Advent Devotional 2025: Part 4
by Bruce Billington
Advent Devotional – Part 4
This is the last devotional on Advent – the coming of Christ, or the Incarnation. This session looks at the most amazing gift of Advent: love.
When we think about God’s love, it’s nearly impossible to put into words, but let’s understand that God loves us with all His heart. He shows this love through His actions. Christ’s coming into the world is the greatest act of love because it places our needs as His priority. In John 3:16, we are told why God did this.
“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
This tells us that He loved us first and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:10).
The entire Christmas story involves a personal sacrifice by God that far surpasses anything any person has ever done for another. God committed Himself to a painful sacrifice even before Christ was born. He understood that our sin would separate us from eternal life with Him, and He realised that we couldn’t save ourselves. This solution would be painful for God, but driven by His love, He chose it nevertheless. We can be confident He knew exactly what He was undertaking, as shown by scriptures like this one about the Messiah, written over 700 years before Jesus was born. Isaiah 53 says,
Isaiah 53:3-5 – “3 He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face, He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. 4 Surely our griefs He Himself bore, And our sorrows He carried; Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, Smitten of God, and afflicted. 5 But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, And by His scourging we are healed.”.
God planned the first Christmas right from the very beginning of the world. Clearly, He knew it would cost Him dearly, but He had a bigger goal than Himself. His aim was to ensure you and I understood that we are seen, known, and wanted within God’s family.
God took the first step to say, “I love you.” He saw what we needed, and He did it, even though it hurt Him in ways hard to imagine. This is the very definition of love—valuing another so much that we are willing to bear a cost to show that value.
1 John 4:10 says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”.
He was willing to watch his Son be born to suffer and die to get His point across to us. He knew what we needed most – it was a Saviour, and we could not provide one for ourselves. As a matter of fact, that was announced by the angel on the very night of His birth:
Today, in the town of David, a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord (Luke 2:11).
God willingly sent Jesus on that first Christmas, and it was the greatest act of love our world has ever or will ever witness, and it was done for us.
I am sure that in his great prayer recorded in Ephesians 3, the Apostle Paul was thinking about this. He prays that we would truly understand and receive the unbelievable love of the God of Christmas. He prayed that we would be,
…rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:17-19).
What an amazing event the Advent is, what an incredible God we have. His heart’s desire is that we would be filled and overflowing with the fullness of Him. Let me encourage you to end this series by repeating Paul’s prayer above.
May God Bless You.
Bruce Billington