Message: “Seeing God Again After You’ve Given Up, vol. 3” from Ross Stackhouse

Message at 15:15. One time, a child asked his dad, “Daddy, why doesn’t God answer prayers?” Isn’t everyone asking that in one way or another, that is, if they still are invested in the whole prayer thing at all? A character in Jesus’s birth story heard this one day, “Your prayers have been heard.” Aren’t we all dying to hear that sort of? This character, Zechariah, struggles so much with how his prayers have been heard and how God is showing up in his life that he can’t help but to express his doubt, perhaps even frustration or anger. So, then he’s not able to talk…for nine months! When he can finally speak, what he says is powerful and maybe something we all need to hear.

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.