This year I have been thinking much about Lent and about these old traditions of ours, and wondering what our Lord thinks of these things. Is it truly any great sacrifice for one to give up chocolate in a world where many people never get the opportunity to even taste it as we do? To give up Pepsi in a world where others cannot even enjoy clean drinking water?
Across the years I have failed at countless attempts to give up something during Lent. I decide to fast and in the hustle and bustle of work catch myself eating a candy bar......can I not even remember Him for one day?
As I pondered these things and read from numerous devotionals I begin to see something. Would I be willing to approach this season of Lent differently than I have in the past? Instead of giving up some insignificant thing would I be willing to give something significant?
I am given this life, waking up each morning with breathe in my lungs and hope in my heart and yet often I will putter about the house until my time is almost up to leave for work.....and I will fail to pray, fail to spend time in His word, fail to just take a few moments and sit in His presence. Thus I steal these moments with no regard for the One who gives them to me, day after day. So instead of giving up something during this season of Lent, I will instead give Him that which is His already. My time. To start the day in His word, to sit quietly in His presence, to lift the prayers of my heart up to Him in quiet and solitude instead of the normal frantic on the run prayers. To take the time throughout my day to see the many gifts He gives, to enjoy the many things He places in my path that I so often even fail to notice.
It is highly likely that even in this I will fail. That is my human nature. But it is my hope and prayer that He will enable me to be faithful in this.
During this time of Lent we are to consider death, for death is certain for us all. We are creatures who will one day breathe our last here on earth. We know not what day that death will come. We should keep death ever in our thoughts that we might live out this life with vigor and gratitude for each breath. We only have this moment, this now, for tomorrow is not promised.
Consider His disciples on the day that Christ died. The full story had not been written yet, all they had was the simple hard truth that the man they left everything to follow, the man that they were convinced was Messiah and Savior and King over Israel......was dead. He was beaten, broken, spit upon, mocked and ridiculed. He did nothing to stop it. They had to have been expecting Him to do something, expecting at any minute the heavens would open and ten thousand angels would descend to stop this injustice.......but nothing happened.......the man they had placed all their hopes and faith in......died on a Roman cross.
Their hearts must have picked up a bit when the sky became dark and the earth began to shake, but even that soon passed, and they were left, hiding in rooms, utterly and completely defeated.
When you look at the cross from their perspective, you begin to see what a terrible and dark day was the day of Christ's death. We tend to look at it from the perspective of the resurrection. We know the end of the story. They did not yet know. He had told them many things but at that time they were unable to understand Him.
For them...."death reigned everywhere"......"death alone"
During this time of Lent we are also to consider our sins, knowing that it is our sins that placed our Lord upon the cross, it was our sins that caused His suffering, suffering He willingly accepted in our stead. What an amazing thing, that the Lord of all would see fit to become a man, walk this dirty sin stained earth, and die a forsaken death on a Roman crucifix to redeem me from the just judgement of God. It never fails to utterly astound me.
This world is a harsh place, because of the sins of humanity. Daily we see the terrible consequences of our collective sins. Not a day passes that I do not read of something that breaks my heart. Children raped and murdered. Yesterday a story of a family who left the bones of their starved and beaten toddler in an old toy box when they abandoned their home. Stories of animals cruelly abused, dogs drug behind vehicles, sheep left starving to death in a dead and lifeless pasture. Many people whom I count as friends suffer various struggles. Some are very ill, going through chemo, uncertain of tomorrow, others have lost children to war, or they struggle as we do with the darkness of PTSD and its effects on their children. Families torn apart, children in prison, jobs lost, hopelessness and sorrow heaped upon sorrow.
The season of Lent is about sorrow, about feeling it, remembering it, living in it........and yet it is a different kind of sorrow for the believer in Christ. It is a sorrow that leads to joy.
In my devotions this morning I read these words;
"The difference between shallow happiness and deep sustaining joy is sorrow. Happiness lives where sorrow is not. When sorrow arrives, happiness dies. It can't stand pain. Joy on the other hand, rises from sorrow and therefore can withstand all grief. Joy, by the grace of God, is the transfiguration of suffering into endurance, and of endurance into character, and of character into hope----and the hope that has become joy does not (as happiness must for those who depend upon it) disappoint us.
In the sorrow of Christ--as we ourselves experience them--we prepare for Easter, for joy. There can be no resurrection from the dead except first there is a death!"
"It is the experience of genuine grief that prepares for joy."
Easter is coming! Redemption is coming! Death is not the end of the story for those who believe!
Whatever you may be dealing with, be it grief, be it illness, be it terrible loss, look to Jesus, for the story is not over, death does not win, sorrow does not win, loss does not win. In Him there is life and joy and fullness despite the circumstances you might be facing here. Meditate upon His life, and meditate upon His terrible gruesome death, a death he died for you, in your place. Meditate upon these things. Feel the sorrow of the loss of Him as he breathed His last and spoke those final words "it is finished".....and then consider the rest of the story. That He is alive, that He died to pay the price for your sins, and He rose from the dead to defeat death once and for all, that you might live and have your being in Him.......forever.
