Point of Grace Worship 12.7.25 – Advent 2 – “Coming Home for Christmas - No Place Like Home”
Advent – A season of anticipation, preparation, waiting for what is coming – for Who came and is coming back.
Perhaps in this season like no other our cultural rhythms reveal a deep unmet longing, yearning, hunger, desire … for a better more beautiful, more bright, less dark, more hope-full, peace-full, joy-full, love filled life. The holidays give us a fleeting taste … a glimpse of life as it should be.
Food and feasting that abundantly satisfy hunger and thirst have always been ways we celebrate, anticipate, create and capture moments of bliss!
Isaiah 55:1-5
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.
Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.
See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a ruler and commander of the peoples.
Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations you do not know will come running to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor.”
Sounds like Jesus!
John 7:36-39
Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.
John 6:27,35
Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
John 4:13-14
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
Isaiah 55:1-2
“Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost.
Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy?
Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare.
This feast is “free”, already paid for, available to all!
Just bring your “hunger and thirst” to this one table that satisfies!
“It’s true, isn’t it? You long to be right with God, to be seen, known, and approved by the One who made you. But instead, you reach for second-rate food. You chase the applause of your peers, hoping it will satisfy. You idolize your children, living through their grades and goals, hoping that will make you feel full. You exercise obsessively, spend gratuitously, strive to be the indispensable friend or the perfect spouse all in a desperate effort to feel “right.” In darker moments, you scroll through images you know you shouldn’t. You pop the pill you bought in secret. You labor, you spend on what Isaiah would call “bad bread.” You toil for food that does not satisfy, forgetting that what you truly hunger for you already have, in full, in Christ.”
Pastor Matt Popovits
We yield our bodies to what we eat … we yield our souls to what we consume!
Choose well the diet for your soul.
The feast that Jesus is and brings is available now – tastes of home that truly satisfy!
Everlasting promises that fuel our soul! When it comes to the soul, we eat with our ears and eyes.
Vs.3
“Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.
I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.”
This feast is too good to keep to ourselves!
Vs. 4-5
“See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a ruler and commander of the peoples.
Surely you will summon nations you know not, and nations you do not know will come running to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has endowed you with splendor.”
Vs. 6-7
Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near.
Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts.
Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.