God on the Go: Get Ready – Advent Means Ready for Adventure!

There’s a word that you might hear a lot in the next few weeks, and that is Advent. And if you listen to the word adventure, you can hear the word advent in there too.  The first handmade wooden advent calendar was made in 1851, and today you can find a lot of advent calendars at a lot of places; grocery store… Advent means that something’s coming, and that’s what we’re talking about this week. Let’s get started!

What’s New!

Monday Story:

• No matter the time of year, we should always be ready for the next adventure God will take us on because it’s coming!

Tuesday Key Verse:

• I Corinthians 1:8 – “God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus. God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure…”

Wednesday Prayer:

• Dear God, help me be ready for the adventure you take me on in my life. Thank you for making life fun and interesting. And thank you for always being with me. In the name of Jesus, amen

Thursday Question:

• What are you most excited about in the next few weeks?

Friday Fun Fact:

• Q: When was the first Advent calendar made?
• A: The first handmade wooden Advent calendar we know about was built in 1851.

Show Notes:

To get this week’s episode and daily text prompts, text the word Go to 89419.
If you are in Canada, text GodOnTheGo to 866-729-1065

Transcription:

Purposely. Your life, God’s purpose. Listen at Onpurposely.com

Julie Lyles Carr

My mom and dad would wake me up in the middle of the night and they would take my two brothers and me out to the car. They’d put us in the back seat and we’d pull out of our driveway, the moon shining through the car windows. My mom and dad would chat quietly in the front seat while my brothers and I would try to sleep in the back. We had a long drive ahead of us, but I knew it would be worth it.

I’m Julie Lyles Carr, and this is God on the Go, where I want to help you make the minutes matter. And that middle of the night car drive with something we did almost every year during the summer. We would head to one of the best places on Earth, in my opinion, when the sun would begin to rise in the morning after we’d driven through the night, we would be going into Yosemite.

Yosemite is this amazing place in California where I grew up. It’s got tall, tall mountains and a beautiful river that goes through the valley. People go there to hike and camp and have all kinds of awesome adventures. We would camp in our tent for a whole week. We would cook our meals over our campfire. We’d float on the river. We’d take long hikes to go see beautiful waterfalls and more big mountains every summer that we got to go. It was an adventure. There’s a word in that word adventure that you might hear a lot in the next few weeks, if you’re listening to this episode in the Fall. That word is advent, and if you listen to the word adventure, you can hear the word advent in there. Do you hear it? Advent means that something’s coming. That something is headed our way. Now, for a long time, the only time I heard the word advent was when we would get an advent calendar at Christmas. Do you know what I’m talking about? An advent calendar. That’s the calendar that has little doors a lot of times, or something like that, where you can open them each day as you count down toward Christmas and there’ll be a treat or candy behind those little doors for each day of December, all the way to Christmas day. Does your family have something like that? It’s a really fun and yummy way to get ready for Christmas coming. And the first handmade wooden advent calendar was made in 1851, and today you can find a lot of advent calendars at places like your grocery store, places like that. You can even get an advent calendar for your puppy. Have you seen those?

Advent is also how we’re supposed to think about Jesus that one day he will come back to earth, and that’s going to be an awesome day. When we live our lives following Jesus. It will always be an advent adventure. One day, Jesus was walking down by a lake called the Sea of Galilee. He saw two guys there who were getting ready to go fishing. Now, this was the kind of fishing where you go out on a boat with a big net, not fishing poles or rod and reels. You throw the net into the water and pull it along behind your boat, and when you pull the net up out of the water after a little while, there will be different kinds of fish caught in the net. That was how these two men made their living. They were fishermen, and they were also brothers. And Jesus sees these two men getting their nets ready to go fishing and says to them, come follow me and I will send you out to fish for people. Now, that doesn’t mean that they were going to go with nets and try to catch people. It meant that they were going to go and spread the good news about Jesus. They were going to spread hope and love to people.

The Bible says these two men set down their nets and they followed Jesus. And just a little further down the shore, there were two more brothers who were also fishermen, and Jesus said the same thing to them, and they decided to follow him as well. These men became Jesus’s first disciples, his friends who went on the adventure of Jesus’s time on earth. Because they followed him, they experienced all kinds of incredible things, from Jesus healing people, to speaking to huge crowds, to miracles and challenges. For them following Jesus wasn’t always easy, but it was never boring. It was always an adventure. 1 Corinthians 1:8 says,

God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus.

God who got you started in this spiritual adventure. God is a God of adventure. When we follow God, we should be ready for all kinds of adventures. God made this big wide world for us and he creates all kinds of people for us to meet. He knows the places he’d love for you to see and all kinds of cool things for you to experience. Our job is to be ready to follow him where he leads us, to be ready for the adventure he takes us on.

Be sure and text the word GO, that’s G-O to 89419 for fun facts, a memory verse, discussion questions you can use, and more as we talk for the next few episodes about getting ready as part of the advent season. I’ll see you next time on God on the Go, when we’ll talk about get ready to go.