Advent 1: Hope
The first Sunday of Advent is often called the Hope Candle, and in many traditions it’s also known as the Prophet Candle, tied especially to the ministry of John the Baptist. Advent begins, not in a sentimental mood, but with a prophetic voice crying out in the wilderness. Isaiah paints the scene: “A voice cries: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’”
That’s the sound of Advent One. It is the announcement that the King is coming and the summons to prepare His way. Nothing that stands between us and right standing with God is to be left untouched: every proud mountain brought low, every insecure valley lifted, every crooked place made straight, every rough place smoothed. Political, social, emotional, spiritual—no layer of life is exempt. The King is coming; make His path straight. Advent begins there: with a call to preparation grounded in hope.
We call this first candle “hope” because the return of Jesus is described in Scripture as our blessed hope. When we light the Hope Candle, we’re not indulging vague optimism. We are anchoring ourselves again in the promise that the same Jesus who came in humility will come again in glory, to judge, to heal, and to renew all things. But Advent invites us to go deeper than doctrines and timelines. It asks: Are we emotionally preparing for the return of the Lord? Are we learning to long for Him?
Jesus Himself gives us a surprising window into this in Matthew 9. John the Baptist’s disciples come to Him with a question that sounds almost like a leadership critique: “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” In other words: if You’re really serious about God, why aren’t You training Your disciples the way we were trained? Jesus answers with a picture: “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.”
He is saying, in effect, My presence with them right now is a wedding, not a funeral. It would be completely out of place for them to fast while the Bridegroom is physically with them. This is a time of celebration: God has come in the flesh. But then He points forward: there will come a time when He is “taken away” – after the cross, resurrection, and ascension. Then, He says, “they will fast.”
Why? Not as a guilt-driven attempt to get God’s attention, but as the expression of a love that misses Him. After the cross, the sin problem will have been decisively addressed—a once-for-all sacrifice. The relationship will no longer center on trying to solve the problem of guilt. Yet the Church will still pray, worship, fast, and seek God. All of those spiritual activities will now flow from longing, not just from crisis. They will come from hearts that have truly tasted His nearness and want more.
You can see this hunger all over the New Testament. In Acts 3, Peter doesn’t simply stand up and deliver a cold theological demand when he calls Jerusalem to repent. He proclaims that repentance opens the door for “times of refreshing” and that the Father will send Jesus. There is this heartbeat underneath: I miss Him. I want Him to come. Paul sees Jesus briefly on the road to Damascus, but that encounter marks him for the rest of his life. Later he speaks of a “crown of righteousness” reserved for those who love His appearing. Not those who merely agree with His appearing, or can diagram it on a chart—but those who love it. He even says that the love of Christ compels him to preach, because when the gospel is proclaimed among all nations, then the end will come. He is driven by mission, but underneath the urgency is longing: if they don’t kill me in one place, I’ll go to the next, because I want the gospel to run its course and I want Him back.
John, exiled on Patmos, receives a vision of Jesus in His glory that leaves him undone. By the end of the Revelation, his heart is branded with a single cry: “Come, Lord Jesus.” Not just “come,” but “come quickly.” The Spirit echoes that cry, and the Bride is meant to learn it as her native tongue: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come.’”
There has been, in some corners of the Church, a tendency to shift almost all emphasis onto “the kingdom now” and to downplay the return of Jesus. In some ways this has been a corrective—we’ve remembered that the gospel has real implications for justice, healing, and transformation in the present. But the apostles never separated the kingdom now from the kingdom to come. They lived in the tension: the kingdom is breaking in now, and yet the kingdom comes in fullness when He returns. And more than that, their hope wasn’t just in events but in a person. They were not merely longing for the restoration of the earth; they were longing for their Friend.
