Starts 1 December · 24 days · About 10 minutes a day
This is a free 24-day Advent Bible reading plan and devotional for women, running from 1 December to Christmas Eve. Each morning takes about ten minutes: one passage, one line to sit with, a short reflection and a prayer. The first twelve days stay with the prophets and the psalms — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Micah, Zechariah, Malachi, Psalm 80 and Psalm 130 — the seven hundred years of waiting before anything happened. The last twelve move through Luke, Matthew and John: Zechariah's silence, Mary's yes, Joseph's dream, the shepherds, the magi, Simeon, and on Christmas Eve, the Word made flesh. It is written for women who want December to be about waiting on purpose rather than rushing to the manger, and it assumes nothing about what you already know.
Day 1 is 1 December and day 24 is Christmas Eve. If you're joining late, start on today's date.
| Day | Date | Passage | Theme | Line to carry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dec 1 | Isaiah 9:1–2 | The People Walking in Darkness | The people walking in darkness have seen a great light. |
| 2 | Dec 2 | Isaiah 9:6–7 | Unto Us A Child Is Born | For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. |
| 3 | Dec 3 | Isaiah 7:14 | God With Us | Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign. |
| 4 | Dec 4 | Isaiah 11:1–10 | A Shoot From The Stump | A shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse. |
| 5 | Dec 5 | Isaiah 40:1–11 | Comfort, Comfort My People | Comfort, comfort My people, says your God. |
| 6 | Dec 6 | Isaiah 35:1–10 | The Desert Will Bloom | Strengthen the limp hands and steady the feeble knees. |
| 7 | Dec 7 | Jeremiah 33:14–16 | A Righteous Branch | I will cause a righteous Branch to sprout up for David. |
| 8 | Dec 8 | Micah 5:2–5 | Out Of Little Bethlehem | But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are small among the clans of Judah. |
| 9 | Dec 9 | Zechariah 9:9 | Your King Comes, Humble | See, your King comes to you, humble and riding on a donkey. |
| 10 | Dec 10 | Malachi 3:1; 4:2 | The Sun Of Righteousness | The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. |
| 11 | Dec 11 | Psalm 80 | Restore Us, O God | Restore us, O God, and cause Your face to shine upon us, that we may be saved. |
| 12 | Dec 12 | Psalm 130 | Waiting More Than Watchmen | O Israel, put your hope in the LORD. |
| 13 | Dec 13 | Luke 1:5–25 | Zechariah's Silence | Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard. |
| 14 | Dec 14 | Luke 1:26–38 | Let It Be To Me | I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me according to your word. |
| 15 | Dec 15 | Luke 1:39–45 | The Baby Leaped | Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord's word to her will be fulfilled. |
| 16 | Dec 16 | Luke 1:46–56 | Mary's Song | He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has exalted the humble. |
| 17 | Dec 17 | Luke 1:57–80 | Zechariah's Song | To shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace. |
| 18 | Dec 18 | Matthew 1:18–25 | Joseph's Dream | When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him. |
| 19 | Dec 19 | Luke 2:1–7 | No Room | She wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger. |
| 20 | Dec 20 | Luke 2:8–14 | Glory To God In The Highest | I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. |
| 21 | Dec 21 | Luke 2:15–20 | Mary Treasured All These Things | But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. |
| 22 | Dec 22 | Matthew 2:1–12 | The Star | We saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him. |
| 23 | Dec 23 | Luke 2:25–35 | My Eyes Have Seen | For my eyes have seen Your salvation. |
| 24 | Dec 24 | John 1:1–14 | The Word Became Flesh | The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. |
The Advent plan is built in two halves. Days 1 to 12 are the waiting: Isaiah's light dawning in the ruined north (Isaiah 9), the child with four names (Isaiah 9:6–7), Immanuel (Isaiah 7:14), the shoot from the stump of Jesse (Isaiah 11), comfort for a people in exile (Isaiah 40), the desert that blooms (Isaiah 35), Jeremiah's righteous Branch (Jeremiah 33), little Bethlehem (Micah 5), the humble king on a donkey (Zechariah 9), the sun of righteousness before four hundred years of silence (Malachi 3–4), and two psalms of waiting, Psalm 80 and Psalm 130. Days 13 to 24 are the arrival: Zechariah in the temple, the annunciation to Mary, the visit to Elizabeth, the Magnificat, the Benedictus, Joseph's dream, the birth in Bethlehem, the shepherds, Mary treasuring these things, the magi and the star, Simeon's song, and finally John 1 on Christmas Eve. Every day follows the same seven movements — Arrive, Set out, Hear, Hear again, Consider, Pray, Carry — and ends with one sentence of scripture to take into the day.
