Advent Devotional

If you're looking for a good devotional to guide you through the Advent season, first of all, you're a little bit late, but secondly, I've got a good one for you. San Francisco Theological Seminary (which happens to be the school where I am attending via the Pasadena Campus) is publishing (a little behind schedule albeit) a 2010 Advent Devotional in which I had the honor of submitting an entry. Right now it's only available online but I think that hard copies might be available as early as next week.

To follow the devotional online, here's the link: http://sfts.edu/about/advent_list.asp

You can find my entry on the November 29th link, but please don't stop there. There are going to be many more great entries and I am sure, if you allow the Holy Spirit to read these entries at your side, you'll be refreshed and nourished.

The advent season is about turning your heart toward the anticipation of Jesus Christ--slowly but surely preparing your heart to receive the things of God's heart until that glorious day of Nativity when the God of the Universe came near in the particular body of a drooling baby boy. It's about radical news of Jesus--news of love for enemies and blessing to the poor--becoming more and more attractive to us until we are encountered by it in the particularity and peculiarity of God's incarnation on Christmas. It's about becoming more and more captivated by the ideas of forgiveness, true peace, sacrifice, and generosity and less enticed by the temptations of power, conquest, and personal comfort. But this sort of formation and transformation does not happen on accident and it does not happen automatically. We have to train our souls and tune our hearts to the heart of God. A devotional, might be a tool for just such formation.