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A Message from the Pastor.....
As hard as it may be to believe, Ash Wednesday is only a couple of weeks away. With that date, the church begins a period of preparation--one that extends through Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday. On the Christian calendar, the time for laughing and dancing and being born is what Advent or Christmas is all about--the celebration over the birth of Jesus. However, the time for weeping and mourning and death becomes for us the season of Lent--a period of preparation and training for the soul, a time for prayer and confession and dying to self, when spiritual disciplines are practiced for developing a deepened and more mature faith in God. Lent is the forty-day season of fasting that begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter eve. Forty is a symbolic number that reoccurs again and again in the Bible; the children of Israel were in the wilderness forty years. Moses remained on the mountain forty days receiving the law of God. After his baptism, Jesus fasted forty days in the wilderness preparing for his ministry. Jesus' desert experience serves as a model for the church for what the Lenten season is all about.
With Ash Wednesday, Christians all over the world began to "set their face to Jerusalem." During Lent, we make a personal pilgrimage marking those days with meditation, the confession of sins, fasting and prayers. It is really the most significant season on the Christian calendar, moreso than even Christmas, for it prepares us mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for the dramatic events of Holy Week, culminating with Easter Sunday. During Lent, we are to so immerse ourselves into the drama that when the stone is rolled away on Easter morning and Jesus emerges victoriously from the tomb, we are filled with unconstrained excitement; we feel a part of it because we know that Christ's victory is meant for US!
As we begin to set our own faces toward Jerusalem, let's make every effort to enter into this period with the kind of seriousness that it deserves, that we be very intentional about practicing such spiritual disciplies as personal prayer, scripture meditation, and being faithful in Sunday worship so that when Easter does arrive, it will be more than just a curious story we like to recite every spring but an event that continues to change our lives year after year.
Pastor Dave
