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Scripture Focus: Jude 20-21
But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

Reflection: Kept in Love :: Love of Advent
By John Tillman

In a time of waiting like Advent, we can become discouraged. We long for “the day when our faith will be sight.” We grow tired rather than excited. The darkness can fill up with doubt instead of anticipation, and apathy instead of engagement. What are we waiting for, anyway? Is what we are waiting for worth it? And will it ever come?

We are waiting, in a very literal sense, for love. 

In Advent, we wait for a love more loving than the most rapturous physical touch. It is more caring than the love of the most loving earthly mother or father. It is more self-sacrificing than a soldier dying that others might live. All metaphors of God’s love fall flat in comparison to Christ. We glimpse the love of God in these examples, as Moses glimpsed God passing by while waiting in the cleft of the rock. The best of them are merely the fringes on the garment of the love that comes to us in Christ. Yes. The love we wait for is worth the wait.

God’s love is both coming to us, and already with us. Jude tells us that we keep ourselves in God’s love through faith and prayer.

The word Jude uses implies being guarded, and kept safe, preserved. This “keeping” is something for which Christ himself prayed in John 17. Christ prayed not that we would be taken out of this world, but that we would be “kept” in the world—protected and maintained.

As we wait in the dark, the comforter that Christ prayed for is here with us. When we “mourn in lonely exile here,” the Holy Spirit echoes and harmonizes with our cries. He is our emmanuel. 

The love of God approaches during Advent. Rather than being gripped with doubt, we will soon be embraced by our God. The arm of the Lord is being revealed to us as he embraces us as his children. His arms are not too short to save. They are not too weak to carry our cross and die upon it. 

Reach out through faith and prayer and you will find there is a spiritual embrace waiting to “keep you” in God’s love as we wait for “this same Jesus” to return. Come Lord Jesus!

Prayer: Jude 24-25:
“To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy—to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.”

We will resume Divine Hours Prayers tomorrow.

Today’s Readings
2 Chronicles 9 (Listen -5:07), Jude (Listen -4:12)

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Read more about His Loving Presence :: Love of Advent
Where is God when we don’t see him? He is among us, leading us, and coming to us.

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