Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang, and the Good Faith podcast, I'm your host, Curtis Chang. And the Good Faith podcast is a production of

Redeeming Babel. And it's where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. And we are in the

middle of a series on Advent and how a proper understanding of Advent helps us make sense of the world.

And I want to say a word about why Advent is so crucial to get right and why it's so crucial

for us to get the world right. The reason is because we have to remember that Advent is really

about two historical events,

two concrete historical events.

One, which has already happened, which is the arrival of Jesus as a king in first century Israel,

as the long-awaited Messiah and his life and subsequent ministry, death, and resurrection,

something that has happened. It is also a second event that is we believe will happen in the

future, which is the return, the re-arrival of Jesus as the fully established king to fully

implement the kingdom on this world as it is in heaven.

And it's important to think of Advent as really the celebration of these two historical events.

The reason why I'm emphasizing this is it is very tempting in our secular culture is to actually

abstract out of Advent some abstract sort of universal values that are actually detached from these two historical events.

And often, the abstract values that are taken from Advent are the ones that traditionally Christians have ascribed to Advent, which is hope, peace, joy, and love.

But when you abstract those values outside of the historical events, they can end up meaning very different things or just things that are not actually what Advent is meant to communicate.

Let me use an analogy to illustrate why it's so

important to get this right. So Fourth of July is a, celebrates a historic event, the signing of

the Declaration of Independence. It is very easy to abstract from the celebration of that historical

event, the abstract value of patriotism.

The problem, though, is if you just sort of start losing the original event and just celebrate the abstract celebration of the value of patriotism, that can go in a lot of different directions,

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