Dear friends,
Lent, the forty-day season leading up to Easter, is an unpleasant time of year. The goal is not to excite but to lead us to repent. It’s not like Christmas. Christmas is a joyous time of anticipation. We look forward to a birth. We have been longing for the Messiah to come and now is he is here. The celebration is like that of parents who have been unable to have children suddenly finding out they have become pregnant. It is a time when we live out the anticipation and celebration of a child’s birth. This is Christmas.
Lent is different. This is a season of the cross. A season of suffering and repentance. A season of renewal and stripping away. Just as Jesus was stripped of his clothes, his dignity, his friends and family and laid bare for the redemption of the world we strip away all that stands between us and the purposes of God for our lives.
Many join in this season by stripping from their lives things which have been allowed to come between them and God in a forty day season of fasting for renewal. The challenge for each of us, whether we formally participate in fasting or not, is to examine our lives for those things which have been allowed to creep and in, then repent and strip away. I have known many who give up caffeine, chocolate, diet soda, or some other food. While it is true these things may be standing in the way of God, their presence, as a stumbling block, often signals something far deeper in our soul. Do we have the courage to peel back another layer and dig deeper for the true source which stands between us and God? Lent is not a spiritualized diet it is deep soul cleansing.
What are you willing to give up? For a long time, I have known I needed to abandoned social media. I have felt its narcissistic envy-inducing claws pierce deep into my soul. I have known I needed to step away but have made many excuses about it being essential to my job. This year, I will stop the excuses. I have found a tool that will allow me to push content to my church’s page without my actually having to be on social media. Beyond that, my participation will go silent. My cover and profile pictures will be replaced by that of the cross. A reminder to this season’s call to repentance.
What about you? What have you allowed to infect you soul which needs to be stripped away? Will you join me in this season you choosing your own act of renewal and repentance?
Pastor Stephen
So what about, “Christmas is a birth and a birth is violent?” Any woman who’s given birth will tell you it’s violent and a baby would too if he could. But what about the violence that came because of Jesus’ birth? Obviously there was Mary’s pain and even the pressure that Jesus must have felt as his tiny body was pushed through a narrow birth canal. But what about the spiritual birth that is made possible in each one of us because of Jesus’ birth, death (violence again) and resurrection? Is that violent? Yeah, I think it is. I think the spiritual birth that is possible in each one of our lives because of the Christmas birth is violent—and sometimes downright painful.