again. There seems to be a deep sacred magic to this time of year we simply cannot shake. At this time, more than any other, our souls are moved steadily upward towards the transcendent. We are inundated with the values of eternity: we sing songs and watch movies on faith and hope, we give gifts with love and receive with joy, and we reminisce on the peace and simplicity of times bygone and longed for. For but a few brief weeks we seem to inhabit a world as it ought to be, and we live lives as they should be. We act and think in ways we were made to be and don’t even recognize it, both saint and sinner. GK Chesterton (1874-1936) put it like this,  
 
“The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.”[1]
 
We need to be a people who awaken to why this season ignites joy, celebration, and transformation, however brief or enduring. We need to come to realize that the hope, joy, peace, and love in this season is but an echo of the Sacred breaking into our world. Liturgically speaking this time of year is known as Advent. That beautifully strange word comes from the Latin adventus which means “arrival” or “an appearing or coming into place” and it powerfully encapsulates the meaning of this time of year. It speaks to the anticipation and realization of the Sacred breaking forth into our world for us. It heralds the recovery of this world from darkness back to light, from brokenness back to wholeness, from doubt back to certainty.
 
Advent is a commemorative delight. It is “our long and steady gaze forward, backlit by history.”[2] In other words, it is us memorializing the fact that God Himself pierced the veil of this stained soaked world to upturn and remake it for His glory and our joy. Through the selfless condescension of His Son in a manger, we can ascend from our present and future guilt, pain, and fear. 
 
Over the next few weeks, I would like to go on a journey reflecting on the beauty and blessedness of this reality. Each week, up to Christmas, there will be a post devoted to one of the four fundamental sacred truths that stand at the core of Advent: Hope, Joy, Peace, and Love. Each one of these coalesced in a manger 2,000 years ago, and as a result, are powerful transforming realities for our lives now and forever.  
 
HOPE IS NOT A WISH
We are living at a time when there seems to be little hope. Global pandemics, political polarization and corruption, democratized depravity, worldwide unrest, and economic unpredictability have awakened us to the realization that the world we inhabit is far more fragile and far more uncertain than we think. We have been forced to recognize, however reluctantly, that the world of our childhoods is gone. This is sobering and this can be unsettling. For so long we had been accustomed to lives of liberty, security, and immediacy that, if honest, we took for granted. We realize now or are starting to realize, that freedom can be lost, security can be shaken, and immediacy can become scarce. Anything that can be shaken, is being shaken it seems (Hebrews 12:27). As a result, we yearn for “normalcy,” we hope things are going to sift back into place or get better.
 
Unfortunately, the mode of hope we have doesn’t seem to be robust enough to see us through. Today suicides are up 25% and depression among adults and adolescents has skyrocketed while anxiety, on average consumes about 20% of the population.[3] While we as a society have more freedoms and stuff (even in the face of the growing scarcity) than any other place or any other time, we seem to be growing less hopeful. One reason for this is we have a neutered view of Hope.
 
For many of us hope is something marketed to us through Hallmark or Disney with inspirational quotes and music. “Just wish upon a star” and it will all get better we are told. If we “just stay positive” everything is “going to work out.” And so, we “hope for a good diagnosis,” or “hope we get the job,” or “hope better days are ahead.” But all of this is just optimism firmly planted in the shifting currents of circumstances. It is looking into the future on the borrowed capital of the present in order to yearn for what could be or may be. This kind of hope is just a mushy sentimentality, a would-be escapism, a naïve optimism. It really isn’t  hope. It is just the World’s version of hope masquerading as the real thing. Christian hope is far more robust. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) put it like this,
 
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next…. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.[4]
 
So Christian hope is deeply and centrally transcendent centered. It is rooted in the Eternal and therefore not enslaved to the monetary ups and downs of everyday occurrences. Lewis only builds off the foundation of the Word itself. God spoke through the Prophet Hosea, who lived amid immense suffering in the history of Israel, saying,
 
“I will give [Israel] her vineyards and make the Valley of Trouble a door of hope.”
Hosea 2:15
 
The Apostle Peter wrote to the dispersed and persecuted Christians in Asia Minor saying,
 
God, according to his great mercy, has caused us to be born again to a living hope…
1 Peter 1:3
 
And the Apostle Paul declared that “the God of hope” can fill us “with all joy and peace as [we] trust in him, so that [we] may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13). Such hope has weight, richness, and purpose to it precisely because it has God smack dab at the center of its orbit. It is an expectant assurance not grounded in circumstances but in a Person.
 
Christian hope is active, not passive. It is expectant not reactant. It is resilient, not restless. Christian hope is not built on syrupy illusions of perpetual comfort and success in circumstances, but a settled certitude found in restive resolve and power. It is such a hope that can pierce the veil of circumstances and find an abiding peace, joy, and love at their expense. As Timothy Keller has put it,
 
“While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.”[5]
 
This is why modern hope is bankrupt and Christian hope is solvent. Modern hope looks forward to escape the past and present while Christian hope looks back so that it might transcend the present and glory in the future. As one author has put it, “Christian hope…doesn’t ignore fear, anxiety, and doubt; it confronts them. It holds steady, clinging to peace in the midst of chaos…[it] is buoyed by something greater that has happened and something greater that is going to happen again.”[6]  This is what Advent is all about and it is why it has such transformative sacred power to it. We can have hope in our future not because we elected the right politicians, not because we saved up enough money in the bank or back yard, not because some scientists or psychiatrists have the next greatest cure for our maladies, but because of the advent of what happened in a manger 2,000 years ago and the anticipated advent of the glory and splendor of the King who was in that manger – that which has happened and is going to happen again utterly transforms what is happening now!
 
