199. Worship While You Wait

What if the way we tell time shapes the way we love God? We trace the deep roots of Advent and Candlemas to show how the early church used feasts to form memory, kindle joy, and carry light from the sanctuary into ordinary homes. Along the way, we meet Anna in Luke 2—a widow of great age whose quiet devotion becomes a loud sermon about steadfast hope. Her story pushes back on the myth that only big platforms change the world, revealing how staying, fasting, worshiping, and praying can open our eyes to recognize Christ when He draws near.

We explore how secular calendars took center stage and why the church once organized life around retelling God’s acts. From the Nativity candles taken home as living reminders to the offering of light returned on Candlemas, these practices were never about optics; they were about formation. We dig into the history, the Reformers’ calendar cuts, and the way those choices still shape how we mark the season today. Then we contrast Zechariah’s divinely imposed silence with Anna’s honored voice, highlighting Luke’s careful theme: God dignifies the overlooked and entrusts His message to those the culture underestimates.

This conversation is both historical and deeply practical. You’ll leave with simple ways to embody Advent: light a candle and pray at dinner, choose a modest fast to make room for presence over hurry, begin and end each day with short prayers, and serve quietly without fanfare. If you’ve ever wondered how to move beyond holiday noise into holy attention, Anna’s life offers a clear path—steady, unseen, and radiant with hope.

My hope is that this podcast helps grow your faith and equips you to accomplish your dreams and goals!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Advent And A Secular Calendar
• 1:28 Feasts As Story And Memory
• 4:05 Nativity To Candlemas Traditions
• 7:08 Why Candles Came Home
• 10:13 Reformation Cuts And Merged Festivals
• 13:13 Setting Up Luke Chapter 2
• 16:16 Meet Anna At The Temple
• 20:08 Names, Lineage, And Blessed Tension
• 24:10 Hannah Then And Anna Now
• 28:05 Four Daily Practices Of Devotion
• 31:40 Women Prophets In Scripture

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today I'm going to be sharing a teaching that I recently did at our staff chapel. My hope is that this encourages you and that your love for God's word deepens. Okay, I'm excited to bring this to you today. We're continuing our idea around Advent and around keeping in mind, okay, so um like in church liturgy, in the church calendar, so as secularism has continued to rise, what has happened is that culture shapes the church calendar. Used to people live their life around the church calendar. But as people have continuously become more secular, we are seeking to create a utopia here on this earth. That's why we see death as loss and not as gain. And because that drive of secularism has gotten so strong, we live our lives, our calendar, our cultural life, and we see if we can fit church in. But used to the person's life was shaped around the church calendar. So um just like a quick little like history break here. Um, are we okay? Okay. Um, so whenever it was around the year 325, I believe, um, that Gnostics were um growing increasingly more loud and just saying that Christ wasn't a real human, that he was a divine spirit, but he was not human, and that he didn't suffer like we suffered, that he didn't, he wasn't like an actual man. And so confronting this Gnosticism, um the early writers um basically say, like, we need to have this return of telling the story. Now keep in mind, in the Old Testament, um, whenever God was gonna do something, whenever he did something big, he would institute a feast. And the point of the feast was A, he was teaching a people that had been in slavery how to celebrate, like how to experience joy. They had experienced bondage. And so he's teaching them how to live a life of celebration and joy. But also every time they had the festival, the point of the festival was to retell the miracle of what God had done. So every festival that we see in the Jewish calendar, the purpose of the festival was I'm retelling the story. Because keep in mind, the thought that you would ever have 66 books bound together that you walked around with, that was like inconceivable to any other generation. Up until the last 500 years, that was like revolutionary. They never thought that would be possible. So the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition, even further back, was passed down orally. And so every feast that we see implemented was because God was passing down the tradition from the fathers to the children, from the grandfathers to the children. And so every time they gathered on these festivals, they would retell the story about what God did and about the miracles that they've seen. And so in this time, it was around the year 380, um, that we have the first