Greetings from President Dr. Barry H. Corey

Welcome to the 2024 Advent Project. This marks the twelfth year of the Biola University Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts producing this rich resource for reflection and worship during the Advent season. I’m so grateful for the ever-growing number of people engaging with this collection each year.

Advent is a time when we, amidst the challenges and mundanities of our lives, pause to reflect on, anticipate and celebrate the incarnation of Jesus. The incarnation is a profoundly wondrous, even bizarre, reality.

Think about it! Jesus, God himself, came to earth as a human person. A man. A baby.

And thank about it! Be grateful that God sent Jesus for you, for me, to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

Incarnation makes the coming of Jesus more than an idea or a doctrine to get right. Advent is as multi-faceted and mysterious as a human person.

Jesus’ mother Mary, when confronted with the wonderful events at his birth, had to sit and ponder what she had seen. Angels announced Jesus’s birth to the shepherds in a visual and audible spectacle. God’s entrance into the world was accompanied by the smells of sheep and dirt and blood and milk, and later the glint of gold and the fragrance of valuable perfume.

Jesus came into a time, place and culture. He grew up and lived and ministered as a person who ate, drank, slept, walked, sang, spoke, prayed, laughed, and cried.

Jesus came as an incarnate person, to redeem incarnate sinners.

The Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts was established to communicate the truth of Christmas, and to do so through Scripture, music, poetry, reflection, and art. This cohesive and beautiful Advent Project is not only a reflection of Biola University’s 116-year commitment to God’s Word and the gospel message that permeates all we do, but it is also a gift for you, friends and strangers.

I hope that you find these Biola University Advent Project entries to be perspective-giving during this season of Christmas, a time of year so often crowded with events and overwhelmed by to-do lists. My prayer — our prayer — is that you choose to decelerate for a few minutes each day by engaging your senses and self to grasp things so profound.

And that is the profundity of Jesus, not just a concept, but a person — fully man and fully God: our Lover, our Savior, our Father, our Counselor, our Lord, our Comforter, our Friend. This Advent Season, may you engage with these expressions of art and culture as signposts that point you towards the One who has entered into our world and redeemed you — the whole you — through his love. Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing. O, come let us adore him.