Advent Week 1 - Psalm 6: Awakening

ARCHDEACON DAN HARDIN / NOVEMBER 25, 2025

Archdeacon Dan Hardin has been Chaplain for more than 30 years and serves as Assisting Priest at St Francis Anglican Parish in Sanford, North Carolina.

Advent begins with a jolt — the Lord calls His people to rise from spiritual drowsiness and face Him with clear eyes and an honest heart. Psalm 6 places us right at that threshold. It is the prayer not of the proud or the self-assured, but of one who finally sees the truth about his own condition: “Have mercy upon me, O LORD, for I am weak.” The psalmist’s words strip away the polite illusions we prefer. He is describing the soul awakened — startled, humbled, and suddenly aware of its need. 

This is where true spiritual awakening always begins. Sin is not merely a tally of wrong actions; it is estrangement from God, a rupture in fellowship, a relationship wounded at its very core. When the psalmist cries out, he is acknowledging that the true weight of sin is not guilt alone but distance — distance from the One who is our life. Advent insists that we face this reality. It refuses to let us drift casually into the season. It confronts us with the truth that something in us must be roused, awakened, shaken loose from complacency. 

Such awakening requires honesty — not the half-honesty that admits only what is comfortable, but the painful transparency that the psalmist models. “I am weary with my groaning,” he says, and the words carry no excuses, no self-defense. Advent asks us to do the same: to come before God without pretense, without rehearsed speeches, without blame shifted elsewhere. In a season when the world races toward sentimentality, Scripture calls us to sober truthfulness before divine mercy. Only those who know their need can truly receive the One who comes. 

And here the connection to the Advent proclamation becomes clear: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord.” The preparation is not external; it is inward. The Lord does not ask us to decorate the heart, but to open it. His light always exposes before it comforts. The light of Christ pushes back darkness in a way that is both unsettling and healing. It reveals what we would rather conceal, yet it does so for the sake of restoration, not shame. The exposing light of God is the beginning of health. 

Therefore, let Advent begin with quiet confession — not rushed, not mechanical, but sincere. Let it begin with a renewed hunger for mercy, a recognition that our weakness is not an obstacle to God’s grace but the very condition in which His mercy meets us. Psalm 6 reminds us that God draws near to the trembling, the weary, and the contrite. And until that awakening takes hold, there can be no true Christmas joy. For joy without repentance is counterfeit; but joy that rises from an awakened, honest heart is the joy that Christ Himself brings. 

So we stand at the doorway of the season with the psalmist’s cry on our lips: “Have mercy upon me, O LORD.” This is the right beginning — the only beginning. Only those awakened by mercy can truly welcome the coming King.