writing. And what it was called is the nativity. And so they started celebrating what we uh now call Christmas. They called the nativity. And they basically decided as a New Testament church, we have to retell the story of Christ's birth. We have to instill within our children the idea of that he was born of a virgin, that he um that he was completely sinless, that he was a hundred percent man and he was a hundred percent God. Now, all of these things you have zero problem with. Like these aren't hard concepts for you because orally it's been passed down for to you since you were born, since you were little, you had the idea of seeing a nativity. So when we see old art, you see that Jesus looks like a man child. Like he looks like a tiny, this is gonna be whatever. I don't care. He looks like a midget, okay? I'm just gonna say it. He looks like a midget sitting on the virgin's lap. Okay. The reason why they painted him that way is because it was heretical to think of Jesus as a baby, like to think of him as so helpless that he would be a baby. So oral tradition goes on. So the biggest day that would happen is on February the 2nd. Does anybody know what February the 2nd is? I guarantee you don't. Rayleigh knows. Do you know what February 2nd is? What is it? Yes, it was candlemiss. So candle miss happened on February 2nd, which is what we're about to read in Luke chapter 2. And so they would celebrate Jesus being brought to the temple to be dedicated. It was 40 days of purification that Mary would have gone through to be able to present the baby at the temple. This is where we see Simeon. This is where we see Anna. So now I'm like taking you through liturgies. Okay. So on the nativity, what would happen is the church would get candles and they would light a candle and saying that the light has come into the world, then what you would do is the Psy household, the Hamilton household, the Martinez household, the Harrison household, they would take that candle home to their house after the church service that day. Now keep in mind, this is the darkest time period of the year. And they're saying that the light that came in the world also came into their homes. So they would bring the light into their home. They would take this candle. This would be like the holiest thing that you could get in a service. They would bring that candle into their homes, and every night they would light the candle as a reminder that Christ came to bring light, not just into the world, but into my home. And they believed as they were lighting that candle in their home that it would keep evil presence away, that it would keep the enemy at bay. It would be a reminder to them. It was a visual, tangible reminder to them about Christ coming in the world. Now, on Candle Miss, on February the 2nd, you would bring the Psy household, the Hamilton household, and the Martinez household would all bring the Harrison household, you're not left out. Um they would all bring their candle, what was left, and it would be an offering that they placed at the altar, saying, The light that you've given me, may I always return back to you to receive what I need. And so Candle Miss was like a high holy day. So the reformation happens, and with the reformation, um, basically there's like all these writings of different bishops, and they're basically saying, There's too many festivals in the calendar. Like we're celebrating too many things, there's too much going on. The people can't manage this. Like, we have to start taking things away. All Saints Day, too much. Like, we can't do all these different things. So they started stripping things out of the calendar, and all the bishops are writing back and forth when you read the writings, and they're like, it's just too much to ask of the people. So we're gonna take these things away to make their life easier. And if we take these things away, it'll make church participation go up because now the people aren't required to do so much because they were arguing back and forth. It's too much for every person to get a candle in the congregation, and then they go home. And how are they supposed to keep up with the candle? And some of them have lost their candle, and what do we do when people lose their candles? And how do we like mitigate this like problem? And so, what we're gonna do is we are gonna have a marrying of candle mists and then nativity, and we're gonna call it Christmas. So, your candlelight moment at the end of a service isn't for an Instagram, it's actually like a high holy moment that the early church did to remind us. So when we see candles being lit on Christmas, it's reminding us Christ came into the world, but he didn't just come into the world, he comes into my home. He comes into my home. He wants to like what's happening here, he wants to come home with me. And so we are picking up in Luke chapter two that long little historical little bit. You feel yourself getting