Come, Let Us Adore Him: An Advent Reading Plan by Paul David TrippSample

I love Christmas. I love the excitement of the season, the gift giving, Christmas cookies, decorating the biggest tree we can get in our home, the special moments with people whom I love, but most of all the deep, encouraging, humbling, and hope-giving story that is at the heart of this season. I loved then and love even more now those rich hymns about the birth of Jesus. I learned them as a boy; but I understand them today, line by line, in a  way I never did during all the excitement of those boyhood Christmases.

These songs echo the glory song that the angels first sang on the night when the most glorious thing in history happened: God took on human form. If you or I had been writing the big redemptive story, we would have never conceived something so amazing and miraculous as God actually coming on a rescue mission as a real human person. There is only one word that captures this one amazing, history-altering event: glory.

The hymn of the angels, and the hymns that have been written by God’s people since, shimmer with glory because  the incarnation of Jesus is about a glorious Savior coming to give glorious grace to people who have forsaken his glory for the temporarily satisfying shadow glories of the created world. 

God’s people have penned and sung glory songs about Jesus ever since. Whenever and wherever they gather, they sing together of the birth, the life, the death, the resurrection, the promises, the presence, the power, and the grace of Jesus. 

The final book of the Bible, Revelation, invites us to listen to the voices of those who have passed over to their final and eternal home. What do we hear them doing? We hear them singing glory songs about Jesus, just as the angels did on the night of his birth. “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God” (Rev. 19:1); “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory” (Rev. 19:6–7). On
into eternity the song echoes. It is the celebration chant of the redeemed. And one day we will join that multitude, no longer looking forward in hope but looking back with the security of redemption accomplished, and with the angels and the saints of old we too will sing glory songs about Jesus forever.