This is the complete first session, exactly as it's read in the app. Every day of the plan follows this shape.
Welcome.
The first of December. It is dark early now and light late, and this is the season this walk was made for.
Breathe in. And out. Let the room be as dim as it is.
Twenty-four mornings to Christmas. We do not start at the manger. We start seven hundred years before it, with a prophet, in the dark.
Isaiah is writing to a country being taken apart.
The Assyrian army has come down from the north, and the first regions to fall — Zebulun and Naphtali, up around the lake — have been overrun, emptied and absorbed.
That is the territory that would later be called Galilee.
So he is writing to people who have already lost. Not people bracing for something — people for whom it has already happened and cannot be prevented.
That is an unusual audience for a promise, and it is the audience this chapter chose.
And into that he says something nobody expected. Listen for where the light shows up first, because it is not where you would put it.
Twenty-four mornings is a long walk and the first half of it is deliberately dark. That is not an oversight and it will not be brightened.
Isaiah, chapter nine, verses one and two.
Nevertheless, there will be no more gloom for those in distress.
In the past He humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future He will honour the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations:
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.
And Matthew, seven hundred years later, quoting those exact verses to explain where Jesus began.
Leaving Nazareth, He went and lived in Capernaum, which is by the sea in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah.
The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.
Walking. Not sitting, and not lost. Still moving, in the dark, without knowing where the path goes.
On those living in the land of the shadow of death, a light has dawned.
A question, and it does not need solving this morning.
Where are you walking in the dark at the moment? Still going, but without much to see by. Just let it come to mind.
Notice where Isaiah says the light comes first, because it is the whole of today.
Not to the capital. Not to the temple. To Zebulun and Naphtali — the regions trampled first, that had suffered longest, that everybody else had written off as gone.
The darkness came there first. So the light will dawn there first.
Seven centuries later, Matthew quotes these exact verses to explain something that had puzzled people. When Jesus began His work, He did not go to Jerusalem. He went north, to the towns by the lake, to the place of the shadow of death.
The light came up precisely where the darkness had been deepest, and Matthew wants you to know it was not a coincidence.
That is Advent in one idea. God does not wait for you to get clear of the dark before He arrives. He comes into it, and He comes to the worst part first.
And now notice the tense, because it is strange.
Have seen. Has dawned. Isaiah is writing about something seven hundred years away and he writes it as finished.
That is what it is to wait as a prophet waits. Not hoping something might happen.
So certain of it that you describe it in the past tense, standing in the ruins, with no evidence whatever. Twenty-four mornings of that is what this walk is, and by Christmas Eve you will have been doing it for three and a half weeks.
Show Him the place you named — the part of your life with the least light in it. You are not asking for it to be explained this morning.
And ask for a prophet's eyes this December — to be able to speak of what He has promised as though you had already seen it.
And if somebody you know is further into the dark than you are, hold them here for a moment before you finish.
The line to carry today.
Say it once — in the past tense, the way Isaiah wrote it.
Twenty-three mornings to go. The first half of this walk is dark on purpose, so do not expect it to cheer up quickly.
Tomorrow: a child, and four names for Him.
For now — keep walking. The light comes to the dark places first.
