Whether you believe your Lenten Fast can end on Saturday, Sunday morning, or you follow Mrs. Worthen’s dogma that it ends after you attend church at Friday noon, Lent soon ends. Next week we’ll talk about what you plan to do with what you’ve gained and learned. But on Good Friday, let’s pause to think about one of the “fundamentals” or “basics.” Forgive me Luis and all other readers more schooled in the basics than I. I won’t say it well. I’m a rookie, not a coach.
On Good Friday, Christ died for us. I listened to CS Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I like the way he said: we may not understand or disagree on how it works but as Christians we believe it happened. (My apologies to Lewis as well. Here are a couple of direct quotes: “We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. … That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.” And “When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world.”).
Now think for a minute, for whom would you willingly give up your life? Family or a close friend, perhaps. Then with even that handful consider, for whom would you willingly go through torture before you died? Would you willingly submit to be beaten and hung with nails driven through your wrists and feet for hours before you die? Would you do it for a stranger? – not likely. You’d have to love someone a whole lot to even consider the kind of death Christ endured.
You are now beginning to look through a dusty lens at a smidgeon of the love God has for you and understand that you are hardly a stranger to God, although God may be a stranger to you. Have you thought deeply about what Christ was doing for you that day? I believe when the reality of what he did for you, not someone else, it will change you forever. God’s love is what you carry with you into the days ahead.
Leave a Reply +