Countdown to Christmas Reading Plan by Provident Label GroupShembull

Day 4: There’s Hope for Everyone written by Matt Maher

Matt Maher - “Hope for Everyone”

Hear the angels sing

‘There’s hope for everyone’

To announce our king

There’s hope for everyone

What good news they bring

There’s hope for everyone

Angels sing, ‘there’s hope for everyone’

“Advent” is a fancy Latin word which means ‘arrival.’ When a baby shows up it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time and that’s what the season of advent is. Each week they focus on a different theme. First hope, then peace, followed with joy, and the last is love so by the time Christmas comes around, maybe you slow down and make a little more room in your heart for God. “Hope For Everyone,” is about hope. 

I have three kids and they’re all at the age now where the magic and mystery of Christmas are starting to come alive. Not just the anticipation of Santa - what’s under the tree? What am I gonna get? -  but it’s really watching their sense of wonder and realizing that for me, I had been asleep. 

I don’t know if it’s the same for you - we get old in life and Christmas tends to have a bitter sweet nature. Christmas is a time of year when everything becomes a memory. Everything we do becomes a way to bring us together so if there’s something that tore us apart, sometimes the thing that was so unifying becomes really painful. 

Sometimes, you need to be reminded of the beautiful truth that love has to be incarnated. I remember reading an old sermon on Christmas Eve and it said the song the angels sang was a song they had been waiting to sing with the Earth since the fall. When they sing ‘Glory to God in the highest,’ they had been waiting for that - hoping for that. Love came down from Bethlehem on Christmas Eve while we were all asleep and still love continues to come down to the Earth when some of us are still not fully awake. Hopefully this soundtrack can wake us up.