Listen to Day 1 and the rest of the walk in the app. Every session is read aloud, softly, over quiet music — about ten minutes a day, from 1 December to Christmas Eve.
Short summaries of the remaining sessions. Each full session is around a thousand words and takes about ten minutes to listen to.
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.”
Two verbs where Isaiah could have used one. A child is born — the ordinary human fact. A son is given — which implies someone doing the giving, and a son who existed before the birth. Then the government on His shoulders: the place you carry a load, not sit on a throne. And the last line, which people skip, says who will do all this. Not us.
“Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign.”
King Ahaz is invited to ask God for any sign he likes, and refuses — in pious language, because he has already paid the Assyrians for a different plan. So God chooses the sign Himself: a child, named God with us. Nobody in the story asked for Advent. It came anyway, over the top of everyone's refusal.
“A shoot will spring up from the stump of Jesse.”
A stump is not a small tree. It is the evidence of a large one that somebody removed. Isaiah says the royal line will be felled — and then something will grow from the same root. Five hundred years of stump, and then a shoot. That is a particular kind of hope: not something else will grow somewhere, but this, the thing that was lost, will come back.
“Comfort, comfort My people, says your God.”
Comfort, comfort My people — and the command is given to someone unnamed. God does not say I will comfort them; He tells a bystander to do it, and the reader is standing right there. Advent is not only waiting for God to arrive. It is being handed a job while you wait.
“Strengthen the limp hands and steady the feeble knees.”
A road through the desert, and in the middle of a passage about landscape, a sentence about bodies: strengthen the weak hands, steady the knees that give way. Years later, John the Baptist sends from prison to ask whether Jesus is really the one, and Jesus answers by quoting this chapter back to him.
“I will cause a righteous Branch to sprout up for David.”
Jerusalem is under siege, Jeremiah is under arrest for saying the city will fall — and he buys a field in occupied territory, weighs out the silver, signs the deed, and seals it in a jar. That is what a promise looks like when somebody acts on it. Advent hope has a receipt.
“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are small among the clans of Judah.”
Bethlehem was a farming village of a few hundred people whose one claim to fame was a thousand years old. God named it anyway. And when foreign astrologers ask where the king has been born, the scribes quote this verse immediately — and, as far as we are told, not one of them walked the six miles.
“See, your King comes to you, humble and riding on a donkey.”
Rejoice greatly — an order to celebrate, issued five hundred years before the event, to an occupied city with no king. And then the animal. Kings rode warhorses. The donkey is not modesty; it is a policy statement, and the next line says so: the chariots and the bows are being removed.
“The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.”
Malachi is the last voice before four hundred years of silence. Generations were born and died inside that quiet, turning up to a temple where nothing was being said. And the last image before the silence is a sunrise — which nobody arranges or earns, and which comes after the longest part of the night.
“Restore us, O God, and cause Your face to shine upon us, that we may be saved.”
A refrain that comes back three times, and each time the name of God gets longer — which is what people do when they are not being answered. The psalmist asks God, out loud, how long He will be angry at their praying. And what he asks for is not victory. It is for God's face to change.
“O Israel, put your hope in the LORD.”
Six verses of one man alone in deep water, and then a turn: O Israel, put your hope in the LORD. Private waiting, if it goes on long enough and stays honest, stops being only yours. This is the last morning of the dark half. Twelve prophets and psalmists, and not one of them lived to see it.
“Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard.”
Zechariah's name comes out of a bag and he gets the most important day of his working life. In the Holy Place an angel says four words: your prayer has been heard — a prayer he had stopped praying decades earlier. Then nine months of silence, for a man whose whole profession was words.
“I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me according to your word.”
She was probably somewhere between twelve and sixteen, in a village of two or three hundred people where an unmarried pregnancy could not be hidden and the law allowed for the worst. She asks one question about how, gets no guarantee about outcome, and says yes. The shortest and most consequential sentence in this walk.
“Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord's word to her will be fulfilled.”
