Dear Christian friends:

If you read your newspaper on Thanksgiving Day, you saw many pages full of ads urging us to buy things for Christmas. So we know that Christmas will soon be here. So we all are making preparations for that happy day and waiting anxiously for that wonderful Day.

We must also prepare our heart and spirit. On Christmas we celebrate one of several wonderful things God has done to save us from sin and hell. He gave His son as a true human to live and die for us. How do we prepare our hearts for God's Savior? By reading and hearing His Word, so that we know our sin and feel our need for salvation.

So Advent is the season when we feel our need of salvation and expect it. This we do by searching our hearts and confessing our sins. Our text today will help us to do this. It tells about Zacharias who was waiting for and expecting God's wonderful salvation. He spoke a beautiful hymn of praise to God which is our text.

Let us consider this text today. It will help us to feel our need of salvation.


Zacharias was a priest of God. Both he and his wife now were very old. They had no children and often had prayed to God for a son. Perhaps they hope that their son would be the promised Savior or a prophet of God. But God never answered their prayer and now Elizabeth, his wife was too old to have a baby. One day while Zacharias was burning incense and making prayer offerings to God in the temple the Lord's angel appeared unto him and said, "Don't be afraid Zacharias, God has heard your prayer. You and your wife Elizabeth will have a son, and you must call him John. He will be your joy and delight, and many will be glad he was born." (read verse twenty)

So John was born six months before Jesus and his work was to go ahead of Jesus and prepare the people for their God and Savior. We call him John the Baptizer.

After John was born and Zacharias could speak again, his first words were the words of our text, a beautiful hymn of praise to God.

Zacharias praises God because He has not forsaken His people, although they are sinners. He has kept His Word and promise to Abraham and David and now gives His Son through Mary a descendant of King David. This Son of David is Jesus the Son of God. Zacharias says that He will save the people from their enemies and let them serve Him without fear in holiness and righteousness before Him all their life.

After Zacharias praises God for the promised Savior He turns to the baby John and prophesies about his work when he grows up. (read verses 76-77) John must prepare the people for their Savior. He must make them feel the need of salvation. The people will not want a Savior if they feel no need for salvation.

So we during Advent should prepare ourselves for salvation. We must feel in our hearts the need for God's mercy and forgiveness, or we will be careless and won't care.

There were two men riding in a canoe on the Priest River in Idaho. They were tourists from the Midwest and did not know that river very well. They were drifting along rapidly, when a farmer along the bank called out to warn them about terrible rapids and a waterfall around the next bend of the river. But either they did not hear him or they did not believe him and they continued on down the river and were drowned. These two men did not know or feel the need of salvation.

So many today drift along in their life and feel no sin or shame or blame. They feel no need for God's mercy and salvation. If they do not wake up, they will be lost forever.

We, also, often feel no need for God's mercy and salvation. We do not feel ashamed or sorry about our sins. Perhaps we do not realize how much we have sinned against God, and therefore are not eager to hear about God's wonderful acts of salvation.

Let us use these days and Sundays before Christmas to search God's law and to search our hearts so that we will feel our need of salvation and anxiously expect the Savior. If we do that then Christmas, Lent and Easter will be very precious to us, more precious than anything else in the world.

We will feel like Zacharias felt about the Savior. He writes in closing his advent hymn of praise:

"Our God is merciful
And will let a heavenly Sun
rise among us,
To shine on those who
sit in the in the dark
And in the shadow of death.
And to guide our feet into
the way of peace."

Amen.