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Friends, the holidays are coming up and we're all thinking about what we're gonna buy for our family and friends. Well, the Catholic woodworker has you covered with Black Friday pricing all month long. You don't have to wait until Black Friday or Cyber Monday, and you don't have to spend those days sitting on a computer screen or going to a store. To try to find the greatest deals, go to TheCatholicWoodWorker.com check out their special Black Friday pricing all month long. It's absolutely amazing. These guys do incredible work. You know that we love them. They. And I think you will, too. So check out thecatholicwoodworker.com for Black Friday pricing all month long. Welcome to Unpacking the Mass with Keith Nestor. On this podcast, we dig into the week's readings for the upcoming Sunday for the Catholic Church so that when you go to Mass, you are ready to hear what God has to say to you through the Scriptures. So grab your Bibles and let's get digging. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Unpacking the Mass for the first Sunday in Advent of Year A. Happy New Year. Right. Liturgical Year A has begun, and Liturgical year C was pretty dang cool, wasn't it? It's gonna be awesome to step into a new year. And in order to do that, we're gonna do something kind of cool. We're gonna. We are going to make some Advent resolutions. You know how you make New Year's resolutions? Well, why don't we do that with the liturgical year, too, my friends? So that's what we're going to do. That's what the readings are going to help us do today. We're going to make some Advent resolutions. Now, here's the great thing about Advent resolutions. You only have to keep them up for a few days. It's not like the New Year's resolution where you have all year long to procrastinate and figure it out or whatever. No, no. You just got to do this really for a few weeks, my friends. So let's get into this, and we're going to figure out what the Lord would have for us as we prepare in expectation for the coming of Christ. Let's begin with the word of prayer. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. We thank you, Lord, for your coming. We thank you, God, that we can start new this year with a perspective that is ready to grow in holiness and in power because of your coming to this world as we anticipate. Enjoy. Lord, we know that it's up to us to be ready. So help us through these Advent resolutions to make ourselves ready for you. We pray these things in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. All right, now, when you're making your Advent resolutions, remember you don't have a lot of times you can't be like, I'm going to lose £20 when you do a New Year's resolution. You got all year. You don't have that much time. But I bet you can get some amazing things done in this amount of time. Let's start with looking at our first reading. It's from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 2, verses 1 through 5. And it reads this. The word which Isaiah, the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem, it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills, and and all the nations shall flow to it. And many peoples shall come and say, come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem he shall judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples. And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. O house of Jacob, Come, let us walk in the light of the Lord. Our second reading comes to us from the book of Romans 13:11, 14. St. Paul writes these words besides this, you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed. The night is far gone. The day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day. Not in reveling in drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires. And our gospel today, From Matthew, chapter 24, verses 37 through 44. As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away. So will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two men will be in the field. One is taken and one is left. Two women will be grinding at the mill. One is taken and one is left. Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would have not and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect. Fellas, how you doing? Where do you want to see more fruit in your life? It's a question that we always ask, what do we have to do to grow? The theme for this year's Exodus 90 is, I will be with you. And God has a plan to walk with you through these 90 days so that you can experience a greater level of freedom, a greater level of joy, and an incredible amount of growth. I hope that you'll join me as we go through Exodus 90 together, my friends. So download the app for free for 14 days. Give it a try. We start January 5th, and I hope to see you there. Wow, friends, this passage in Isaiah, of course, is one of those prophecies that you look at, you go, wow. Even hundreds of years before Jesus came, they were being told of his coming. They were being told that there would be a day coming when the king would come from Israel and many people would come and there would be this. This recognition of who he is, my friends, powerful. And the judgment of God is at hand. I love that it says, he will judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples. And then what happens next after he judges, they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and there's not going to be any more war. Basically, is the point of all of this. Why? Because God has come to judge. God has come to bring his salvation, to bring his power, and to bring his justice. This is the coming of the Lord. The Jews anticipated this coming, and we have to anticipate this coming too. The church gives this to us so that we too can look at ourselves and we can say, look, we must remember that it shall come to pass that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the highest of the mountains and shall be raised above the hills, and. And all the nations shall flow to it. We got to remember that. What does that mean for us? It means that God is everything. And there's a day coming when he will destroy kingdoms of this world and he will reign supreme, when there won't be any nation against nation, because there's only going to be one nation. And that nation will be the nation of the Lord. My friends, that joyful anticipation is