This week's Advent devotional from Practicing the Way reflects on the peace we have been given in Jesus.
You can download a PDF of all of these devotionals and share them with your family, print them for yourself or save them to read on your phone.
Pastor Tracy
PS - for you keen observer, the order of themes (hope, peace, joy, love) often changes from church to church. Our Advent series, "Waiting for Jesus" is using the order hope, love, joy, peace this year so they don't line up perfectly with these devotionals. If you noticed, good eye!
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Read Luke 1:7-25
"A voice of one calling in the wilderness." Luke 3:4
"Do not be afraid." Luke 1:13
"Do not be afraid ... you have found favor with God." Luke 1:30
There’s a quietness that comes to us when we take a moment to feel the barrenness in our lives. We discover our inner wilderness. A wilderness that, as it turns out, becomes the very womb of our hearing the voice of the Spirit.
That seems to be where Luke wants to take us in his advent story because he immediately moves us from Elizabeth’s barrenness to Zechariah’s encounter with the angel of God in the temple. It’s there during Zechariah’s time of burning incense — a type of prayer — that the angel visits him with good news. He’s alone, Zechariah’s attention is toward God, and finally, he’s quiet enough to listen to the voice calling in his wilderness.
Feeling our own barrenness does that, anticipation does that. It increases our faith, makes room for God to speak, sharpens our spiritual ears. Because God isn’t so interested in competing with the noise of our world. And it is noisy. Now more than ever, it’s possible to live from wake to sleep again without ever being quiet enough to feel the depths of us where God lives. We can become foreigners to ourselves, unwittingly crowding God out.
Like Zechariah, we need to turn toward our own inner temple, toward prayerful silence, solitude, and stillness, and not toward the quick satisfactions of our noisy world, that we might hear the Spirit speaking to our aches. And how does the voice of God arrive to us? The same way it did to Zechariah, with the word of peace; “Do not be afraid” (Luke 1v13).
When we un-noise our life and build the place of prayer within us, peace becomes a continual reality. We no longer live at the mercy of circumstance but can experience firsthand what Jesus meant when he said, “the kingdom of heaven is within you” (Luke 17v21), experiencing the peace that “transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).
To anticipate the arriving Christ, we must make room, draw ourselves away, and listen. When we do, we inherit Advent peace, and as we’re about to see, it’s in this very place of prayerful listening that the seed of our promise is about to be planted within us.
Reflect
Sitting in the quiet and in your place of greatest need, take a minute to still yourself and invite the Spirit to speak a word of peace to you.
This week, consider holding Psalm 46v10, “Be still, and know that I am God,” in your heart. When anxiety, lowness, distraction, or fear beckon, recall the passage in your heart, creating an inner room for the King of Peace to dwell.
The angel of the Lord spoke to Zechariah when he was burning the incense, which is a biblical image for prayer. If you don’t already, try practicing moments of intentional silence, solitude, and stillness each day as a way of making yourself available to the voice of the Spirit to speak.
