Advent Guide: You BelongSample

The Joy of Joys

Chief among the great Advent promises is the dawn of joy that has risen over the mountains of this age, even as we await the great joy to come in Christ's second coming. It's a joy that takes all other joys up into it, recognizing that the advent of God in the flesh fundamentally changes our relationships to lesser joys.

The joy of family becomes the joy of reflecting the fatherly love of God, or the motherly security he offers to his children (see Psalm 131). The joy of home becomes the joy of welcoming the stranger, for Christ was a stranger on the road of this life. The joy of enjoying becomes joy in Christ, who gives us all things richly to enjoy!

But when those joys are taken as ends in themselves, they will always spoil. The promise is that we will rejoice before Christ (Is. 9:3). To rejoice in the gift without rejoicing in the giver will turn even the sweetest gifts into bitter tears.

C.S. Lewis captures this in his imaginary journey from hell to heaven, "The Great Divorce."

There, a mother arrives on the plains near heaven's mount, demanding to be reunited with her deceased son. (Personally, I have thought about that moment almost every day for six years, since my firstborn died in his sleep.) But there, in the foothills of heaven, the woman lodges her complaint against a God who would allow her highest joy to be taken from her.

Ultimately, she turns away from the offer of heaven because she first desired the boy.

Meanwhile, a heavenly onlooker comments: "What she calls her love for her son has turned into a poor, prickly, astringent sort of thing ...Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried."

Advent reminds us that even the highest joys in this life must yield to the coming joy of being in the presence of the Savior.

But it also preaches to us that the Savior himself would ultimately submit to death and the grave in order to raise our joy with him and make us new creatures, ready to proclaim joy to the world as we journey farther up and farther into the joys of his kingdom for all eternity.

Alex Dean is lead pastor of New St. Peter's Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas. He formerly served with Buckner International as a volunteer coordinator.