smarter, change the way you see things a little bit. Um, in Luke chapter two, we see um the famous story of Anna. Um, and now you know it's candlemiss, it's February 2nd. What we would celebrate is February 2nd. Do we know definitively? People argue all the time, well, do we know definitively the date? No, nobody knows the date. It's the date that we've been celebrating. Shut up. Like if if okay, let me just use whenever somebody gives you crap theology, just turn it back on them. So imagine it's Pastor Jimmy's birthday uh a week ago, but today I say we're going out to lunch for Pastor Jimmy's birthday. If you're a heretic, you would say, y'all, y'all are just heretics celebrating his birthday today. His birthday was a week ago. No, I'm still celebrating it today. And in that moment, the celebration is as real for Jimmy. He feels just as honored, he feels just as loved as though we would have done it the week before. It's not as much the point is the day as the point is the heart posture towards him. So when you see people arguing about calendar, just eye roll really hard and just reverse that back on them. We don't use that for anything else, like anything else, but we just want to be hyper um religious and we want a virtue signal that we're more holy than everybody else. But whatever. Anyways, so Luke chapter two, just roll up on them and say, Well, what are your thoughts on candlemass? See where they go with that. Um, Luke chapter 2, 36 through 38, and says, Now there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanil of the tribe of Asher, and she was of gr a great age, and had lived with a husband seven years from her virginity. And this woman was a widow about eighty-four years, who did not depart from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayer night and day. And coming in that instant, she gave thanks to the Lord and spoke of him to all those who looked for redemption in Jerusalem. So this happened on February the 2nd. This would have been 40 days after Jesus' birth. And there's a few things that the text tells us about her. Um, number one, she was very old. The Bible says she was of great age. Again, I often think, like, how is the Bible, like, how is scripture, if scripture was going to remember you by something, I don't think any woman would want to be remembered that you're very old and then just blasting your age. Rude. Um, so one of the things that's like under debate is is she 84 or what is she? Um at this time, marrying age was 14 to 15 years old. And so some would say that she was 14 to 15 whenever she got married. She was married for seven years, putting her at 22. And then some would say she lived 84 years without her husband. Um, some would say she literally was 84, but even the way the Greek reads, it's very unclear where she was. But we know for certain she spent at minimum 60 years of her life devoting herself, waiting for the Messiah, like waiting for the promised son of God. The Bible tells us that she was a widow. Luke takes time to tell us that she's a widow. It doesn't tell us about the tragic loss, it doesn't tell us about how her husband dies, but it does tell her the her heart's response to the loss. She was drawn closer to God. And I think it's beautiful that when we go through disappointments in our life, because it's not if you go through a disappointment, it's when are you going to go through a disappointment? Does it drive you deeper into the community and into the heart of God, or does it drive you further away? And Anna, here she is in that culture society, her full identity would have been in whose wife she is. It doesn't speak of any children. And in fact, the rhythm of her life, some theologians would say that she didn't have kids. But the text is silent. But normally, if a woman would have had a child, it would, it would mention that because her identity was in that. Um, so we don't know. The text is silent, but I think what's beautiful is she has every reason that she could have run away from God, and yet we see her running to him. And um, what's interesting is the Bible also tells us about her family line. She was of the tribe of Asher, and Asher is the son of the handmaid of Leah, um, Zilpha. And Asher literally means happy or blessed. And Luke is weaving together for us because Mary, whenever she comes in and she sings a song to Elizabeth, um, just previous to this, she calls herself happy and blessed that the Lord would call her to carry the Messiah. And so, and even in Jesus' first message in Luke chapter four, Luke records that he writes in the Amplified, it says, Happy or blessed are those. Like that's the very first words we see recorded of Jesus and his first message. I think it's beautiful, it's like this theme of happy and blessed, but yet she's a widow. It's like it's he's putting these two things, not to just give us her historical line, but narratively, it's like you, he wants you to feel the tension