#5 - Celebrating Advent with Laura Rainey Dries (Part 1) - A Call to Advent

Barbara Rainey's Top 10 Interviews

Click Here to Listen to the other parts in the series
Celebrating Advent with Laura Rainey Dries (Part 1) - A Call to Advent
Celebrating Advent with Laura Rainey Dries (Part 2) - Being Still
Celebrating Advent with Laura Rainey Dries (Part 3) - Introducing Your Kids to the Savior
Celebrating Advent with Laura Rainey Dries (Part 4) - His Savior Names
Celebrating Advent with Laura Rainey Dries (Part 5) - Remembering Christ at Christmas

FamilyLife Today® Radio Transcript

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A Call to Advent

Guests: Dennis and Barbara Rainey

From the series: Celebrating Advent (Day 1 of 5)

Air date: November 28, 2016

Bob: Does your church or does your family do anything to celebrate the Advent season? Are you even familiar with what Advent is? Here’s Barbara Rainey.

Barbara: The term, “advent,” just means Jesus’ coming—it means the time when He came to earth / He left heaven. The Book of John tells us He was sent by God—He left heaven, and He came to earth. He became a baby, as we all know in the story, and was born and lived and gave His life for us. But the time—those weeks leading up to Christmas—years ago, in the Middle Ages or somewhere in there, the church fathers met and decided that this would be a good time to help people prepare their hearts to celebrate and to worship when Christmas Day actually came.

I think it’s a great concept because, in our culture today, we don’t wait very well, we do not celebrate very well, and we don’t mark the days very well.

1:00

I think there is some benefit—especially for families—to mark those Sundays of Advent with, even, a ten-minute gathering. Get together before bed time, if you have to—or after breakfast or whenever it works—and just think together about what this season is all about. The whole idea of Advent is preparing your heart to worship and to appropriately celebrate the gift of Christ.

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, November 28th. Our host is the President of FamilyLife®, Dennis Rainey. I’m Bob Lepine. We have a great opportunity, over the next four weeks, to prepare our hearts and minds for the celebration of Jesus’ coming. We’ll talk about that today. Stay with us.

2:00

And welcome to FamilyLife Today. Thanks for joining us on the Monday edition. I just—I’m wondering: “Do you guys have, at your house, somebody who comes through—like at the end of the weekend after Thanksgiving—and says: ‘Okay; we’ve got to do a major shift here! We’ve got to take all the Thanksgiving stuff down’?”

Dennis: You’re looking at him. [Laughter] My martyr meter is going off right now. [Laughter]

Barbara: There’s not that much Thanksgiving stuff to take down; mind you.

Dennis: There really isn’t; but I’m going to tell you—the Christmas—we have it out in a little storage shed. I’m not saying it’s a lot, but we hire an 18-wheeler to move the 200 feet from our storage shed up to our back door. [Laughter]

Bob: You had to put an addition on the storage shed—didn’t you?—just to handle more Christmas stuff over the years? [Laughter]

Barbara: You guys are terrible!

Dennis: We are terrible.

Barbara: You are, because it’s so not true.

Bob: But the truth is that—

Dennis: Barbara—you know, here is the thing, Bob—this is a paradox of life.

Bob: Yes?

3:00
Dennis: Barbara says her favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.

Bob: And by the way, Barbara is joining us again today. Welcome back to FamilyLife Today.

Dennis: Welcome back, Sweetheart.

Barbara: Thank you.

Bob: So, Thanksgiving, which we’ve just completed—your favorite holiday; right?

Barbara: Yes; and the rest of the sentence is?

Dennis: Why are there boxes of Christmas gear that we bring in?

Barbara: Because there is so much more available to purchase, and to display, and to decorate with for Christmas than there is for Thanksgiving.

Dennis: Especially since you created Ever Thine Home®.

Barbara: That’s part of it too.

Dennis: You have declared the reason for the season, both at Thanksgiving and at Christmas—

Barbara: So, part of—

Dennis: —and at Valentine’s, and at Easter.

Barbara: —and Easter. Part of the reason—

Dennis: —and the Fourth of July! [Laughter]

Barbara: Part of the reason we have more at Christmas now is because we have all the old stuff—all the old Santa, snowmen / things have nothing to do with Jesus—stuff that I haven’t gotten rid of yet.

Dennis: You know what I think?—[whispering]—they could disappear.

Barbara: They could.

Dennis: [Whispering] They might—they might vanish.

Barbara: But we’ve replaced them with all the new things about Jesus.

Bob: If you see an extra trash can out at the curb tonight when you go home—[Laughter]

4:00

Barbara: I’ll know what it is; yes! [Laughter]

Bob: —you will know—

Dennis: It may be my body! [Laughter]

Bob: