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    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room: Daily Family Devotions for Advent
    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room: Daily Family Devotions for Advent
    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room: Daily Family Devotions for Advent
    Ebook136 pages1 hour

    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room: Daily Family Devotions for Advent

    By Nancy Guthrie

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    About this ebook

    How many Christmas mornings have you found your family gathered around the tree with presents beautifully wrapped and a scrumptious feast on the table, but with hearts that have not been prepared to truly take in the wonder of God become human? Not this year. Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room, a family Advent devotional from Bible teacher and mom Nancy Guthrie, is designed to bring your family together during a season that is oftentimes too much about programs and presents, and simply not enough about Jesus. Along with devotions for every day in December, this resource includes explanations of some hard-to-understand aspects of popular Christmas carols, and discussion questions to draw in your elementary through high school-aged kids, transforming this time together from a dry lecture into a treasured family experience.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTyndale House Publishers
    Release dateOct 12, 2011
    ISBN9781414365978
    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room: Daily Family Devotions for Advent
    Author

    Nancy Guthrie

    Nancy Guthrie teaches the Bible at her home church, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church in Franklin, Tennessee, as well as at conferences around the country and internationally, including her Biblical Theology Workshop for Women. She is the author of numerous books and the host of the Help Me Teach the Bible podcast with the Gospel Coalition. She and her husband founded Respite Retreats for couples who have faced the death of a child, and they are cohosts of the GriefShare video series. 

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    • 5/5
      Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room takes you on an Advent adventure leading up to the celebration of Christmas. This adventure prepares you, and your family, for celebrating the birth of our Savior by making room for Him in your hearts and in the celebrations of the season.A different reading/ devotional for each of the days through the season is provided with heart-warming themes that are certain to bring your hearts and families home for the holidays.A must read for every Christian home, and certainly a must for every Christmas, I heartily encourage you to purchase this book for your own home, and to consider it for gift-giving this season!I give this wonderful book my Five Star rating... and give it my Thumbs Up award!****DISCLOSURE: A copy of this book was provided by Tyndale Publishers for review.

    Book preview

    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room - Nancy Guthrie

    Introduction

    As December dawns, most families are busy putting Christmas programs and parties on the calendar, making holiday travel plans, and purchasing Christmas gifts. Those are all wonderful things, but if your family is anything like mine, these good things can squeeze out the best thing—nurturing a longing in our hearts and our homes for a fresh sense of wonder that God has come to us in Jesus. If we do not set aside time to focus together on what God’s Word tells us about the promise of Christ, on Christmas morning we can find ourselves surrounded by mounds of torn gift wrap, our laps full of presents, but with hearts that are empty and unprepared.

    As you enter into December this year, I hope you and your family will gather at some point each day to read this book and turn your focus to God’s promise of a Savior. You’ll be reminded of how God’s people longed for centuries for the Messiah to come, and you’ll read the Gospel accounts of the Messiah’s coming. By setting aside this time, you’ll turn away from this world’s materialistic frenzy and toward a truly sacred celebration of Christ’s coming.

    Let Every Heart Prepare Him Room provides a short reading for every day in the month of December, taking your family on a journey of identifying with the distant longings of Israel, listening for the angel’s announcement, and gazing at the Baby in the manger. You’ll find several suggested discussion questions that will help to transform this time into a meaningful discussion in which everybody in the family can participate. Each day’s questions begin with a question that even the youngest member of the family can likely answer. There are additional Scriptures you might want to read as part of your discussion and Christmas songs your family can talk through and then sing together. Several lined pages have been spaced throughout the book where you can jot down dated notes of comments made and questions asked by various family members that you want to remember as the years go by.

    The busyness of December can easily crowd out contemplation of the amazing reality of God’s coming to live among us as one of us. I hope that your family will overcome the empty busyness of this season and that in your home, every heart will prepare room for Jesus.

    —Nancy Guthrie

    December 1

    When someone promises us something wonderful, we can hardly wait for that promise to be fulfilled. If the promise is something good, we want it now! We really don’t like to wait. And yet the very best things are worth waiting for.

    A long, long time ago, God made a promise to his people, Israel. In fact, he made many promises to them. But God’s most important promise—the promise all his other promises depended on—was that he would send the Messiah, the Anointed One, who would save them from the difficulties of living life in this world broken by sin. The Messiah would not be an ordinary person, but God’s own Son. The people he made the promise to had to wait, putting all their faith in the One who made the promise.

    The season leading up to Christmas is called Advent, which means coming. During Advent, we remember the thousands of years God’s chosen people anticipated and longed for the coming of God’s salvation through the Messiah. Then, at Christmas, we celebrate the fulfillment of the promises God made. Jesus—the Savior God had promised—was born to us. No more waiting. Jesus came.

    When John the Baptist was born, his father, Zechariah, recognized that the long years of waiting were finally over. God gave him a special understanding that his son, John, was going to prepare the way for the promised Messiah. Zechariah celebrated that God was about to fulfill his promise. He said, Praise the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has visited and redeemed his people. He has sent us a mighty Savior from the royal line of his servant David, just as he promised through his holy prophets long ago (Luke 1:68-70).

    God promised that he would send a Savior, which he did when Jesus became a human baby. And while Jesus did everything necessary to save us when he came the first time, he also promised to come again. Then all God’s promises will be completely fulfilled. So again we are waiting. Waiting patiently for God to fulfill his promises is what it means to have faith.

    Putting faith in God’s promises is not something a person does only one time on the day he or she becomes a Christian. The essence of being a Christian is placing all our hope in God, knowing we can trust him to fulfill all his promises—even the ones that haven’t been fulfilled yet. We are willing to wait, trusting that God’s way is perfect. All the LORD’s promises prove true (Psalm 18:30).

    Prayer

    Like your people of old, we are waiting for you, God, to fulfill all your promises. And because we remember how you fulfilled your promise to send Jesus, we know that you will fulfill all your promises to us.

    * * *

    Discussion Starters

    What does it mean to make a promise?

    Zechariah said that God would soon send a mighty Savior as he promised through his holy prophets long ago. Look up these verses in your Bible to see a few examples of promises God made about the Messiah, given through his prophets in the Old Testament: Deuteronomy 18:15; Psalm 72:10; Isaiah 7:14; 9:6-7; Jeremiah 23:5-6.

    Waiting for Christmas to come gives us a tiny taste of what it must have been like for God’s people to wait hundreds of years for God to fulfill his promise in sending Jesus. Why do you think it is good to learn to wait on God?

    More from the Bible about—

    The Promised One:

    Remember that Christ came as a servant to the Jews to show that God is true to the promises he made to their ancestors. ROMANS 15:8

    All of God’s promises have been fulfilled in Christ with a resounding Yes! 2 CORINTHIANS 1:20

    December 2

    Most days we set specific times for when we will go to school, have piano lessons, or get picked up from our friend’s house. But sometimes there is not a specific time set for something, and we’re left waiting, wondering when the package will be delivered, when the plumber will arrive at our house, or when our ride is going to show up. We wonder if we’ve been forgotten.

    By the time Jesus was born, the Jewish people had been waiting for hundreds of years for God to send his promised Messiah. It had

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