What does First B Jackson teach about advent joy?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on Advent joy begins with the long wait before it arrived. In the messages that focus most directly on this theme, Pastor Brian and Pastor Mark both trace the four hundred years of silence between Malachi and the opening of Luke's Gospel. That silence was not an accident or an absence of God's plan, but a long stretch of holding on to old promises, often with the expectation that a military king would come to overthrow Rome. When the silence finally broke, it broke not in a palace or a seat of power but in a moment of humble faithfulness, with an elderly priest alone at an altar and an angel delivering the first authoritative word from God in four centuries. Joy, in this teaching, is inseparable from understanding what God's people were delivered from and waited through.
The joy that erupts in Luke chapter one is shown to be Spirit-filled and prophetically loaded. The births of John the Baptist and Jesus are traced back through Hosea, Malachi, Zechariah, Micah, and Joel, showing how thick the expectation had grown before a single word of the New Testament story begins. Pastor Brian made the point that the messianic prophecies scattered across the minor prophets were not a catalog of predictions to be checked off, but cumulative weight, centuries of God speaking specifically about what was coming. When it finally came, the response was songs, Spirit-filled speech, and a joy that exceeded what anyone watching from the outside might have predicted.
The Christmas pageant service from 2016 planted the same idea in simpler soil. The third Advent candle, the candle of joy, was lit with a reading of the angel's words to the shepherds: good news of great joy for all people. The children's scenes that followed kept pressing toward the same conclusion the prophets had been pressing toward for centuries. Santa, for all his goodwill, could not give what people most needed. One child reasoned it through plainly: everyone sins, nothing we do can fix it, and Jesus is our only hope. That is where Advent joy lands in this church's teaching, not in the season's general warmth, but in the recognition that the one the whole Old Testament had been pointing toward actually came.
Taught from Luke 1:5-25 · Luke 1:26-38 · Luke 1:46-56 · Malachi 4:5-6 · Luke 2:8-11
The passage taught · 1 Corinthians 15
1 Now I declare to you, brothers, the Good News which I preached to you, which also you received, in which you also stand,
2 by which also you are saved, if you hold firmly the word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,
4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- December 14, 2025 Messianic Messages - Advent Advent's third Sunday traces messianic prophecy from the minor prophets into Luke 1, where four hundred years of silence finally breaks with Gabriel's announcements to Zechariah and Mary.
- December 14, 2025 Four Hundred Years of Silence Advent sermon on the 400 years of silence between Malachi and Luke 1, and how God broke through with the births of John the Baptist and Jesus.
- December 11, 2016 Christmas Pageant (3) A Christmas pageant from First Baptist Jackson shows children asking Santa the questions that matter most, and pointing each other toward Jesus as the only true gift.
Mentioned along the way
- December 15, 2024 From the Cradle to the Cross in Five Days Luke's five "today" moments trace Jesus from cradle to cross, showing that the age of grace is still open and Jesus is still seeking and saving the lost.
- December 11, 2022 Jesus Christ Really Is That Awesome A Wyoming pastor walks through the genealogies of Matthew and Luke to show why Jesus Christ really is that awesome, closing with the first four verses of Hebrews.
- December 15, 2019 When He Was Called, He Obeyed Hebrews 11 traces Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph as ordinary people whose forward-looking faith in God's promises shaped history and still speaks today.