Advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter, and therefore like Lent, Advent prepares us to experience Christmas in new and powerful ways each year. Each year, beginning with the advent we know that Christmas, the birth of Christ, is coming; but Advent which is a time of preparation, declaration, and anticipation helps to cultivate this incarnation that we know is coming, in our own hearts personally, so that there is of sorts, a new birthing, or expanded birthing of our own personal encounter, of incarnational reality, which is at the heart of what it means to be in union with Christ. In Luke 1:67, we’re told this; “and his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit, and prophesied, Saying: Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited us and accomplished redemption for his people, and raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of David his servant… “
Nine months earlier Zacharias had a hard time even believing that his wife Elizabeth could give birth to a child, but now with the birth having taken place, and filled with the Holy Spirit he speaks as if the entire redemptive work of God through Jesus had already taken place. Spirit filled faith is like that, because faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not yet seen. Even though Zechariah had struggled to believe at first, now moving in the spirit, he was declaring things to be done even though in the site realm it had not yet happened. I believe one of the things that Advent does is remind us that there is a pre-season as far as the things of the spirit are concerned, that prepares us for, and even participates in, the full manifestation of the thing (the promise) we are believing for. At the end of Zacharias’s prophetic declaration notice what it says in Luke 1:80 about John the Baptist: “And the child continued to grow and become strong in spirit, and he lived in the desert until the day of his public appearance to Israel.” There seems to be a spiritual connection between Zacharias’s faith that was declaring something to be so, even though it wasn’t so yet in the site realm, to John the Baptist continuing to grow and become strong in the spirit. I believe we can at least draw a metaphorical principle from these verses, and that is as I move out of unbelief concerning the promises of God, and begin to declare something that is yet to be as though it already were, that is: “Calling those things which are not as though they were,” that the very thing I am openly believing for as if was already existed, is nurtured and aided in its coming forth in full manifestation.