of sometimes like what your name is, where you came from, it doesn't line up with what you're presently seeing. And sometimes it doesn't look like what culture would define as happy or blessed. And yet that's exactly who you are. It's exactly who you are because we're not what we're presently experiencing. We are we live in a greater reality, and then her uh father's name, Fanil, um, which literally means face of God. Face of God. What's beautiful is Phanil, his name meaning the face of God, and we see Anna, who would literally see the face of God in the courts of the temple. Like his name was in prophecy, what Anna would experience in reality. Anna literally saw the face of God in the Christ child. Then we have Anna, and her name Anna, in Hebrew, it's actually the name Hannah. And we all remember a girl named Hannah. And Hannah goes all the way back to 1 Samuel. And so, 1 Samuel, we see a woman named Hannah and she wants a child. And what do we see her doing? She comes down to the altar and she's praying. And y'all remember Samuel presumes that she's drunk, and it says that her lips were moving, but there was no words coming out. And he's like, What are you? What's wrong with you? Are you drunk? And she's like, No, my lord, like I I want a child. Like, I'm I'm believing God for a child. And the story goes on. Hannah gets pregnant. Um, we see, I'm sorry, it wasn't Samuel that came down to the altar. It was Eli that came down to the altar. Hannah got pregnant with Samuel. Sorry, my bad. So, anyways, y'all are following though, right? You're okay. Okay, great. I'm sure you all already caught that. Sorry about that. Okay, but there is no words recorded in our prayer. So the old testament, what he's doing here, again, Luke is very intentional on how he's writing. The old testament, Hannah, is silent, but she's misunderstood. The New Testament, Hannah, is silent, but understood. She lives this life of silence. And what's beautiful is that she spends her life doing these ordinary things. The Bible tells us there's four things that she did. Number one, she did not depart from the temple. She did not depart from the temple. Like finding a family of God and refusing to leave amidst heartache, amidst hardship, amidst disappointment. You're waiting for something for over 60 years. I'm sorry. I talk to people all the time. They're like, Crystal, I've been praying for a year. I'm like, no, hold up. Imagine devoting your entire life to something, and yet you refuse to depart. Like, my faith is not wavered by what I see. My devotion to God is not wavered by what I'm experiencing. It says that she did not depart the temple. Number one two, it says that she was fasting daily. Fasting daily. We don't know if it was daily, we don't know if it was annually. It's open, but she lived a life of fasting. I think for us, it's really important that we live our life in this rhythm of uh fasting is why we're fasting in January. And so, used to in the church calendar, um, Advent began the beginning of a new Christian year. And so the new year began with the first day of Advent. So in the Christian calendar, we would turn the page there. You would fast leading up to the nativity. And the nativity, a lot of times, the first meal that somebody would have, they would taste, is that of communion. And so the way they would break the fast was with the Lord's body and with the Lord's blood. And so for us, we have a cultural calendar that again shapes the rhythms of our church now. We've like, because of the Reformation, thank you, Martin Luther and John Calvin, um, we have flipped it around. But we, what are we still doing? We're still adopting that New Testament, that practice of beginning our year, beginning our rhythm with 21 days of prayer and fasting. And then it says that she worshiped daily. She worshiped daily, like she lived a life of worship. She lived a life of worship. And then finally it says that she made prayer day and night. She gave prayers day and night. Okay, I'll just say there's people in the Bible that I aspire to be like, and their life is just so high that I just I there's no way I can attain to it. Like Samson, love him, what a king, but cannot relate to Samson at all. Like supernatural strength, not at all. I can't even open a jar in my kitchen, right? Like, I can't relate to Samson. There's people in the Bible that had like great feats, like Noah, don't know what it's like to build a ship. Sorry, I don't. I don't, I don't know what that's like to have never seen rain and to like have that kind of. I don't know what that's like. Abraham can't relate. Sorry. There's a lot of that story. I can't relate. David can't relate. Like, I I I love him, but I can't relate. But Anna, like, what a queen. Like, literally, all of these things are things that any believer, no matter where you are, what time period you're in, no matter what city you find yourself, what season of life, whether you're a