PRESENT HOPE ROOTED IN A NATIVITY & RETURNING KING
Think of this for but a moment: Hope has an expectancy to it and expectancy is built on promises and promises are rooted in the identity and character of the promise maker. That “promise maker” could be ourselves, others, a thing, or a circumstance in which we place our trust to execute what they pledge to do. And so, we may say, “I hope I can lose weight,” which is fundamentally tied to our own personal future resolve; or we say, “I hope they follow through,” which is contingent upon the other person keeping their end of the bargain; or we say, “I hope this thing stays together,” which is conditional to the resilience of the object in question. In a very real sense then the intensity and surety of hopefulness are grounded within the nature and character of the promise maker. If the promise maker is fickle then the expectancy in the promise holder will be fickle. If the promise maker is indifferent, then the anticipation in the promise holder will be indifferent. If the promise maker is unreliable, then the assurance of the promise holder will be unreliable.
 
By way of example consider a father who keeps making promises to his little girl that he will come to her dance recitals. When he makes these promises there is an expectancy and joy that fills the heart of his daughter. The intensity of her hope is grounded in the nature and character of her father. Unfortunately, he doesn’t show up for the first recital or the second or the third, and so on. He keeps making promises, “Next time I will be there,” and each time fails to fulfill, thus slowly eroding the intensity of his little girls' hope. Eventually, her hope is not built on any assurance but upon chance. It no longer has a certainty to it but a wishful optimism. “I hope dad will come…but who knows,” or “I will believe it when I see it.” But this is not a problem sons and daughters of God should have because of the Promise Maker we have. As theologian Thomas Oden (1931-2016) has said,
 
“Hope is that excellent habituation by which one securely trusts that God will be faithful to his promise and will provide the faithful with fit means to receive it. The ground of hope is the almighty power of God, and confidence that God will provide means to save.”[7]
 
Do you understand this? “The ground of hope is the almighty power of God, AND confidence (not wishfulness) that God WILL provide means to save.” Oden is merely mimicking the beauty of Scripture. Remember again the words of the Apostle Peter (1 Peter 1:3-5) to the exiled and persecuted Christians of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey),
 
God, according to his great mercy, has caused us to be born again to a living hope…
 
By what means?
 
…through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead
 
To what present and future end?
 
…to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.
 
What beauty and power and joy reside in these words! Advent represents the breaking into Reality of the “living hope” the passage is speaking of! Such hope is not wishful thinking nor expectant could-be-ism. It is an active present abiding assurance grounded in the reality of who God is and what God has done and will do! This is why it is a “living hope.” It is not something merely wished for based on uncertain circumstances but is a sign sealed delivered fact grounded in the power of the living and active God. It is “living” because it is rooted in the living God Who is not like the fickle father who fails to deliver his end of the bargain but is the eternal, unbounded, self-existent, giver, definer, sustainer, covenant-making Creator King of the Cosmos that accomplishes all His promises, executes all His decrees, and fulfills all His blessings! That God is the same God who promises and decrees that there is (not maybe) an imperishable, undefiled, and unfading inheritance for His children. That God is the same God who condescended into our baby crib of a cosmos and cocooned Himself in the mind, bone, and blood of a Man, that He might remake the World as it was intended to be.
 
Because of this, the Nativity becomes the canvas upon which our present and future hope can be painted.  We have a future precisely because we have a past. That past is the glorious work of God’s Son igniting onto the world stage, coming to dispel and break the powers of our present insecurities, anxieties, and failings. But it doesn’t stop there. That same God Who was veiled in flesh is the same God who will be veiled in glory at His Second Coming. It is this kind of Advent hope that allows us to transcend above our present world gone mad and declare there is life and peace and joy and love and they will victoriously triumph by the power of the everlastingly GOD Who was and is and is to come.
 
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.
Israel's strength and consolation,
hope of all the earth thou art;
dear desire of every nation,
joy of every longing heart.
 
Born thy people to deliver,
born a child and yet a King,
born to reign in us forever,
now thy gracious kingdom bring.
By thine own eternal spirit
rule in all our hearts alone;
by thine all sufficient merit,
raise us to thy glorious throne.
Charles Wesley (1707-1788)

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[1] G.K. Chesterton, “On Christmas” in Generally Speaking (1929) http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/Generally_Speaking_scan.pdf
[2] Jay Y. Kim, Hope Is an Expectant Leap (Christianity Today, 2020), https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november/advent-hope-is-expectant-leap.html
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p0607-suicide-prevention.html; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1555415521003615; https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics
[4] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity in The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2017), pg. 112-114
[5] Timothy Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering (New York, NY: Penguin Random House, 2013), pg. 31
[6] Jay Y. Kim, Hope Is an Expectant Leap (Christianity Today, 2020), https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2020/november/advent-hope-is-expectant-leap.html
[7] Thomas Oden, Life in the Spirit (New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), pg. 146