Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday. Today begins a 40 day journey that will take us to the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on March 27th. Not everyone participates in Lent in the same manner but I do believe that it is important that each of us take time to reflect on the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for each of us. It is very easy to become attracted to the "blessings" that are associated with Jesus. This can lead to the tendency of forgetting those things concerning the "sacrificial" side of Jesus. We must remember that He left the splendor and glory of Heaven to come to Earth and dwell among sinful humanity. He took on the form of a human being so that He would be able to identify with the challenges, temptations, trials, difficulties, etc. that human beings face. 

Aren't you glad to know that He is able to identify with our humanity? He is not only able to identify with our humanity but He is also able to minister to our humanity. This serious reflection on the price that was paid for our redemption will also lead us to celebrate the freedom that we enjoy because Jesus willingly offered His life in our place on that old rugged cross over 2,000 years ago. Yet, the life of Jesus Christ is still making a difference in the lives of many people even in 2016. And I am one of the lives that senses His work in my heart on a daily basis. It is no wonder that the song declares, "Oh what a Savior..."

I would like to share something that I read earlier this morning:

"What happened on that Resurrection Day, which we’ll commemorate 40 days from now, is the most important event in the history of the world. As Russell Moore has said, “Christians from all over the world, despite all this science and all this progress and all this technology, [still confess] what the earliest believers in the catacombs of Rome cried out: ‘Christ is risen indeed.’”

We confess it because what it says about God, the universe, and us is TRUE. On Ash Wednesday and during the season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving called Lent, we redouble our efforts to heed Jesus’ call to pick up our crosses and follow him. We meditate and remember with Paul that we have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer we who live, but Christ who lives in us.

Crucified with Christ! Our hopes, desires, politics, intellect, and yes, even our sexuality—crucified with Christ. What a thing to say! Jesus, who redeemed us by His blood, lays claim to all of these things.

This is not the God of what sociologist Christian Smith has dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a god who demands nothing more than that people take it easy on themselves and be nice and fair to one another.

This is a God who says the two greatest commandments are to love Him with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And as Jesus said, to love Him is to obey Him (talk about counter cultural!) and to believe in the One He has sent. To love our neighbors, we preach the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection and His triumph over sin and death. 

Friend, what could be more authentic, more relevant, than to conform our lives to Jesus, who is the Way the Truth and the Life? Jesus did not and will not conform Himself to the culture. Why would we? How dare we urge others to? As Paul says, we were called to freedom in Christ, which is a freedom from conformity and from the desires of the flesh and a freedom to serve one another in love, joy peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5).

Now that’s a lot to swallow, which is one reason that for nearly two millennia, Christians have taken this long season of Lent as an opportunity to repent of our conformity to the world, draw near to Jesus, and prepare ourselves to celebrate the day that changed the universe."

Let each of us eagerly participate in a time of personal reflection over the next 40 days!!

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