A pregnant teenager walks eighty miles to the one person who might believe her. The first to recognise Jesus in Luke's gospel is an unborn child. And Elizabeth, with decades of waiting behind her, makes the scene about the girl at the door instead: blessed is she who has believed.
“He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has exalted the humble.”
Rulers brought down, the hungry filled, the rich sent away — sung in the past tense by a poor, pregnant, provincial girl under an occupying empire, before anything had happened. This song has been banned by governments. They understood it better than most congregations have.
“To shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
At the naming, a mute priest writes His name is John — against every relative in the room — and only then does his voice come back. The obedience comes first. And his song ends where the walk began: the Dawn visiting those in darkness and the shadow of death.
“When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him.”
He had the law on his side and the whole village behind him, and his first instinct — before any angel, while he still believed the worst — was to protect her quietly at his own cost. Four dreams in Matthew, and after every one the next sentence is that he got up and did it. He never says a word.
“She wrapped Him in swaddling cloths and laid Him in a manger.”
The word usually translated inn is the one Luke uses for the upper room. The likelier picture is a relative's house in a full town during a census, and a baby born in the part of the house where the animals were. No villain, no cruelty — God arriving in the middle of an ordinary domestic crowding problem.
“I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.”
Good news was the emperor's word — the announcement sent round the provinces when Caesar won a battle. Luke uses it about a baby in a feed trough, and the announcement goes not to Caesar or the priests but to the night shift in a field. The sign they are given is that He will look like nothing at all.
“But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”
Where our Bibles say Mary pondered, the Greek means throwing things together — pieces on a table, trying to see how they fit. Everyone else was amazed, and amazement evaporates. She kept hold of what she did not yet understand. Thirty years later, Luke was still able to interview someone who remembered.
“We saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him.”
Not kings, not necessarily three, and practising a discipline their own scriptures forbid. The star got them started but took them to the wrong city; it was scripture, quoted by men who never made the journey, that sent them the last six miles. God begins with whatever is to hand, and finishes the job with the Bible.
“For my eyes have seen Your salvation.”
An old man asks to be stood down from a watch he has kept for years: now dismiss Your servant in peace. Then, in the same minute, he turns to a teenage mother and tells her a sword will go through her soul. The one moment where the shadow of the ending falls across the beginning — two days before Christmas, on purpose.
“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.”
No manger, no shepherds, no star. John starts before there was a world to start in. On the first morning Isaiah wrote, in the past tense, of a light that had dawned; this morning the Light shines, present tense, and the darkness has not overcome it. Eight words: the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.
Day 1 is 1 December and day 24 is Christmas Eve, so it runs on the calendar. If you're starting late, begin on today's date rather than on day 1 — the last session is written for the night before Christmas and works best read that evening.
About ten minutes. Each session is a short guided reflection of roughly a thousand words: you arrive, hear the passage read aloud, sit with one line, consider it, pray, and carry a single sentence into the day.
Both. There's a fixed passage for every day, from the prophets and psalms in the first half to Luke, Matthew and John in the second, and a devotional reflection and prayer around each one. You can read only the passages if you prefer.
Yes. Nothing is assumed. The historical background you need — who Isaiah was writing to, what betrothal meant in Nazareth, why shepherds were an odd audience — is given inside each session.
The Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Every session works with any translation you already read.
No. The schedule and Day 1 are here in full. In the HER Hallow app you can listen to every session read aloud with music, about ten minutes a day.
Yes. Because it's dated, everyone reads the same passage on the same morning, which makes it easy to do with a friend or a small group over December. Each day ends with one line to carry, which is the natural thing to share.
Advent isn't Christmas. The first half is the prophets and the psalms — the waiting — and it's kept dark and unresolved on purpose. The light on Christmas Eve only lands because of how long the dark has been.
Advent, read aloud to you. The HER Hallow app has this walk and twelve others — Bible reading plans for women you can listen to, ten minutes a day.
Written by the HER Hallow team.