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During the Christmas season, Christians turn their attention to the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or in other words, his coming to earth in the flesh. In some church traditions, people call this season Advent, which simply means 'arrival.' Advent is usually celebrated in the weeks of December that lead up to Christmas day, with particular words being attached to each of the four weeks before that final day. The four words used are hope, peace, joy, and love. These words were chosen because they have an anticipatory nature to them, drawing the heart and mind to the eager expectation of these four things being fully realized in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
What I want to show here is that these four things mentioned above are not simply things that Jesus brings with him to earth and gives us, like a present, but are actually four features of Jesus Christ himself. He doesn't just give hope; he is our hope. He doesn't just bring peace; he is our peace. He doesn't just fuel our joy; he is our joy. And he doesn't just bestow love; he is love.
Jesus is our hope
Hope is an interesting word. It, like the others mentioned here, has been so overused that it's actual meaning has become so obscured that we hardly give any thought to it. We hope our favorite restaurant is open for date night; we hope our team wins the championship; we hope the late Christmas purchase arrives before the big day. In all of these we are, in a sense, cheapening the word hope.
In biblical terms, the word hope means “the sure and confident expectation of receiving what God has promised us in the future.” So we see that hope is built upon the promises of God, not upon our fleeting fancies. God hasn't promised that our favorite restaurant would be open every time we wanted to go. He hasn't promised that your team will win. And he certainly hasn't promised that the presents you forgot to order on time will arrive when you need.
But what has he promised? Here are just a few of them.
He has promised to never leave us or forsake us (Heb. 13:5).
He has promised to be our Good Shepherd, tenderly caring for us and constantly pursuing us with his steadfast love (Psalm 23).
He has promised to provide us with every material need to live if we will seek him and his righteousness (Matthew 6:25-33).
He has promised us eternal life (John 3:16).
These are staggering promises, the kind that should fill us to the brim with hope, no matter the circumstance or situation. But how then is Christ our hope? If hope is an expectation of receiving what was promised, how is that Jesus?
He is hope because he is the reason why those promises are true for you. It is Christ, our righteousness, who will never leave us or forsake us. It is Christ who said in the gospel of John that he is our Good Shepherd, leaving the ninety-nine to chase down the one and bring it back to the fold. It is Christ who, when we are united with him, gives us contentment no matter what material possessions we have here on earth. And it is by faith in the real life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Christ that gives us eternal life.
Why is Jesus our hope, and not merely a bringer of hope? Because Christ is the ground and object of every one of the comfort-giving, life-producing promises made to us.
Jesus is our peace
We can agree that our world has a serious deficiency of peace. Whether it be foreign wars and conflicts, domestic division over political issues, or familial division due to the radical individualism preached by our secular prophets and prophetesses, our world is not exactly peaceful. As Christians, we know that we should desire, pray for, and seek peace, but oftentimes we don't know how to go about actually bringing that into reality. Enter Jesus.
Micah 5 tells us of the coming Messiah, the one we know as Jesus, and the shepherding and governing role he will carry for both the nation of Israel and the world itself. But in verse 5 we have a fascinating line: "This One (Jesus) will be their peace." That is amazing to think about. It has several implications, but I want to speak about two primary ones, namely, that Jesus is the means of our peace with God and the means of our creating peace in the world around us.
Firstly, Jesus is our peace, and not merely just a bringer of peace, because it is his righteousness covering us that gives us peace with God. That is an important note to remember; the great need of the unbeliever is not to have peace and rest in their heart, but for them to be in right standing before God, to have peace with him. You see for the unbeliever, they are functionally at war with God, living a life of committing unrepentant sin and doing un-sanctified good deeds. For a person to ever have peace with God, they must be declared righteous, and the only means of that ever happening is by receiving the righteousness of Jesus Christ, our perfect Law-keeping substitute. With this in mind, it is easy to see how Christ is our peace, not just a bringer of peace.
Secondly, Jesus is our peace in terms of how we bring peace to the world around us. So many Christians scratch their heads, rack their brains, and even drift into unbiblical methodologies in an effort to come up with ways to bring peace into their hearts, homes, extended families, and communities. This problem arises out of the improper view that Christ is a bringer of peace, and not peace itself in the flesh. The message of the Gospel is the paradigm-shifting reality that brings peace to any and every situation, regardless of the issue. For so many of us, we want to see the peace of God flood the world, but we are unwilling to speak the truth in love to the world around us, bringing peace through the message of the crucified and risen Christ Jesus.
If we want peace, we must preach Christ. And to have a Gospel to preach we must have a real Messiah, one who really came to earth in the flesh.
Jesus is our joy
Luke 2:10 says this: 'But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all people." '
What is the joy spoken of by the angels in this passage? Well sure, it is the much-anticipated arrival of the promised Messiah. I mean after all, since the fall of man in genesis 3, the people of God had been looking forward to this historic moment that would mark a supposed turning point for Israel, both militarily and economically. But more specifically, what is the substance of the message, that which truly makes it good news of great joy?
What makes this message so joyous is the person whom the message declares. It is not enough to simply derive joy from the announcement of a message; it is not even enough to be excited about the reality of the message existing; we must look to the content of the message, and there find our joy. So for the Christian, the Gospel is more than just a message to find joyous, but is rather a person, in whom and through whom we find all our joy and pleasures forevermore (Ps. 16:11).
When we build our life around what we think Jesus can give us, and not who he is, oftentimes our circumstances will begin to dictate us and we will look at Christ through the lens of what we have going on and not through the lens of who the Father says Jesus Christ is for us. We stop looking at Christ as our joy, infinite and unchanging, and we start looking for him to give us joy, in greater portion if we are good boys and girls, and lesser portions if we don't obey perfectly. It wreaks havoc on a persons soul to live this way. We will never be free of this destructive pattern of thinking unless we recognize that all of our joy, both now on earth and then in eternity, is bound up in a man, the man Christ Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us.
Jesus is our love
Finally, we come to the L word. Of all the words that come out of our mouths, this one is the most used and abused. From ice cream and garbage TV to high school sweethearts and soulmates, we sure do seem to 'love' a lot of things. But for the Christian, we must be different. We must realize that for us, love is a given reality, not a moldable and bendable reality that is derived from our own imaginations and subjective feelings.
Love is constant, fixed, and steady, because God is constant, fixed, and steady, and God is love (1 John 4:8). If we give just a moment of thought to this concept, we will come to the realization that, if Christ is the perfect revelation and image of God the Father, and God is love, then Christ is love. This is a very important thing that I believe a lot of people miss. Jesus didn't merely show love to the people he met; he embodied love to the people he met. Showing love has its place in the world. In fact, there is far too little love shown these days, but that will likely be addressed somewhere else.
What would it look like to be give people Christ, and in turn, give them love?
What would it look like for you to stop waking up everyday and wondering who is going to love you and how much, and instead looking up to your faithful Savior, the one who is love, who has no shadow of turning and change?
I can't answer these questions for you personally. But I can tell you that there is freedom and life when a Christian walks everyday who knows they are Christ's, and he is theirs, and that means they have the fullness of hope, peace, joy, and love right here, right now, and forever.
My prayer for you, both in this season and all year long, is that the Holy Spirit would fill you to overflowing with hope, peace, joy, and love, as you look not to what Christ can do for you, but who he already is for you, leading to exultation and praise to our heavenly Father.