something that they've been looking towards for hundreds, if not thousands of years. And as we step into Advent, friends, part of our Advent resolution has to be that we look forward. We look forward, but yet at the same time, this is what I always get excited about with Advent. We look back. We say, wait a minute, what are you talking about? How can you look forward and look back? Well, because this has been fulfilled in a sense, right? Jesus has come. He's come to save his people from their sins. Jesus came. We don't look forward to the first coming of the Messiah, but we do look forward to his second coming. We look back at the first coming and look forward to the second coming. And in reality, that's a pretty cool place to be, isn't it? Why? Because we know that he's real. We know what he's accomplished. And we have a promise. We have a hope. The Israelites looked forward, but they had no clue what this was ultimately going to look like. And they missed him. But friends, we know what he's done. We know about the resurrection from the dead. We know about the mandate of the church, the reign of Christ through His church, the mandate to go out and preach the gospel to all nations. We're in that. And yet, as it's difficult and we fight this fight against evil, we know that he will return. That's the anticipation that we have to have if we're going to make these Advent resolutions, because they must be made. Hope. Why would you make a resolution about something if you had no hope? We can say, I'm going to make my life more about Jesus because I know that he's coming back. That's what the other two readings are about. In essence, they are both warning and encouraging, aren't they? They warn us if we're not ready, but they encourage us if we are. And that's the ultimate Advent resolution that we need to make. It's to get ourselves ready. I want you to imagine that Jesus is coming over for Christmas dinner. He's actually showing up. What would you do in your house if you knew the Lord was coming over? What would you throw away? What would you clean out? What would you fix that was broken? What would you straighten up now? Remember, your heart is the temple of the Lord, and he's coming into your life. This whole idea of the coming of the Lord, we might look at that and go, well, that already happened here, and it's going to happen someday in the future. But what the gospel is talking about and what St. Paul's talking about is to make ourselves ready for that coming of the Lord, because we don't know when it will be now. People say, oh, well, yeah, all these prophecies have to be fulfilled and all these things in time. And people. People have been talking about the coming of the Lord for so long, and here we are. Well, remember, friends, like we saw here, we're closer now than when we first believed. That's objectively true, isn't it? We're one day closer to the coming of the Lord than we were yesterday. And either that coming is going to happen when Christ returns or when we pass away from this life and come to Him. Either way, it's a guaranteed thing to happen. And either way, we don't know when it will be. So the message of Advent, the message of the beginning of this new liturgical year starts with this anticipation and this call to be ready. To be ready, because it's happening whether we are ready or not. And those who are ready have an incredible hope, and those who don't, an incredible judgment. So what does it look like to be ready? Well, I love this imagery that's used of staying awake because it can be so easy to be lulled into a kind of trance in life, right? A kind of sleep, if you know what I mean. The world will do that to you every day. Just routine of life can sometimes lull us into a sense of complacency. And maybe at the end of this liturgical year, you felt that at the end of the calendar year, you feel crazy. Like, I'm not ready for Christmas, for the holidays, for all that stuff. You got to wake up and be ready because Christ is coming. So the beginning of our Advent resolution is a wake up call. Now, what do you do when you have to wake up? I'm talking physically, of course, you set an alarm which jars you out of sleep. But what else do you do when you need to wake up? Do you come out of bed and play, like, nice, soft, soothing, relaxing music? Do you leave it dark in the room and speak in a quiet voice that's going to put you back to sleep? No. What do we do when we got to wake up? We wake up. Sometimes we put our alarm across the room so we have to get up and go and turn it off. And then before we can even open our eyes fully, we're already, like, making the coffee to prepare ourselves to have that jolt of energy. We're thinking about the things that we have to do that day because we want to be ready for whatever's coming. From a spiritual perspective, what does that look like for us? Do we kind of move slowly? Oh, all right, well, let me hit the snooze button again. Don't hit the spiritual snooze button in your life, my friends. What does that look like? What's a spiritual snooze? A spiritual snooze is when you say, ah, I know I need to do that, but not now. How many times have we done that in our lives? Yeah, I know I need to pray more, but not now. I'll hit that spiritual snooze. Yeah, I know I should. I shouldn't. I haven't prayed my rosary yet today. I should really do that. Ah, maybe I'll just wait till tomorrow we hit the spiritual snooze. I haven't been to confession in a long time. I kind of want to do it, but I don't know. I'll hit the spiritual snooze. I. I could keep doing this. Where are you hitting the spiritual snooze, my friends? Your Advent resolution is to knock that off, to say, all right, I'm not doing that. When the alarm goes off, I'm ready to go. And guess what? The alarm is going off. It's time for you and I to wake up, my friends. It's time for you to be ready to understand why Jesus came. Because we needed to be saved, to watch for his coming, even though he already came. Again, this is that going back to looking backwards and yet looking ahead to say, where is he, God? Where are you? Asking that question is so important. And it's not that we, like, want the physical location. It's just like, lord, where are you, my life? Where are you working? Where are you challenging me? Where are you pushing me, Lord, where are you in this. These situations that I'm in where I'm