Today, we continue the third week of the Advent season with our focus on joy.

Do you have all your plans together for where you’re going this Christmas? One of the best parts of the season is getting together with all your friends and loved ones and seeing them face to face. There’s so much joy when you see each other.

Apostle Paul points to this experience, speaking about the coming day when we’ll see Jesus face to face. In 1 Corinthians 13, he writes: “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away… For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

Think of the shepherds on that first Christmas night. They heard the angels’ announcement, ran to Bethlehem, and there—they saw Jesus face to face. Not just hearing about the Messiah, but gazing upon him with their own eyes. A baby wrapped in cloths, lying in a manger. They “returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen” (Luke 2:20). Their joy overflowed from encountering Jesus in person.

But even that face-to-face encounter was only partial. They saw the infant King, humble and helpless. Don’t you wish you could have seen His little sweet face? Of course, we now see Christ through Scripture and the Spirit’s work—real encounters, but still “in a mirror dimly.”

Yet Paul promises a day when we’ll see Jesus face to face in His full glory—not as a baby in a manger, but as the risen, glorified, perfected Lord. If the shepherds rejoiced at seeing the infant Messiah, imagine the joy of seeing Him in all His majesty! Then we will know fully, and our joy will be eternally complete.

This Advent, as you celebrate Christ’s first coming, don’t forget to anticipate the greater joy still ahead when He returns, and we personally see Him face to face.

May you be blessed this Advent!

Change begins in you!