mother, whether you're a child, whether you are 80 years old, or whether you're 20 years old, I can live this life. Like, literally, when I look at it, her life of devotion was like, it's not something flashy. It's not something extravagant. And you might even be like, worshiping daily, like legit, it's putting on a song in your car on the journey. And prayer day and night. It's not saying she prayed from morning till night. It means she began, her life was an inclusio every day. She began with meditation on the Lord. Let my thoughts and intent be pleasing unto you. And she ends the day with gratitude to the Lord. That's literally what it means. I can live that life. And Anna, to me, like inspires me because it's that natural rhythm that sometimes we overcomplicate our spirituality. And Anna brings it way down that this is what it looks like to be faithful to God. Just being faithful to his house. It's living a life of prayer, living life. Life of worship and having fasting in my rhythm. Okay. So then it tells us that she's a prophet. She's a prophet. I think this is, it made me laugh as I was studying this because there's eight women in the Bible who are described as prophets. We have Miriam, who is Moses' sister. She was a prophet. And the Bible records like a few lines from her. Then we have Deborah, who is one of the judges of the nation of Israel, who is a prophet. We have Isaiah's wife is mentioned as a prophet in Isaiah chapter 8, verse 3, and which is interesting because it says she's a prophet, but we have no words recorded from her at all, but she's a prophet. Then we have Anna here in Luke chapter 2, and then we have the four daughters of Philip in Acts chapter 21. And what's interesting is we have the Old Testament prophets that all of them had husbands. All of them were married. They had like that male headship covering. Then we have these New Testament prophets who, all of them being female, none of them, the I the main commonality between all of them is they didn't have a husband. And yet the Bible says they were prophets. So here are these women. Okay, I want you to feel the tension of the text of what Luke is doing. In that culture society, you didn't have a voice unless you had a husband. And yet God uses people who shouldn't have a voice, and he says they have a voice to me. That their voice matters to me. They matter to me. Now, keeping in mind, Luke chapter 2, Acts chapter 21, both of these are Luke writing. Luke's gospel is known as the gospel of women and the gospel of the outcasts. And Luke's main emphasis is that Christ came for the people that nobody else would have wanted, but he also came for women. And so we see this emphasis in Luke highlighting this to us. But I think what's beautiful is Luke is like so purposefully allowing us to feel this tension. So do you remember the story right before this? Um, we have this man who's faithful unto God, him and his wife, uh Zachariah, and he is there believing God for a child with Elizabeth. Y'all remember this? And it says, and the lot fell to Zachariah, and he goes into the holy place. Now, I'm just gonna like bring you back to remembrance of the Old Testament. Whenever you got the lots cast and you were able to go into the holy place, this only happened how many days a year? One, one time a year, y'all are doing great. Okay, and whenever you would go into the holy place, what would the priest be wearing? Does anybody remember what the priest would be wearing? Do you remember? Robe, the bell. Why did they have bells on? Yes, they want to know if God struck them dead. Okay. So in the whole tribe of all the priests, so in the priesthood, for the lot to be cast, and Pastor Jimmy gets to go into the most holy place. This is literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where we get once in a lifetime opportunity, literally once in a lifetime opportunity. So, congratulations, Pastor Jimmy. You need to go in the most holy place. Put this on unless you die. Like, goodie. Like, I hope you haven't sinned this week. Yippee. All right. So Zechariah's going in. Now he's going into the most holy place. He he's the text is wanting you to feel the tension. You've got this life of barrenness, this life of doing exactly what God's wanted you to do. And yet the fruit of what you prayed for has never happened. And now you get to go into the holy place. And the Bible says that he lingered there a long time. Okay, what is everybody thinking outside? He's dead. Like a hundred percent, he's dead. They're like, ring a bell. Okay, so the priest would have a rope tied to his waist because if he were to drop dead, then the people outside the tent would drag his dead corpse out of the presence of God. Okay, so we have this man who is a priest, and he's in the holy place. And your Bible says he asked the question, but he asks it out of doubt and unbelief. And in that moment, the Lord says, You're not gonna speak, you're not