Ash Wednesday

Matthew 6:20-21
“But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Where your treasure is, there your heart, your centre, your core will be also. Drought, fire and flood remind us again that this world is passing away, that your life is always just a step from death’s door. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are all born weak and helpless. All lead the same short, troubled life. So why should we treasure the things of this world, pleasure, possessions, and pride, all that is passing away? From Joel (2:1), the day of the Lord is coming, 40 days not counting Sundays until that time when He would come and fulfil His promises, destroying sin, death, and the devil; the Day of the New Creation.

And you are already a part of that New Creation in Jesus, joined with Him by the Spirit in baptism and again soon by Holy Communion. And yet still we are part of this world that is passing away. Jesus had lived in this world for 30yrs before He began His ministry, so to prepare He went into the wilderness, away from the world, and fasted for 40 days. He was tempted by the devil with bread, pleasing the bodily desires; with global power, possession of fame and fortune; and finally to prove Christ’s divinity outside of God’s Word, to take the place of God in pride saying it’s my way or the highway.

Jesus refused all these worldly temptations with the Word of God, and now He tells us to do the same. To fast, give to the needy, and to pray. Not to let your belly, or other lower parts of your body, control your life, not let money or pretty things guide you, not let your pride take you down that wide road to destruction. Those are the ways of this world, if you treasure these things your heart will be destroyed with them. Rather, just as Jesus did, treasure the things of God, His Word, His love, and His power. For these things will never pass away. And if these things of God which you treasure will not pass away, neither will you.

That is the promise of God at His coming. Jesus lived, died, rose and now lives again for you and the New Creation. This world is passing away, hunger, lust, greed, and pride are passing away; but the New Creation in Jesus, this holy life will never pass away. So prepare for the celebration of the New Creation, treasuring the things of God.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus now and forever. Amen.

Rev Joseph Graham.

Return to the Lord your God

Joel 2:1-2; 12-17.

(1) Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy hill. Let all who live in the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming. It is close at hand– {2} a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness. Like dawn spreading across the mountains a large and mighty army comes, such as never was of old nor ever will be in ages to come. {12} ‘Even now,’ declares the LORD, ‘return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning.’ {13} Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity. {14} Who knows? He may turn and have pity and leave behind a blessing– grain offerings and drink offerings for the LORD your God. {15} Blow the trumpet in Zion, declare a holy fast, call a sacred assembly. {16} Gather the people, consecrate the assembly; bring together the elders, gather the children, those nursing at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room and the bride her chamber. {17} Let the priests, who minister before the LORD, weep between the temple porch and the altar. Let them say, ‘Spare your people, O LORD. Do not make your inheritance an object of scorn, a byword among the nations. Why should they say among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?”

As we begin this Lenten season, God through the prophet Joel sends out the call to us, to wake up: to sound the alarm: we are facing a very serious situation: Which on the face of it has dire consequences. The day of the Lord is coming; and in fact, we are reminded that it is close at hand; and that most people are not ready or prepared for it. So it is going to be a day of darkness and gloom: a day of clouds and darkness. A day of destruction as has never been seen before: A day when many people will be wiped out – caste into Hell. So wake up – sound the alarm bells – because that day is near at hand.
But, ho hum – everybody goes back to sleep: they hit the snooze alarm. What’s the big deal! Who cares? I have got other things to do and think about. I’m busy and all the rest.

No, wake up! Wake up! This is God – the Lord’s – call. This is important stuff. It is not some media beat up or some panic merchant talking about some insignificant issue. This is God Almighty himself telling us to wake up – to sound the alarm bells. There is not much time left and unless there is an urgent change of heart, the destruction that will take place will be unprecedented. Remember, here the Lord himself is trying stir us into action: to wake us up from our apathy and make us aware of the seriousness of the situation of life that we are facing and the destruction that will befall us if there is no change of heart. In a sense, he is saying that here is a last chance to avert this impending doom.
Even now, he says – even now – return to me: return to me with all your heart; with fasting and weeping and mourning. Please; please, come back: Take this message and me seriously, and do it recognising the seriousness of the issue, and the harm and the devastation that you are bringing on yourselves. Return to me; he says. Come back! Come back now, before it is too late.

