Christmas time is here! Each year it arrives, we have a strange confidence that we know what we’re longing for.
The season is thick with language of longing – peace, love, joy, hope, goodwill; yet the world into which Christmas speaks doesn’t feel settled or clear-minded. Desire is everywhere this Christmas, but it’s largely restless, impatient, and easily redirected. We want things to be resolved, clarified, fixed. Yesterday, if possible.
Hark! the Herald Angels Sing is one of my favourite Christmas hymns. I’m certain you’re familiar with it, but there’s a verse you probably never heard of. I found it included here:
The Forgotten Fourth Verse
Not very festive sounding is it. The verse is deeply theological; it leads us from Genesis and points toward the end of days with the New Heaven and New Earth in Revelation. Precisely the journey we will take in the “Story of Desire” starting in January 2026. For the purposes of this article, there’s one line I highlight:
“Come, Desire of nations, come, fix in us Thy humble home.”
That’s an odd sounding phrase. The writer Charles Wesley doesn’t speak of Jesus Christ as the One who fulfills personal wishes or private spiritual needs. He names Jesus as the Desire of nations – this is a global longing; explaining it seems beyond us but beneath the surface we feel it: a shared longing for wholeness we struggle to name accurately.
Scripture is surprisingly realistic about this. From the opening pages of Genesis, human desire isn’t portrayed as sinful in itself, but as powerful, formative, and easily misdirected. We’re people who want, and what we want shapes who we become. It’s human to want but when desire points to an improper direction, it doesn’t disappear but it does attach itself to lesser objects that make louder promises. Like a familiar proverb says, “empty vessels make the most noise” – bang on an empty, 44 gallon steel drum and you’ll hear what I mean.
Christmas doesn’t arrive to denounce that desire or silence it. Nor does it arrive to instantly satisfy our want. Instead, it enters quietly into the middle of it.
The birth of Jesus suggests that God’s answer to disordered longing isn’t to give a Doc Martin diagnosis and prescription, but a presence. The arrival of the Christ child isn’t a concept to be grasped, but as a life to be received – personal, patient, relational. He doesn’t override human desire; He lives it, redirects it, and reveals what desire was meant for all along.
Watchful Waiting
Wesley’s hymn is careful here. The prayer isn’t simply that Jesus would come to the nations, but that He would “fix in us thy humble home.” In other words, take up residence in us. Desire, Scripture suggests, is reshaped from the inside out. It’s not about changing our desire through force or fear, but through nearness. Through attention. Through a long obedience of re-learning what, and whom we love.
Maybe this is the quiet truth of Christmas. Before correctly naming what we hope for, we need to learn to notice what we’re actually longing for. And seeing requires slowness and stillness. It’s more about listening than speaking.
While the word “Advent” means the arrival of a notable thing, person or event, “Advent” the season is always about watching rather than announcing; waiting rather than arrival. It resists the urge to rush to give answers. It allows desire to surface from within you without immediately trying to manage it.
Centering Christmas
Ours is a world eager to diagnose, declare, and divide, but the story of Christmas invites a different posture – an attitude of the heart; a resolve to trust God is at work not only in the clarity of our convictions, but also in the confusion and doubts of our desires. Christ comes not because our desires are pure, but because they’re not. Not because we always know what we need, but because often we don’t.
If Jesus really is the Desire of nations, then Christmas is less about fulfilling our expectations and more about re-forming them. I’m not talking about a dramatic or instant change but a slow, relational renewal of perspective.
Giving God the Benefit of Belief
We all know the idiom of giving a person the benefit of the doubt. That’s when we’re uncertain about the person’s character; not sure how faithful they’ll be in following through. That saying is appropriate when our trust is thin. We can’t use that idiom for God, so this is a slight spin on meaning. We sense God is faithful, but our lived experience doesn’t always confirm it on demand.
As the season unfolds, perhaps the most faithful response is not to name the world’s problems more loudly, but to pay more careful attention to the longings beneath them. And to give God the benefit of belief; that in Christ, He hasn’t abandoned the patient work of reordering desire – in us, and among us. That saying names something we could call an Abrahamic attitude:
Choose to trust before evidence.
See my slow faith formation through God’s essential nature of love.
Live as though God is at work even beneath my awareness (that’s a tough one).
This is what biblically informed faith is. It’s not giving God the benefit of the doubt, but the benefit of belief; that His slow work in us is real, even when it feels incomplete.