Advent Series Introduction

Hello! Those of you who follow my writing regularly know that I don’t usually do a Saturday post, but I wanted to do a bit of an introduction to the Advent series that launches tomorrow. This series is a little different from anything I’ve ever done before, so I wanted to do a set-up before we do a full-launch. I wanted to be able to get to the heart of the message in tomorrow’s post, so this one offers a little backdrop and background.

First, tomorrow is the first day of Advent, a Christian season that makes space for holy preparation of hearts and lives for the coming of Christ. Just as God’s people in the years before Jesus was born prepared themselves for His first coming, believers today are meant to wait expectantly for Christ’s second coming even as we make ourselves ready for our celebrations of Christmas. 

The four Sundays of Advent help us to slow down and recenter ourselves on Christ so that our hearts are ready for celebrating His birth and for better understanding what His coming meant for the world. When we look back upon all that God sacrificed by sending His only Son to earth as a human, as a fragile, helpless baby boy, we begin to grasp the depths of His love for us.

This Advent, I’d love for us to dive into that very love. 

And I have an idea to do so by drawing on a few of the songs from George Handel’s Messiah – because, as I have recently learned, every single lyric in this famous oratorio is Scripture! 

Back in Handel’s day, people were rejecting Christianity for more popular ideas, such as humanism, secularism, and Deism. So a lovely man and member of the “Society for the Propagation of the Gospel,” named Charles Jennens, set out to present the entire Christian message by writing a ‘libretto’ (the text of an extended musical work), connecting prophecies and fulfillments about Jesus. “He believed that putting the gospel to music would communicate its truth, not just intellectually, but at a deep heart level.”¹ 

In total, the libretto of Messiah utilizes seventy-three verses (all KJV) – forty-two from the Old Testament, thirty-one from the New Testament. Every single one of them point to Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ, the Messiah. Mr. Jennens then gave the libretto to Handel, and eighteen months later, Handel finally pulled this masterpiece of scriptural truth off the shelf and got to work. A short and intense three weeks later, Handel had written music for the entire libretto, and Messiah as we know it came to be. 

Originally written and performed as an Easter oratorio for an Irish concert in the spring of 1742, Messiah found its niche as a Christmas favorite by the early 1800s. While the entire story of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection are told in Messiah, most who are familiar with its songs today think of the oratorio as a Christmas piece.

Messiah is written in three sections: 

• Part I: The Prophecy and Birth of the Messiah
• Part II: The Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ
• Part III: Redemption and the Final Judgment

So, for our Advent-focused purposes, we will spend more time in Part I than the final two sections. However, the most known song of all, “Hallelujah,” actually falls near the end of Part II, so we’ll soak ourselves in its power on Week Four of our journey – the Sunday before Christmas! And we’ll wrap-up our series in a fifth-week post that looks ahead to the second coming of Christ, a more than appropriate theme for the Christmas Season. 

I do hope that you’ll not only join me on this musical journey but will invite others to take part in this five-part series, Embraced by Love. I believe by taking in the immense love God has for us, we will live freer, more rested, and more confident in God. When we are more willing to receive God’s love, we’ll be better able to live from His love. 

As Eugene Peterson paraphrased Paul’s words in Ephesians 2:4, “It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us.” So, meet me back here tomorrow. And we’ll move toward a deeper belief that we are truly embraced by the love of God. 

1  – quoted from this article by Charles Morris, 2020