Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Lenten Quote, Day 12
Christians are walking dead men. The Christian life is a kind of living death. We are learning to be broken, even as Jesus was broken. We are learning to give ourselves in costly sacrifice, even as Jesus did. We are learning to live the cruciform life. We are learning to give life to others by dying to ourselves, our desires, our agendas. Yes, the reality of bodily death awaits us. But having already died in Christ, we can approach our bodily death with hope, knowing that while death remains a foe, it is a defeated foe, and now serves our ultimate good. Death has defeated death, so, dying we live. Lent emphasizes that we live our whole lives under the sign of the cross — and in this sign we conquer! When you’ve already died, you have nothing left to fear. You are prepared to fearlessly serve God. You are set free to live for the glory of God and the good of your neighbor. You know ultimate victory over death is secure. You know nothing that can happen to you without serving your ultimate good. –Rich Lusk
Wilson on Lent without Easter
Doug Wilson again touches on a crucial element of our weekly gathering:
In Leviticus 23, the weekly sabbath is listed along with the rest of Israel’s festivals as a feast, as a festival. The weekly sabbath was a day of rejoicing, not a day of gloom. The Jews had only one penitential day out of the year — their Good Friday, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement.
But for some, that is not nearly enough gloom. There is something in the religious heart that wants to locate affliction and trouble where the God of all grace has located none. When we say that we are sabbatarians, the mind and heart leap immediately to what we have to give up. It has been easy for us to see Lenten excesses in what other communions say and do, but the conservative Reformed view of the sabbath is often Lent without any Easter to mitigate the sorrow.
The joy of the Lord is our strength. We have been laboring for many years to turn around this common error concerning the Lord’s Day. More is involved in this than might initially appear, and so we give ourselves to it.
What must you give up in order to come to this Table? What must you leave behind? Only your sorrow. Only your guilt. Only your gloom. Come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.
Lenten Quote, Day 11
“The spiritual quest is not for interesting “spiritual experiences” but for the expansion of our capacity for mercy, the opening of our hearts wide enough to embrace the world, and not just the fragments of it, here and there, which at present we manage to feel with and care about.” (Martin L. Smith, A Season for the Spirit, p. 27)
How Paul died daily is perfectly obvious. He never gave himself up to a sinful life but kept his body under constant control. He carried death with him, Christ’s death, wherever he went. He was always being crucified with Christ. It was not his own life he lived; it was Christ who lived in him. This surely was a timely death-a death whose end was true life.
I put to death and I shall give life, God says, teaching us that death to sin and life in the Spirit is his gift, and promising that whatever he puts to death he will restore to life again.
St. Gregory of Nyssa
Lenten Quote, Day 10
We acknowledge Lent in the same way and for the same reason we have a time of Confession at the beginning of each worship service. There is a time for lament over sins; there is a time for mourning our own depravity. But lament and mourning ought not choke out rejoicing in the goodness of God. –Peter Leithart
Lenten Meditation: The Salvation of the World
Jesus Christ is the Savior of the World. There is no salvation apart from Him (John 14:6; Acts 4:12). We reject the claim that any man can be saved apart from Jesus Christ. Yet, we must also not fall into the trap of believing that Christ is saving only a few. Contrary to modern expectations, Jesus has come to save and not to condemn (John 3:17). He is saving a world of people by drawing them to Himself (John 6:44). Heaven’s population will be infinitely superior to hell’s population. The reason this is the case is because the death of Christ secured the election of a great multitude that no one could number (Rev. 7:9). Let us rejoice in this Lenten Season that the death of our Lord on the cross was a death that did not save a few, but people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.
Prayer:
We thank you our Lord for redeeming us. We pray that as your gospel is proclaimed in all parts of the world that nations would flock to you in worship (Isaiah 2); that they would acknowledge you as the only Lord of the world and the only true light. Amen.
Lenten Quote, Day 9
Is it necessary to explain that Easter is much more than one of the feasts, more than a yearly commemoration of a past event? Anyone who has, be it only once, taken part in that night which is “brighter than the day,” who has tasted of that unique joy, knows it….On Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us to joyfully affirm: “Death is no more!” Oh, death is still there, to be sure, and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a “passover”—into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory.
Such is the faith of the Church….Is it not our daily experience, however, that this faith is very seldom ours, that all the time we lose and betray the “new life” which we received as a gift, and that in fact we live as if Christ did not rise from the dead, as if that unique event had no meaning whatsoever for us? … We simply forget all this—so busy are we, so immersed in our daily preoccupations—and because we forget, we fail. And through this forgetfulness, failure, and sin, our life becomes “old” again—petty, dark, and ultimately meaningless—a meaningless journey toward a meaningless end. … We may from time to time acknowledge and confess our various “sins,” yet we cease to refer our life to that new life which Christ revealed and gave to us. Indeed, we live as if He never came. This is the only real sin, the sin of all sins, the bottomless sadness and tragedy of our nominal Christianity.
So let us rediscover Lent. A journey, a pilgrimage! Yet, as we begin it, as we make the first step into the “bright sadness” of Lent, we see—far, far away—the destination. It is the joy of Easter, it is theentrance into the glory of the Kingdom. And it is this vision, the foretaste of Easter, that makes Lent’s sadness bright and our Lenten effort a “spiritual spring.” The night may be dark and long, but allalong the way a mysterious and radiant dawn seems to shine on the horizon. –Alexander Schmemann
Penitential Prayer of St. Ambrose of Milan
O Lord, who hast mercy upon all,
take away from me my sins,
and mercifully kindle in me
the fire of thy Holy Spirit.
Take away from me the heart of stone,
and give me a heart of flesh,
a heart to love and adore Thee,
a heart to delight in Thee,
to follow and enjoy Thee, for Christ’s sake, Amen
St. Ambrose of Milan (AD 339-397)
Lenten Quotes, Day 8
I venture the affirmation that the great need of the Christian life, is the need of the grace of humility. Humility, which exalts the law of God, and the example of Jesus Christ, our righteousness; humility which has the courage to confess a fault with the purpose to correct it; humility which craves the smile of God before the face of man; humility which judges all conduct by the one only standard of human life–the will of God. –Rev. Ellison Capers
We must never forget that the religion of the Crucified can never be the religion of the self-satisfied. –EC
A Song of Humility (Hosea 6:1-6)
“Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn,
that he may heal us;
he has stricken, and he will bind us up.After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;
his going forth is sure as the dawn;He will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth.”What shall I do with you, O E’phraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes early away.Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets,
I have slain them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.Glory to the Father and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning is now
and will be forever. Amen.
Lenten Quote, Day 7
Lent is the season of Thanksgiving for the penitent. If truly so, and the confession is sincere, there are no places in his mind which he is afraid to disclose. His penitence and confession has secured pardon, and it is this sense of pardon which is man’s emancipation. –George Worthington