Greetings from President Dr. Barry H. Corey

Welcome to the 2025 Advent Project. This marks the thirteenth 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.