So this Lenten season rend your hearts and not your garments. Be fair dinkum about God and the Christian life. Now is not the time for outward show. It is not simply a matter of church attendance, finances, and a few good deeds. We need to recognise that at the core of our being there is a serious problem: Our hearts are not where they should be; they are focussed inwards and not upwards, and so there is a serious need for a change for the better. Tear your heart open, because it is a matter that is too grave and too important. Remember this is a life and death issue, and we are facing death and destruction if we do not take God and his Word seriously: and we deserve nothing less if that be the case.

Let us all heed the call here to return to the Lord our God, for he is gracious and compassionate; slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He does relent from sending calamity, and yes, he wants to help us and save us. His love for us is such that does not want to give us a hard time or destroy us. Even though we don’t deserve it, he still cares about us and wants better for us. There is still hope.

Look God has changed his mind before; on a number of occasions. Think of Jonah and the people of Nineveh for instance. When they realized what was about to happen to them because of their waywardness, they repented: they sincerely turned their backs on their former ways, with great sorrow. And we hear that God did not bring the calamity on them that he had promised. So let us return to Lord our God, while we still have an opportunity: who knows, he may turn and have pity on us and leave behind a blessing, so that we can again give thanks to our God.

Let us gather together everyone, so that we can call on the Lord our God to spare us: To call on him so that he does not wipe us out, and give further evidence for others to ridicule Christianity, and continue to say that obviously this God of ours is not for real. Look what he has done to us. No, let us call on him to help us; to save us; and make us the people that he wants us to be again: Imploring him to restore us again as his people: as people who look to him as their Lord and saviour.

This Lenten season let us heed our Lord’s message here. Let the alarm bells ring to stir us out of our complacency, and to remind us again that we cannot take the Lord our God for granted and ignore the fact that his day of judgement is coming; soon. Then he will deal with those who continue to place their trust in themselves or elsewhere other than the Lord Jesus Christ; as he must, once and for all.

So let us hear his call to return to him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength; cut to the heart because of our sins; sorrowful for our waywardness; yet knowing that he is a gracious and compassionate God who loves us immensely: so much so in fact that he sent own Son into our world to take that punishment we deserve for our sin, on himself: So that we can have forgiveness and the assurance of salvation.
Knowing that he has died and risen again for our forgiveness and salvation, let us return to him with confidence. Yes deeply aware and sorrowful for our waywardness and sin, which brought about Jesus’ death on the cross, but with that assurance that he is slow to anger and abounding in his steadfast love toward us.

Then may we again confidently, give our gracious God thanks and praise for all of his goodness, and that we then also go forward with this message that others may look and say, Yes, here is their God also. A holy and awesome God: one who is above all and over all: gracious and compassionate. Here is that One who is truly the only real God there is. Yes, may we all take him seriously and give our all to him.
May God’s Holy Spirit be with us all this Lenten season, and draw us all back into his loving fellowship, so that the day of the Lord may be a day of rejoicing for us his people. God be with you all this Lenten season. AMEN.

Pastor Roger Atze

The best pretenders!

Ash Wednesday

Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21

Dear Heavenly Father, send your Holy Spirit upon us so that we don’t pretend or ‘show-off’ our faith for our own glory, but instead seek to do our acts of righteousness for your glory, for the sake of the treasure given to us through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

We humans are so mixed up and so often get things the wrong way round!

Take for example, our fixation on awards.

One of the most popular and most watched award programs in the world would have to be the Oscars. You know, the Academy Awards for the best film, best actor, and so on. Just try to imagine how much money is spent to hold the event, how much is spent on the spectacular looking clothes all the artists wear, and how much is spent publicizing the event on TV and in magazines. The amount of money would have to be significant to say the least! The size of the audience watching the Oscars, either live, or delayed, or viewing summaries shown in news broadcasts, would be huge.

