Advent 2025: Your Kingdom Come | Josh Harrison
Advent, the Lord’s Prayer, and Living in Expectation: A Reflection
With December’s arrival, the air outside and the atmosphere within our homes are thick with a familiar holiday busyness. Lights strung, parties planned, and the calendar frays beneath a weight of obligations. And yet, hidden beneath the “holiday season” is a very different, ancient invitation: Advent. Every year, the Church summons us not just to celebrate, but to prepare—to mark the arrival, not of simply a holiday or tradition, but of a King.
This preparation is anything but perfunctory. As Josh observes, even in the smallest of households, the idea of welcoming someone important demands a flurry of anticipation. How much more, then, when the One who comes is Christ himself? The contrast is sharp: while our culture clutters our lives with the trappings of December, Advent at its heart is about creating space, simplicity, and a lingering expectancy for Jesus’ arrival.
Living Between Two Kingdoms
But, as Josh reminds us, we are not merely creatures of nostalgia or party planners. Advent, properly understood, launches the Church’s entire year. It is both retrospective—remembering Christ’s birth—and forward-looking, awaiting his return. The Christian is called to live, not aligned to the rhythms of the world’s calendar, but to the pulse of the Kingdom. This discipline, lived out, forms a habit of attention: each day becomes a fresh moment to recognize Christ’s presence, to welcome him anew in prayer and expectation.
Rediscovering Prayer as Expectancy
Central to this posture is prayer—not as a religious duty, nor a magical incantation, but as the truest act of being human. Drawing on the Genesis account, Josh names us as creatures of dust and spirit, standing always at the intersection of heaven and earth. In prayer, we attune ourselves to both halves of our existence. It is not only our confession of need; it is our declaration of allegiance, our daily invitation to God to make all things new.
Prayer resists the gravitational pull of self-centeredness. It is, as Josh so clearly models, less about persuading God to do what we want and more about forming hearts that can desire what God desires. The Lord’s Prayer is the anchor here—acknowledging the holy God as Father, and having the audacity (learned only from Jesus himself) to walk into his presence with the intimacy of a child.
Surrender and the True Adventure
And now we arrive at the truly unsettling, thrilling heart of the message: “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Here is where most of us balk. Prayer, left to our own instincts, quickly becomes a recitation of our needs and wants. Yet Josh gently shows us the better way—to begin every prayer not with our agenda, but with surrender. To invite God, not ourselves, onto the throne of the situation. Because “wherever the king’s will is done, there the kingdom is.”
This is not, he assures us, a call to abandon our concerns or become stoics indifferent to pain. We pray honestly, with rawness and wrestling. But always, first, we pray for God’s will—knowing, sometimes trembling, that we may be called to be part of the answer ourselves.
Partnering With God in a Broken World
Why pray this way if God’s will is “always done” anyway? Here the sermon turns not to abstract theology but to lived reality, and Josh reminds us: God’s will is not always done in this world—not in the smallest heartbreak, nor the grandest injustice. There are rival kingdoms at work, powers that devastate and diminish.
Thus, to pray “Your kingdom come” is an act of quiet rebellion and bold hope. It is to stand in the broken places and proclaim: this, too, belongs to God. And, perhaps most challenging of all, to be willing—like Jesus—to become the conduit, the answer, the ambassador through whom that healing and order come.
Four Key Lessons from This Sermon
Advent is Preparation, Not Distraction: True Advent is countercultural, inviting us to create space and expectancy for Christ’s arrival rather than succumbing to seasonal chaos.
Prayer Aligns Us With God’s Will: Rather than seeking to persuade God, prayer transforms our desires, helping us to want what God wants and live in surrender.
God’s Kingdom Breaks In Where We Yield: Every prayer of surrender (“Your kingdom come, your will be done”) plants a flag for God’s reign in the broken places of the world, through us.
We Are Called to Be God’s Partners: As we pray for God’s will, we must be prepared to become part of the answer—ambassadors who embody Christ’s character and mission wherever we are sent.
This is the adventure of Advent, prayer, and the way of Jesus—one simple, surrendered moment at a time.
