Advent Christmas Quotes & Sayings

God of hope, I look to you with an open heart and yearning spirit. During this Advent season, I will keep alert and awake, listening for your word and keeping to your precepts. My hope is in you. — Matthew Kelly

The holy dark over the manger gives way to the heinous dark over the Messiah and the slamming hammer and the tearing vein and the piercing thorn - the created murdering the Creator. The Cross stands as the epitome of evil. And God takes the greatest evil ever known to humanity and turns it into the greatest Gift you have ever known. "If the worst things work for good to a believer, what shall the best things?" writes Puritan Thomas Watson. "Nothing hurts the godly . . . all things . . . shall co-operate for their good, that their crosses shall be turned into blessings."[11] If God can transfigure the greatest evil into the greatest Gift, then He intends to turn whatever you're experiencing now into a gift. You cannot be undone. Somewhere, Advent can storm and howl. And the world robed for Christmas can spin on. You, there on the edge, whispering it, defiant through the torn places: "All is grace. — Ann Voskamp

Christmas is about the coming of the Son of Man who "came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." These words in Mark 10:45, as a brief expression of Christmas, are what I hope God will fix in your mind and heart this Advent. Open your heart to receive the best present imaginable: Jesus giving himself to die for you and to serve you all the rest of eternity. Receive this. Turn away from self-help and sin. Become like little children. Trust him. Trust him. Trust him with your life. — John Piper

Advent creates people, new people. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I believe deeply that God does his best work in our lives during times of great heartbreak and loss, and I believe that much of that rich work is done by the hands of people who love us, who dive into the wreckage with us and show us who God is, over and over and over. There are years when the Christmas spirit is hard to come by, and it's in those seasons when I'm so thankful for Advent. Consider it a less flashy but still very beautiful way of being present to this season. Give up for a while your false and failing attempts at merriment, and thank God for thin places, and for Advent, for a season that understands longing and loneliness and long nights. Let yourself fall open to Advent, to anticipation, to the belief that what is empty will be filled, what is broken will be repaired, and what is lost can always be found, no matter how many times it's been lost. — Shauna Niequist

This Advent we look to the Wise Men to teach us where to focus our attention. We set our sights on things above, where God is. We draw closer to Jesus ... When our Advent journey ends, and we reach the place where Jesus resides in Bethlehem, may we, like the Wise Men, fall on our knees and adore him as our true and only King. — Mark Zimmermann

Every year we celebrate the holy season of Advent, O God. Every year we pray those beautiful prayers of longing and waiting, and sing those lovely songs of hope and promise. — Karl Rahner

I've always thought of characters like advent calendars. You have Christmas and you have all the little doors over the windows and every day you're allowed to open one more as it gets towards Christmas and you see more and more about what's inside that house.I remember as a kid being fascinated by that and I've always thought of my character as a little bit like that. I like to have secrets and slowly let those secrets out to the audience, sometimes never let them out, but let them see as you open the shutters, open and see a little bit more of a character. — Jeremy Irons

Advent: the time to listen for footsteps - you can't hear footsteps when
you're running yourself. — Bill McKibben

The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it "Always Advent," but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all. — Richard Rohr

It is not enough to celebrate Christmas. We need to be changed and shaped by what we are celebrating. If our spiritual life is no better in spite of all our praying, fasting, and church services, then we have not yet begun to fully respond to the significance of Advent and of the Nativity. — Vassilios Papavassiliou

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last. — Frederick Buechner

He may be doing it for you in this Advent season - graciously and tenderly frustrating you with life that is not centered on Christ and filling you with longings and desires that can't find their satisfaction in what this world offers, but only in the God-man. What a Christmas gift that might be! Let all your frustrations with this world throw you onto the Word of God. It will become sweet - like walking into paradise. — John Piper

It is now, at Advent, that I am given the chance to suspend all expectation ... and instead to revel in the mystery. — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

So now we pause. Still. Ponder. Hush. Wait. Each day of Advent, He gives you the gift of time, so you have time to be still and wait. Wait for the coming of the God in the manger who makes Himself bread for us near starved. For the Savior in swaddlings who makes Himself the robe of righteousness for us worn out. For Jesus, who makes precisely what none of us can but all of us want: Christmas. — Ann Voskamp

Here's an Advent illustration for kids - and those of us who used to be kids and remember what it was like. Suppose you and your mom get separated in the grocery store, and you start to get scared and panic and don't know which way to go, and you run to the end of an aisle, and just before you start to cry, you see a shadow on the floor at the end of the aisle that looks just like your mom. It makes you really happy and you feel hope. But which is better? The happiness of seeing the shadow, or having your mom step around the corner and it's really her?

That's the way it is when Jesus comes to be our High Priest. That's what Christmas is. Christmas is the replacement of shadows with the real thing. — John Piper

Advent is a season that is a borderland. A new year is coming. We're waiting for the coming of Jesus, both for his birth on Christmas Day and for his coming again on the Last Day. — Heidi Haverkamp

Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine. — Brian D. McLaren

The Advent season is that time when we seek to, in a manner of speaking, mute our memory of what has already happened, that we might brighten our joy that it happened. We leave the already of His advent to taste the bitter of the not yet. We, in short, go back, that we might look forward to His coming. — R.C. Sproul

Into this world, this demented inn
in which there is absolutely no room for him at all,
Christ comes uninvited. — Thomas Merton

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The four-week period of Advent before Christmas - and the six-week period of Lent before Easter - are times of penance and life change for Christians. In our book The Last Week, we suggested that Lent was a penance time for having been in the wrong procession and a preparation time for moving over to the right one by Palm Sunday. That day's violent procession of the horse-mounted Pilate and his soldiers was contrasted with the nonviolent procession of the donkey-mounted Jesus and his companions. We asked: in which procession would we have walked then and in which do we walk now? — Marcus J. Borg

Thus says the Lord: the meaning of Christmas is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed. The fears that the few good things that make you happy are slipping through your fingers, and the frustrations that the bad things you hate about yourself or your situation can't be changed - these fears and these frustrations are what Christmas came to destroy. It is God's message of hope this Advent that what is good need never be lost and what is bad can be changed. — John Piper

Advent allows us to recover during this four-week journey. It begins four Sundays before Christmas all the way up to Christmas. It lets us breath in those moments of faithfulness and helps us recognize that God is working. — Louie Giglio

Say to the next generation again and again: God is truthful; God keeps his word; God does not lie; God can be trusted! That's one blessing of Advent. Receive it as a wonderful Christmas gift, and give it to as many people as you can. — John Piper

The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak. — Jerusalem Jackson Greer

At this Christmas when Christ comes, will He find a warm heart? Mark the season of Advent by loving and serving the others with God's own love and concern. — Mother Teresa

Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been. — Michael Ondaatje

December 6 is noted on Catholic calendars as the Feast of Saint Nicholas and it usually falls within the first week of Advent. In many European countries, the Feast is an even greater celebration than Christmas. It is a day to remember the saint's dedication to giving to those who really needed it, and doing it in a way that drew as little attention to himself as possible. — Katie Savage

And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I am determined to enjoy each day to the fullest. I don't want to wish away Christmas. I want to enjoy these last moments of Advent and look forward to Jesus's birth with anticipation. — Shelley Shepard Gray