When God Comes

We have been praying through a four-part series on Longing, Waiting, and Prayer centered around the themes of Advent. So far, we have reflected on how our unfulfilled longings are actually invitations to find God, what God does while we wait, and the four core longings of the human heart from Psalm 42.

Today, I want to talk about the One we are all ultimately waiting for — God.

God is the fulfillment of every longing in the human heart.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is dead. And we have killed him.” While I am not pretending to be an expert on 19th-century German philosophy, I can say that this sentence can interpreted as the triumph of the Enlightenment, modern and postmodern projects: we in the West have abandoned the Source of our knowledge and, ultimately, the path to fulfillment in our hearts, through various means of replacing him.

Instead of looking to God, we look to everything else for satisfaction: money, success, relationships, science, reason, politics, and (if we’re honest) even the simple things like the dopamine hits that come from social media scrolling.

Often, just claiming Christianity as a religion does not change the core of our human condition: we are endlessly unsatisfied and we look to everything outside of us to fulfill the ache on the inside of us.

Advent is the time to name our longings and to confess that we will be perpetually unsatisfied until God himself comes in his fullness.

Catholic priest Ronald Rolheiser names the problem this way:

Because of our perpetual search for anything and everything to satisfy us, many of us go through our days with little to no awareness of the presence of God around us. We stop noticing him because we are not accustomed to looking to him to meet our needs. And as a result, we forget him and go on to live lives without him.

We were made to walk in the cool of the garden with God, to enjoy the continual joy found in his presence, and yet many of us find our daily realities far from Eden, far from fulfillment, and far from Paul’s encouragement to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17).

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot premiered. It’s an absurdist dark comedy about two acquaintances, Vladimir and Estragon who wait for the entire two-and-a-half-hour run time for a mysterious and undefined character named Godot. Spoiler alert: Godot never comes.

Americans often pronounce the title of the play God-OT with an emphasis on the second syllable, while Beckett vocally opposed this pronunciation. Irish himself, he affirmed the pronunciation of the British and Irish — waiting for GOD-ot.

With the latter pronunciation in mind, it is entirely possible to interpret the play as an allegory for the human condition post-Nietzsche: we are waiting for God, but we often feel like he never comes.

Before we rush to the fulfillment of Christmas and the perennial promise of the Christian faith — God has come in Christ and he is coming again! — we must name with Advent honesty where our hearts are at.

How many of us are waiting for God to come through in some area (see last week’s email if you need help to name these areas for yourself), yet there is a nagging fear in our hearts that he won’t?

The early Pentecostals are known for the practice of tarrying. Early in the Azusa Street movement, seekers would come to the mission specifically looking for the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” with the evidence of speaking in tongues — a supernatural, heavenly language.

Early seekers were instructed to do nothing other than simply wait — or tarry — at the altar.

Learning this spirituality of disciplined waiting for God to do what only he can do is essential to a thriving life of following Jesus and is core to the invitation of the Spirit during Advent — but it is not easy to learn.

Tarrying and Advent both teach us the spirituality of waiting well, of waiting for what only God can do, and becoming people of deep trust in the waiting. We get into trouble when we force God’s hand and timing when all he is asking us to do is trust.

Advent is also a time to reflect on the nature of how God comes when he comes. Who are we waiting for after all?

In the first Christmas, God came as a baby in an animal stable — in the middle of mess, stench, and to a nation that wouldn’t even recognize him and would ultimately kill him.

God always comes in the way that we least expect it — right in the middle of the mess. And this is our hope! Even if we can’t comprehend how he will come, he is coming.

During Christmas (aka the 12 days of Christmas from December 25 to January 5), we will recognize how God is being born in our midst. I want to save reflection on this for next week, but I will say this: how God is born in our midst is always unexpected, messy, and not how we would have planned. 

Part of the preparation for Advent is to let God prune us in the waiting so that we let go of our attachment to how God chooses to fulfill the longings in our hearts so that we are ready to receive him however he comes. Will we let him prune us? Will we set our eyes on the One who will fulfill every longing in our hearts, even in unexpected ways, and take our eyes off of everything else?

I want to invite us to two prayerful responses this morning on the final week of Advent.

The first is what many authors often call contemplation. I want to invite us to “direct your hearts to the love of God” (2 Thess 3:5) — to take all of the unfulfilled longings and sit in the tension of their unfulfillment, and to invite Christ himself to become our fulfillment in the deepest level of our beings.

The second response I want to invite us to is what many authors call detachment. As we direct the inner gaze of our hearts towards God, I want to invite us to “detach” from ways that we are hoping God comes through, and “attach” to a posture of trust that there is a Father who sees us, loves us and cares about us. And that he knows what he’s doing better than we do.

So, I’d love to invite us to take some deep breaths. Perhaps as we breathe in, pray, “Come” and as we breathe out pray, “Holy Spirit.”

To contemplate this morning, I’d love to invite us to pray a simple prayer:

"Lord, would you help me to direct every longing in my heart towards you? You are the fulfillment of all of my desires, even in the tension of the waiting. Teach me how to wait well. Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.”

To detach this morning, I’d love to invite you to pray:

“Lord, would you help me to detach from every possible outcome that I have grown attached to, and help me instead to quietly trust that you know what you are doing? Maranatha, come Lord Jesus.”

Amen.

P.S. Thank you so much for praying with me in this Advent devotional series on longing, waiting, and prayer! If you have a friend or colleague that you think would benefit from these devotionals in which we are seeking to come alive and live in love with Jesus through this blend of contemplative and charismatic spiritualities, please feel free to share my subscribe link with them: ryanpmurphy.beehiiv.com.

P.S.S. Next week, we’ll reflect more deeply on what it means for Christ to be born in our lives.