Unto Us a Child Is Born: Reflections on the Promises of Advent

The true gift of Christmas is that Jesus came to meet your deepest needs.

Hope. Peace. Joy. Love. We all long for an abundant life full of these good things, but so often our actual experience feels more desperate and divisive. The promise of Christmas—of baby Jesus born on a silent night, away in a manger—seems too innocent to meet the real needs of our world.

But the truth is that Jesus’s life provides the answers to our deepest longings. By pairing Old Testament stories of fundamental hu...