2020 Advent devotional

Missing out on your Advent devotion book from church? Here’s a free PDF booklet you can print out at home!

With many people staying at home from church, you may not have the opportunity to pick up an Advent devotion book. It’s great that Lutheran Hour Ministries continues to offer a free Advent devotional book every year.

After filling out their form, they give you lots of printable PDF options to download:

• Folded booklet: color PDF (Finished size: 5.5″ x 8.5″)
• Folded booklet: grayscale PDF (Finished size: 5.5″ x 8.5″)
• Large-print booklet: color PDF (Finished size: 8.5″ x 11″)
• Large-print booklet: grayscale PDF (Finished size: 8.5″ x 11″)
• E-reader version: zipped ePub file
• And Spanish versions of all these!

I went with the 5.5×8.5 grayscale PDF. So nice they give an option that saves color ink! In total, it’s 22 pages to print out (11 sheets of paper if you print on both sides)

I just printed out my copy, and it’s great! The theme of the 2020 devotional is “God with Us”. Here is the summary:

Christmas is a time for reflecting. We think of holidays past and the one that’s upon us. As you read the messages of God With Us, consider the many ways that God is present in your life — through His Word, your loved ones, the fellowship of believers, Holy Communion, and more.

His love for us is personal. He proved that in a Bethlehem manger — God’s only Son born for all mankind, so that through the Christ Child we might know life with Him forevermore.

When you print the booklet and fold it, here’s how the interior pages look:

You can listen to every daily devotion via an audio.
The publishers of this Advent booklet also produce a podcast. Every day they release a new podcast episode with someone reading the devotion for that day. If you would like to listen to two-minute devotions on the go, give their podcast a try.

This month my wife and I will read this to our two children (4-year-old & 1-year-old).
If there are any days in particular that we really enjoyed, I might update this blog post with notes on those days.

If you find any of the day’s devotions to be inspiring, please share it in the comments. I’d love to hear your favorites. Thank you!

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2019 Advent devotional

The theme for 2019 is “Call His Name Jesus”.

Foretold by the prophets and announced by angels, Jesus’ birth is the fulfillment of divine promises. The events of Christmas have God’s fingerprints all over them. At just the right time, He brought His Son into this world to redeem us. In “Call His Name Jesus”, we see how God is ever – present in our lives — so much so that His Son became one of us to bring us back to Himself.

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2018 Advent devotional

The theme for 2018 is “The Coming King”.

The coming Savior’s birth was foretold by the prophets of old and later experienced by many who were on hand as He came into this world.

Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon, shepherds, wise men from the east, a legion of angels, and even King Herod — all play their parts in the Gospel narratives that speak of the Savior’s incarnation.

Explore the many ways their lives were touched as God became one of us, for each of us, in The Coming King.

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2017 Advent devotional

It’s December! Do you have any Advent devotional booklets? Many churches hand them out during this time of a year. Advent devotions are a great way to remind yourself about what Christmas is really about–the birth of our Savior!

At my wife’s Catholic church in Oak Park, they hand out Advent devotion booklets every year. She loves these devotion books. However, we recently moved to Glen Ellyn, where they?don’t hand out these devotions (just a single sheet paper calendar). My wife Sarah was really disappointed.

Being the good Lutheran husband, I went searching for a Lutheran devotional book for Advent. The Lutheran Hour Ministries offers a free Advent devotional book. The PDF has the printer pages already set! All you have to do is print, fold, and staple. I love it! Sarah will love it too.

Here’s an example spread:

Lutheran Hour Ministries says about the 2017 Advent book:

In Love Came Down we see how the Heavenly Father spared nothing — not even His own Son — to work out our salvation.Though we had rebelled in our sins and spurned God and His Commandments, He chose us — not for exclusion, but redemption. The Father’s love sought us out in our perilous condition and, in His infinite mercy, bridged the divide to our isolation through Jesus — the one Mediator between God and Man.

“Jesus came to be in our lives, a part of our lives, one of us. He came to be our Savior, and that is not a job someone can do by standing safely at a distance. Instead, He embraced our human nature — He was born, He grew, He lived, worked, and suffered, He died. And then He rose from the dead,” writes author Dr. Kari Vo.

The story of our salvation is a hard-fought victory. What began in a humble manger stall in Bethlehem on Christmas morn reached its zenith when Jesus — child of Mary, Son of God — was crucified, died, and rose from the dead three days later.This is what God did for us; this is what happened when love came down.