Everybody knows how hard it can be to wait.

Betsy Childs Howard is the author of a book called Seasons of Waiting.

She realized that women throughout the Bible had to wait for a lot of different reasons.

For years, Israel was waiting on the Messiah.

Abraham and Sarah experienced barrenness.

And the barrenness that they experienced that eventually

ended in the birth of Isaac was a small picture of the baronness to Israel experience for years

and years waiting on the promised Messiah. It looked like God was not keeping his promise. But yet he did.

And it's interesting that the coming of Jesus was heralded by another barren woman, Elizabeth,

conceiving a child in her old age. So we have this picture of barrenness and then barrenness

ending with the coming of the Messiah. As believers, we wait on Christ's return. We don't know if it

will come in our lifetime or if it will be later on,

but we're supposed to watch and wait and prepare ourselves.

In the same way that a woman who wants to be married watches and prays and waits for that,

though she doesn't know whether it's going to come.

That idea of waiting is central to the Christmas story.

Our host, Nancy DeMoss Walgamuth, will show you why today on the Revive Our Hearts podcast.

For December 20th, 2021, I'm Dana Gresh.

We're anticipating Christmas by talking about some Christmas carols.

In fact, we're looking at the gospel in some of our Christmas carols in a series we're calling Come Adore.

The title for that series comes from a CD that I've recorded on the piano with other instruments that we added to make these just beautiful arrangements.

And 10 Christmas carols, we're talking about several of those, their background, their biblical

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