But, get this…the biggest award show on the earth gives away awards to…the best pretenders!

Have you ever realized this? The awards for best actors in most of these award shows go to those who are best at pretending to be someone else! Just think how many people become famous, or make incredible fortunes by pretending or making out they’re someone else.

Of course, not all people are paid to pretend, but they do seek something for their efforts. We have all, at some stage, put on a show for others in order to get what we want. For instance, have you ever seen children put on those ‘crocodile tears’ in order to get something, and then, once they got what they wanted, they quickly reverted back to ‘normal’? Or, have you seen children ‘show-off’ to get attention?

We adults are much more subtle of course. We’ve learned the art of pretending or ‘showing-off’ over the years and some of us are very good at manipulating people in order to get what we want, be that attention, praise, sympathy, or recognition.

We may even ‘pretend’ with our faith. Our ‘pretending’ or ‘showing-off’ gets even easier in church, because Jesus even tells us how we should act. For instance, in tonight’s reading, Jesus tells us to give to the poor, to pray, and to fast. We can pretend to do that. We can even try to impress each other by showing how generous we are with our giving, how many meetings of church committees we attend, how many times we pray, or what food and drink we are fasting from or how good we are at church cleaning duties and so on.

We might even show-off our faith or spirituality by showing people how long our prayers can be, how committed we are to the Lord by urging others to match our efforts, or how much we’re willing to sacrifice for the sake of Christ and his church. We even compare ourselves to others, criticising them when we don’t think they’re as good a Christian as we are, criticising them when they’re not good enough at ‘pretending’. For this reason Martin Luther insisted our righteousness is more dangerous than our sin because our ‘righteousness’ serves the most self-centred of all human desires – the desire for self-glorification.

You may not think you’re pretending. You may think you’re doing these things because of your genuine faith in Jesus. Yet, as Holden Caulfield, a character in the book ‘Catcher in the Rye’, written by J D Salinger, said: “If you do something good, then, after a while, if you don’t watch it, you start showing off. And then you’re not as good anymore.”

Also, unfortunately, sooner or later we stop pretending and people see us live differently at church compared to our public life during the week. They wonder which one is the “real” us and which is our fake life of pretending or showing off? They even call us names for our pretending, for the way we live a lie, or for the way we show off our faith by making people think we’re better than others. They call us hypocrites.

Jesus tells us how to act but he also tells us to do all these things in secret. How can we gain attention, praise, sympathy or recognition, when we have to do all these things in secret? How are we supposed to win awards if no one sees us? How are we to get the attention we’re craving if no one knows what we’re doing? How are we supposed to show-off or gain glory for ourselves if there’s no one about?

God’s not into pretending or lies: he sees right through our clever charades, our acting and pretending, and he sees the frightened sinful people behind the masks we put on to hide our true selves. He’s the one who sees everything we do, even when we do it in secret.

We don’t need to show off, or do a great song and dance act, or put on crocodile tears, or make huge shows of sacrificing time, talents, or money in order to be noticed by God. God sees us and knows us more intimately and more truthfully than we know ourselves. We don’t have to compete for his attention, because we already have it. Jesus wants to liberate us from the burden and never-ending task of trying to impress anyone- whether it be impressing ourselves, impressing others, or impressing God.

When we silly humans do things in order to impress God, he doesn’t see them. It’s as if our ‘showing off’ blinds him. But, when we do things in private, where no-one else can even see what we’re doing, God sees clearly.

If all our pretending and showing off is for a reward here on earth, then that’s all we’re going to get, and the rewards will remain on earth. The bank account of human admiration we build up for ourselves on earth can’t be transferred to heaven.

But instead, in this season of Lent, our Lord encourages each one of us to take up private acts of faith. For our secret or private faith practices of being charitable, praying and fasting, seen only by God, will be rewarded in heaven. The reward isn’t salvation or righteousness, because these have already been given to us as a free gift through faith in Jesus Christ. The reward referred to is recognition for our faithful service in heaven.

