Advent may have started on Monday, but it’s not too late to begin an Advent devotional to help focus our hearts and minds on what this season is truly about. To help get you started, we collected a few for you to choose from.

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:13)

Good News of Great Joy: Daily Readings for Advent by John Piper

Free ebook download. A great resource for you to open up and read in the morning before starting your day. Each day has a short reading that will focus you on God and the gift of His Son.

The Village Church’s Advent Guide

This free resources is from 2013, but you can adjust the specific dates to line up with this year. The guide is created to be a study for you to do on your own and if you have a family with kids, there are family portions as well.  They explain more about the guide here.

An Advent Sojourn by Elliott Pollasch

You can get this devotional for $1.99 on Kindle.

A note from the HPC Family Life Connection leaders:

“…visions of sugarplums danced in their heads…”
It sounds so sweet, but your reality is probably more like… “everything in the Target holiday flyer danced in their heads…”!!  Ahh, Christmas.  The celebration of our Savior’s birth, yet for our kids, the commercialism around them casts the manger in a slight shadow. It’s up to us to put Christ as the center of our children’s Christmas.  The world certainly won’t.  So what’s your focus this Christmas?  What will you spend the majority of your time talking about with your kids concerning Christmas?  Gifts? Santa? or JESUS?

Don’t let this Christmas season fly by without being intentional and God-honoring.

Here’s a link to a resource to help your family focus on the manger this Christmas. http://www.thrivingfamily.com/advent

The Greatest Gift and Unwrapping the Greatest Gift by Ann Voskamp

This is not a free download, but something you can get at stores and go through on your own (The Greatest Gift) or with your kids (Unwrapping the Greatest Gift). On Ann’s blog, A Holy Experience, she has many free resources to go along with these devotionals.

There are many ways to focus on Jesus during the advent season. Share how you keep God in the forefront of Christmas through family traditions, devotionals, or any other ways below in the comments.