Message: “Seeing God Again After You’ve Given Up, Finale” from Ross Stackhouse

Perhaps because we think of Linus, many of us know that it’s shepherds who first hear of Jesus’s birth. But think of the moments right before they find out. These rough-around-the-edges shepherds have no clue what is happening on this otherwise ordinary evening of keeping sheep. For them, it may as well be “in a galaxy far, far away” because they have no clue. What they know is the kind of world that Mary and Elizabeth and Zechariah knew–a world where they are viewed as disgraceful and world that is filled with darkness and despair. And yet just “nearby” (Luke 2:8), the light of heaven is dawning. This concept of “the nearby but to us so far away” inbreaking of miraculous light and mercy and great reversal sounds like a feel-good idea, but sometimes such ideas are the reality. And it’s kind of frustrating, because why does it have to be this way? Why does there so often seem to be a divide between the certainty of God’s restoring glory and the omnipresence of suffering? Let’s talk about these questions as we make our way to the true, deep joy of Christmas.

Related Topics: Advent | More Messages from Ross Stackhouse

From Series: "Seeing God Again After You've Given Up"

We’re entering a season called Advent in the Church in which we prepare our hearts for Christmas. Yes, it’s a season of joy, but we don’t get to the joy–the truest joy of this story–by leaving our pain, sorrow and sins unaddressed. After all, this isn’t how the story of Jesus goes anyhow. We’re going to take a deep dive into the two chapters of the Bible that deal with Jesus’s birth (in Luke’s Gospel), and we’ll see from the beginning that people like Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary and others had perhaps given up on the possibility of God actually existing, or, at the very least, that God was yet going to do something in the world and in their lives that would honor the despair and disgrace they had experienced (along with others). Until one day, there’s a glimmer of light, a glimpse of something God was doing…and was preparing to do all along.