gonna say anything. And he comes out and he's completely mute. So they're like, bro, what did he see? Like, we've never had this happen before. So he goes home, and now I just always think about what is it like for Elizabeth? Because now she has a husband who can't speak, and he's like, I just want to know how that happened. Because we know she got pregnant. That was weird. And he's silent the whole pregnancy. But the minute he's able to speak, what does he do? He prophesies and he begins to praise God. All the questions are gone. All the things are gone. And I used to think that the silence was a curse, but now looking at it, I think the silence was a blessing. And it was him being able to realign, re-calibrate his heart. Now, see what Luke is doing. We have Zachariah, who's a priest, who should have a voice. He is a man, he has been completely clean, he's got all this authority, he's the man of God. He went into the most holy place, has no voice. We have Anna, who is a widow, has no husband, should not have a voice, and yet the Bible calls her a prophet. And Luke is allowing you to feel this tension of these two stories back to back. And yet, here we see in her silence, she's actually preaching the loudest message to us. And in her silence, even though there are no recorded prophetic words of all the 60 plus years of Anna's faithfulness, God looks down and he says, She is a prophet. And actually, she's the first person to preach the gospel. Everybody's told you it's Mary at the garden. It's not, it's her. Homegirl goes and tells everybody the Messiah has come. Come see the Messiah. He's here. That which Israel has awaited, he's here right now. She goes and she's preaching the gospel. And as I thought about this, I thought, could it be that God's more concerned about our silent prophetic lives than we realize? Our lives are a prophecy, not with words, but yet God's recording everything we say and do. The silent prophecy of walking with a loved one as they transition into eternity. The silent prophecy of walking with a prodigal person in the church. Your name isn't in lights. Nobody even knows. You're just faithfully walking with them through the process of discipleship. The silent prophecy of helping a family in need this holiday season, and they don't even know whose name to thank. But God knows. The silent prophecy of showing up early and staying late. The silent prophecy of forgiving somebody of the pain again. And I began to think about at this Christmas season that perhaps it's not all the things that we do that everybody else records. But perhaps the emphasis is the silent lives that no one sees and no one knows about, but God does. Because I wouldn't call Anna a prophet. I wouldn't call her life a prophet, but God did. And I think for some of us, like the reminder of this Advent season is Advent. The whole point is we're awaiting Christ's return. It's remembering He's coming again. And are we going to be prepared when He shows up? And it's the life of silent faithfulness that we're living right now that's preparing us. And God's doing something so much deeper. And yeah, maybe it's not flashy. And yeah, maybe it doesn't look extravagant, but God sees it. God sees the faithfulness and he's going to honor it in a great and beautiful way. And so, Father, we just thank you so much, Lord, for all that you're doing. Lord, may we be silent prophets. Just faithful wherever you have us. May Anna's life inspire us this Christmas season. Lord, may Zachariah's silence, Lord, inspire us this season. May God, our prayer be less about give us the right words to say, but Lord, let our lives be a prophetic act in our silence. That Lord will be faithful to you, faithful to do whatever you asked us to do. Not for recognition, not for a thank you, not for any of those things, but just because you asked us to do it. And so, Father, right now in this Advent season, may we wait for you. Lord, anything that we've been filling our life with that isn't you, Lord, we repent. Lord, anything that we've satisfied ourselves with that isn't your presence, Lord, we just ask for your forgiveness. And Lord, I thank you that this Christmas season that will slow down, recalibrate our hearts, help us retell the story that's been told for 2,000 years, the one that poured first from the lips of the angels and the lips of Anna in the temple, that our Messiah is here, that he has come. We love you so much in Jesus' name. Every person I believe is that Amen. Amen. I love you guys. Have a great day. Thanks so much for hanging out here on my podcast. Do me a favor and hit the subscribe button if you haven't done so already, so you never miss out on anything here on my podcast. Also, one of the best ways for us to begin to reach other people is by you sharing. So if you do me a favor and share this podcast with a friend, family member, or maybe on your social media, help us get the word out so we can help others.