The Hope of Advent: Healing Humanity's Broken Heart

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Advent season reminds us that God created us for connection. The arrival of the infant Jesus transformed our understanding of the trinity—empowering us to interact with God using our senses and human characteristics. This new way of connecting with God functions as a bridge for grasping our connection with him spiritually. Though important for us to celebrate these events, the first coming of Jesus and the anticipation of his second coming, this podcast focuses on the day-to-day impact of Jesus—provided we pick up our cross each day.

Over the four weeks of advent and the celebration of Jesus’s arrival, we will cover how our connection with God:

• Provides hope that humanity’s broken heart, corrupted at the fall, will be reconnected with God.

• Enables peace as Jesus works to remove corruption and restore our wholeness.

• Empowers joy as we begin to experience life as individuals and in community according to God’s intended design.

• Envelops us in love as we surrender our lives to his plan for us and receive the full measure of his goodness.

• Actualizes our relationship with God, connection with ourselves and engagement with others through Jesus's arrival as a Damascus Man—fully God and fully human.So let's dive into this week's lesson.

This first week of Advent explores the idea of hope. I express hope as a confident expectation of a future event. Isaiah, an Old Testament prophet, declared this about the future arrival of the Messiah. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14 NIV).

For the Israelites, hope came in the expectation of the future Messiah, Immanuel. For us, we have the privilege of asking him to live in our heart. Advent though, both celebrates what Christ did 2000 years ago and our future life in eternity. So this begs the question: Why did Jesus need to come?

God created humanity as perfected beings. From the mud, he crafted a perfect image of himself and breathed his Spirit into us to give us life. But Adam and Eve were curious and started talking with the wrong crowd. Influenced by the serpent, they chose to disobey God. This act, one of dishonor, severed the connection between the image made of mud and the Spirit of life. Though able to walk and talk and hide without God’s Spirit, man now gets through life as an animated but dead creature. Essentially, humanity suffered a broken heart, losing the power of the Spirit that enables connection with God, the source of life.

The heart, broken by a single choice to dishonor God, required a lifetime of choices that perfectly honor God. To restore connection to God required Jesus to live his entire life abiding with God—surrendered to God’s heart, not his own heart. Praise be to God that he accomplished that task. It brings to mind the song, “My hope is built | on nothing less | than Jesus’s blood | and righteousness.”

So let’s break that down. Jesus had to be born in the normal way of humanity so that his life checked off all the boxes to undo the brokenness caused at the fall. I find this next idea really cool. Even though his body of mud concealed his God nature, he lived entirely by human effort with the Spirit's assistance—every emotion, every sensation, and every decision. To accomplish this, he constantly focused on his need for the Spirit to guide his path, the same Spirit that he sent to dwell in us. Because he walked as a man, we should take seriously his command to take up our cross and follow him. He experienced the struggle of humanity. He knows why we need to take up our cross each day.

Hope, for Israel and for us, always has and always will focus on our connection with God and healing humanity’s broken heart. The heart, according to the Hebrew mindset, controls everything (to update our thinking to current medical terminology, the central nervous system functions as the control center). To understand the this idea of the heart better, we divide it into four parts: the heart, the mind, the soul, and the body. Hope, expressed as an emotion, identifies its brokenness in the body, in the way that we feel.

Since the fall, humanity has managed their own protection—which we feel as peace or fear. When we disconnected from the Spirit, humanity became resourceful and created coping strategies to deal with the struggles and dangers in life. But these strategies work like bandages, they don’t provide healing and only cover up the issues. The bandages are called coping strategies, or tools, and work for a while in the place of God. Instead, the Spirit connects with humanity to provide stabilization for our nervous system—his protection actually casts out fear.

Throughout the Old Testament, Scripture offers hope by foretelling of a real solution for healing the broken heart—the Messiah. All throughout the Old Testament, humanity, namely the Israelite leaders, drifted away from God and created a blended understanding of God—one that mixed Scripture with what they wanted, and that was not an eternal kingdom but an earthly one. God predicted this would happen and had a plan. He sent prophets, kings, and enemies to refocus Israel on connection, but he knew he must enter humanity as a man for the Spirit to reconnect with the image made of mud.

Jesus succeeded. He fixed the mistake which allowed the Spirit to stabilize our nervous system and transform humanity from an animated corpse to an empowered being. Through Jesus, we now ask to connect with God exactly as he did as he walked the earth and as Adam did prior to the fall. But we still must choose to connect with God constantly to remain stable. The devil waits for us to be lazy, to forget, or to stop thinking that connection matters. Ponder this: God protects us like an umbrella. The devil runs around us trying to get us to join him in the rain. The further we stray from the handle, the more vulnerable we become to his ideas.

In the beginning of our spiritual journey, when we first crawl under the umbrella, connection with Jesus feels amazing. But connection with God requires discipline and we have a role to play in our continued stabilization. It takes time for our nervous system to get used to a new normal. Under stress, before we build trust that Jesus will protect us, we want to protect ourselves using our old systems. Hope—the ability to trust Jesus for protection when we do not understand his ways—requires us to stay close to the truth.

I mentioned that hope aligns with the brokenness of the body. During early practices of advent, fasting restored wholeness and connection in the body in preparation for the celebration. I know fasting sounds terrible, but hear me out. Food activates every part of the nervous system—the senses, emotions, and even our interactions with others. Experiencing such an all-consuming and challenging task makes us ask Jesus for help. We call it “fasting” but “hold-fast” provides a better term. It means to cling to Jesus instead of relying on coping strategies to get through a trial. Disciplines, like fasting, invite him to remove our broken coping strategies and replace them with his Scriptural design for us. (Now it's hard. I suggest you find brothers and sisters in Christ to be able to walk through your early stages of holding fast so that you have support to kinda keep going through it.)

As you think about hope this week, remember that God sent Jesus and the Spirit to connect with us now and into eternity. He proved by example that an empowered life—a life connected to the Spirit of God—restores our stability and allows us to live with perfection as Jesus did. His promises, those we hope for today, will come true, they always have and always will.

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