If you’re like me you’re preparing for guests or Christmas morning. You’re planning meals and last minute activities for your family. You’re getting ready for your cookie day or gingerbread houses day.
Either way we’re all preparing. Maybe you’re doing your advent calendar or your bible readings to prepare to celebrate our savior. The past two weeks I’ve written on doing heart checks in our own life. Talking about victim mentality and the busyness that longs to take over but what about the actual advent? The actual preparation for Christmas.
What better way to learn about preparation than from Mary and Joseph, two people who had to very tangibly prepare for the Birth of our savior.
This post is going to be shorter and sweeter because their example is simple. Their preparation was simply saying yes.
Mary said yes to the Lord when Gabriel showed up. She knew the Lord and said yes. Joseph had a few more heart checks to get through before he could say yes.
Mary could have thrown her hands up so many times with a victim mentality but instead she clung to her Father. All it took was her yes. There was a freedom from preparation that came over her when she said yes. She didn’t need a place to stay. She didn’t have to worry about making the trip to Bethlehem. She didn’t have to worry about birthing her son without the comfort of her mother. Friends, we don’t either.
Joseph, in contrast to Mary, actually Said no in the beginning. He wanted a quiet divorce. Then God spoke to him in a dream. Confirming what Mary had already known. It was then that he said yes. Giving him freedom from his preparations. Freedom from mans approval, freedom from the worry of
God has already spoken to us all. Through his word and through His spirit. We already have all that we need to prepare. This season we may be a Joseph. We may have a few more heart checks to get through before we can find rest in saying yes to our father. We may be a Mary, already clinging to the yes we said to our father ages ago.
I want this to encourage you. I want this to encourage you that you don’t need all the extra to prepare. Advent calendars are fun. Bible studies are good.
Yet somehow in all of that we begin to feel that if we don’t do it all we aren’t preparing to celebrate our Savior. When in reality its very simple. It’s simply taking what God has told us:
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Immanuel.”
Isaiah 7:14
and Saying: “Yes Lord. I know that to be true.”
All the preparation for Mary and Joseph was wrapped up in that prophecy. After that, everything else was simply a step to fulfilling it. It was no longer looked at as preparation because God had done it all and he would continue to.
So when we look at our spiritual preparation are we simply moving forward from a place that knows the fulfillment is complete? That all the preparation that needs to be done, God will do? Are we heeding to Gods word and direction like Mary and Joseph?
The truth is, if we are still in a place of emotional distress, trying to reach for all the things to make it seem like we are preparing; have we truly said yes to knowing what Isaiah Prophesied all those years ago?
When discomfort hits do we flinch in frustration? or do we make the trek to Jerusalem? When we are told no, do we lash out in anger and blame? Or do we find a manger?
These things are enough to drive one mad yet Mary and Joseph didn’t flinch because they had said yes. They knew what was coming. Thats all they needed. You see if they had leaned on their own preparations, they would have never been ready. Never been ready to deliver a baby in a manger.
So on the last of my Heart check Holiday installment, I’d like to ask you:
Do you find yourself needing more than just Gods word and Spirit? Are you taking Gods direction or discipline and twisting it to place blame away from you, forgetting what Jesus came to do? Are you so caught up with mans approval this season that you’ve lost sight of your fathers approval?
Do we seem to think the more we do, the more prepared we will be? That somehow our works or actions can change our hearts?
It’s easy to think that we need more. That we need to DO more than just simply saying yes to Gods truth in our life.
Our preparation should be nothing more than knowing Gods truth and saying yes to it, forever more. Everything else is extra, although nice and useful, it’s not needed and sometimes it’s even distracting.
If we think we’ve said yes but small things seem to trigger or pull us astray than maybe we placed a “but” after our yes that needs to be removed. Can we allow God to remove those “buts” and find freedom from preparation?
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