That’s an important shift. It’s easy to think about the second coming only as “when God finally fixes everything.” And He will. But the apostles talked about it as the return of the One they loved. Their longing for Jesus’ return grew out of His first coming. They had eaten meals with Him, watched Him heal, heard His teaching, encountered His mercy, seen His humility. They had watched Him wash their feet and then die in their place. They had witnessed the resurrection and felt His breath as He spoke peace over their failure and fear. Once you’ve known a person like that, you don’t just want His policies; you want Him.
Advent One is an invitation to rediscover that kind of longing. We were created for His presence. Human beings, uniquely, were made in God’s image with the capacity to commune with Him forever. When the angels fell, God did not become an angel to redeem them. But when humanity rebelled, God took on human flesh, lived our life, died our death, and rose again so that we could be with Him. Until the day He comes again, something in us will always feel unfinished. We won’t work right until His presence fills all in all.
When Jesus returns, He will not whisk us off into a vague spiritual cloud where we lose all real experience. He will renew creation itself. The sky will be clearer, the air purer, the earth restored, and our bodies raised in glory. Our joy will be complete, not because we finally get an upgraded private spirituality, but because He is there, and we are with Him, and the world is made new. From the vantage point of relative comfort, it’s tempting to feel like we can wait. But forty million people trapped in human trafficking would be better off if Jesus came. The poor, the oppressed, the war-torn, the sick, the abused—they would be better off if Jesus came. The return of Christ is not an escape hatch from responsibility; it is the only true hope for perfect justice and unending peace.
So where does that leave us now? One theologian, Wayne Grudem, once raised a searching question: Do Christians, in fact, eagerly long for Christ’s return? He observed that the more we’re absorbed in the good gifts of this life, the more we neglect deep fellowship and a living relationship with Christ, the less we tend to long for His coming. Conversely, those who suffer, those who are persecuted, those whose bodies are failing, and those whose daily walk with Christ is living and deep often find their longing for His return increasing. He suggests that to some extent, the degree to which we long for Christ’s return is a measure of our spiritual condition in that moment.
That doesn’t mean we should beat ourselves up if we don’t feel a strong longing today. But it does invite honesty. Some of you reading this may feel your heart already resonating: Yes, I want Him to come. Others might think, “I get the concept, but if I’m honest, I don’t really feel that.” Advent is for both.
Sometimes the reason we don’t feel thirsty for God is not because we’re empty, but because we are constantly filling ourselves with other things. Our souls are thirsty, but instead of water we keep snacking. We use entertainment, busyness, achievement, or even ministry to distract us from the deeper ache. One of the quiet mercies of Advent is that it gives us permission to stop, to let the noise die down, and to realize just how thirsty we truly are.
Psalm 63 says, “My soul thirsts for You; my flesh longs for You in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” You might not feel that thirst right now, but the Spirit is able to awaken it again. Revelation 22:17 gives us a promise for Advent people: “The Spirit and the Bride say, ‘Come’… and let the one who is thirsty come.” The Spirit is already praying “Come” within the people of God. Our part is to agree with Him, even if we start by saying, “Lord, I want to want You.”
Advent is a season of preparation that makes room for this kind of awakening. As we repent—removing the things that dull our senses and crowd our hearts—we often discover that the longing was there all along, buried under layers of distraction. The goal of the Christian life is not to manufacture desire for Christ from scratch; it is to uncover the desire that God Himself has planted in us. You were made for Him. Your soul already aches for Him, whether you can name it or not.
A simple way to pray in this season is to borrow a threefold cry: Come to me. Come through me. Come for me.
“Come to me” asks for a fresh experience of His presence now.
“Come through me” invites Him to sanctify and use you as a witness in the lives of others.
“Come for me” anchors your hope in His return, when He will finally make all things new.
This is what the Hope Candle is about. It is not naive optimism or vague positivity. It is the steady confidence that Jesus is coming, that His presence is our great good, and that the Spirit is already teaching the Bride to say, in love and in longing:
Maranatha—come, Lord Jesus.