struggling or I don't know where to go? Crying out to the Lord God, where are you with this? Because, yes, God wants to come to you in the ultimate coming of the second Coming, but he also wants to come to you in those daily moments where you're searching for him, where you're crying out to him, where you don't know what to do. He wants to show up in those places as well, my friends. But you gotta be Watching. So many times we go through life and we're like, I just wish God would do something amazing. My life. I just want God to show up. Well, maybe he is, but you're doing this. Spiritual snooze. Spiritual snooze. Spiritual snooze. You got to look, you got to say, God, where are you? I got to keep watch. I got to be watching for you in my life, in the small things and in the big things, my friends. And then, hey, the next thing that we have to do in terms of our Advent resolutions, this is a big one. This is what St. Paul's really pounding on. We've got to conduct ourselves becomingly. I love that. It's a word we don't use enough, right? Becomingly. We have to conduct ourselves according to the truth, not according to sin. And again, if you knew Jesus was coming over, what would you clean up? If you knew you were going to meet with him tomorrow, what would you deal with? It's time to do that stuff now, my friends, because I think it's interesting that Paul doesn't say, well, just try harder. No, he says, make no provision for the flesh. He doesn't say, do the best you can. He says, it's time to wake up. So let's make some goals for Advent, some Advent resolutions, and I've got three of them based on these texts here that we're going to get into. And the first one is this Advent goal. Advent resolution number one. Break up with sin. Look what he says. Look at what he says in this text, my friends. He says, let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. Conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day. Then he goes into this whole list of things that we shouldn't be doing. Make no provision for the flesh to gratify his desires. Where are you still in a relationship with sin? It's time to break up with sin. It's time to cut that off. It's time to say, hey, it's not you, it's me, right? No, you can say, no, it's not me, it's you. And I'm done. We are through sin. Think of the worst breakup you've ever had. Break up with sin. 10 times worse. Block, delete all that stuff. Unfriend, unfollow, unsubscribe. All of the things you got to do to sin to break up with it. That's what you got to do. That's Advent resolution number one. Number two is this. Protect your house. Jesus said, if the Guy knew when the guy was coming to rob his house, he wouldn't let it happen. He'd have protected the house. Friends, your heart is your house in addition to your home. Protect it from the evil one. Protect it from falling away. Protect it from the spiritual snooze. Be awake. Be ready. What does that look like for you? Where have you let down your guard in your life? The first Sunday of Advent. Friends, let's strengthen everything up. Let's keep our eye out. Let's protect our house. So break up with sin. Protect your house. And then the third one is this man, I'm getting old as I do this. I can't see anything. Eliminate distractions. Make this season about Jesus instead of everything else. That's a big part of it, isn't it? Eliminate distractions. Because you might be like, all right, I'm ready. I'm watching. But then you hear a noise. What was that? You're like, okay, I'm breaking up with sin. But then somebody's calling me. What's going on over here? No, there's so many distractions in this time of year. There's so many things that are going to try to take you away from your focus. Make your Advent resolution about breaking up with sin, protecting your house, and now focusing on Christ. Remember what St. Paul said? Put on Christ. Take off evil. Put on Christ. That's so important, my friends. Think of that imagery. We're wrapped in something. We clothe ourselves in something. It's either Christ or it's evil. Take off the garbage. Put on Christ. When you put on Christ, guess what people see? They see Christ. When you put on darkness, that's what they see. And your Advent needs to be about that, my friends. So will you make those resolutions with me? Will you commit to that? Will you joyfully anticipate the coming of the Lord? Will you turn away from sin, breaking up with it, not even allowing even a provision for it at all, so you can take on Christ and live a life that's becoming. And will you be ready? Will you keep watching, as Jesus said? Because you don't know. You don't know what's going to happen. I'm not trying to be morbid, but, friend, there could be people that are watching this, unpacking the Mass here tonight, that aren't going to live until the next calendar year. Something could happen. Are you ready? What if that's us? What if that's me? What if that's you? I want to be ready. None of us are guaranteed one more day on this Planet Christ is coming. Are we ready? That's really what I'm hoping for with Advent. I want to just let this start so that we can just catch momentum and move into it. And if you need another Advent resolution to commit yourself to weekly study of unpacking the Mass, then do it. Make the comment in below and say, here's my resolution, here's what I'm going to do. And then people are going to hold you accountable to that. So if you in the comments say, I'll be here every week. So maybe one of your Advent resolutions is that you're going to show up every single week during Year A. You're going to check in, you're going to be like, all right, Year A, I'm here unpacking the masks, and people are going to hold you accountable. A is for accountability, my friends. So people will be like, hey, where's so and so? I'm checking in. Leave that down in the comments as well. And I'm telling you, we're going to have an incredible year. I'm anticipating that. I can't wait to see how unpacking the Mass has continued to grow. I know that this coming year is going to be the best year we've ever had, my friends. So thank you for being a part of it, thank you for committing to it, and thank you for being ready and not hitting that spiritual snooze. Friends, time to wake up. Let's do this. Thanks so much for watching, my friends. I can't wait to come back next week to be with you. Take care and God bless you.