An example of this might be God boasting to the heavenly council of Job’s faithfulness, proudly pointing to him and how trustworthy he is. In this sense, the reward is a bit like a parent who is proud of their child and boasts to their friends and relatives. Even though we simply act how God expects us, the reward could simply be God saying to us: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

We don’t have to impress God. We already have his attention. Nothing we do could make him love us more or less, yet he does reward his faithful servants in heaven. The reward isn’t silver or gold or an Oscar, but it might simply be God’s approval and pride in you, his precious child.

We don’t need to show off our faith in order to be noticed and awarded by others, but we do need to practice our faith – in private. God sees what you do and his lasting reward is waiting for you.

The peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

The time is now..

 

The following stories all appeared one under the other in a city paper:

Islamic State burns 45 people to deathPastor Steve

ISLAMIC State militants are using a new tactic to shock the world as they move closer to a US stronghold in Iraq.

Muscle Barbie: ‘The guys are just jealous’

JULIA Vins is just 18, but the ‘muscle barbie’ has gained thousands of fans because of her unusual blend of wide-eyed pretty looks and muscular physique.

Welcome to the randiest suburb in Australia

THEY’RE single and ready to mingle. With over a hundred times more lonely hearts in this suburb than any of its nearest neighbors, we bet you won’t guess what’s made this area so hot to trot.

Abbotsford.

Maybe a lot of men wearing Budgie smugglers.

It would seem we live in a world where one person might chain themselves to a tree in a forest to protect it, while another lives with the constant dangers of rape, beheadings and now being burned alive for no other reason than they’re not of the same variance of the ideology of the perpetrators.

We have the great Western power seemingly making friends with countries that openly desire that the nation of Israel be wiped off the map.

Church’s not just welcoming those who live who live in opposition to God’s law-AS WE SHOULD ALL WELCOME, but  some Church’s not just welcoming but seemingly condoning it.

If we were in the heavens looking down and seeing all these jigsaw pieces come together in the one picture I would think we would feel like busting it up and starting a new one and the statements concerning the last days of:

As in the time of Noah

And leaders talking of peace but looking to war certainly come to mind.

This could be where I go down the street with my soapbox bellowing “repent for the end is near.”

Who knows, maybe it is or maybe it’s not because we remember that the apostles were all but certain it would happen in their time.

Martin Luther when asked what he would do if he knew it was his last day before death answered, that he would plant a tree which echoes to me the sign on the out the front of the plant nursery on the way to Gil. That says:

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, and the next best is now.”

Since ancient times Lent has been a time of preparation for the celebration of Easter, a season of spiritual spring-cleaning. During the 40 days of Lent, Christians battled against the powers of darkness and their sinful self by the practice of fasting and self-examination, meditation and prayer. Since it was a time of repentance, they often wore sackcloth and covered themselves with ashes.
Hence Ash Wednesday.

Problem for me is that a bit like New Year’s Eve’s resolutions, in my failed attempts at repentance it’s tempting to repent of repenting.
And there’s the trick that the dark side wants to push on us. See you’re still as bad as before, just give up on it.
Words with a bit of truth but like to Adam and Eve in the garden, used out of context and meaning.

Repentance is not becoming some great never to sin again person. Yes it is most surely striving too, but at the top is in repenting to see the error of our ways and turn back to God-seek and receive forgiveness and start afresh like a cricket batsmen who gets out early from a stupid shot must put it behind them, get back to basics and start a fresh in their next innings.

I mentioned once before that King David, the King mentioned as a man after God’s own heart was mentioned as such not because he was perfect, but because as soon as he was shown the error of his ways, he would turn to God and seek forgiveness.

These are turbulent times in our world and how they will play out we do not know, but like with our own thing that we are each dealing with, God seems to makes a habit of bringing deliverance from a crisis and if you planted that tree twenty years ago, though there has been droughts, floods, fire and famine-there it still is, stronger than ever providing shade in the heat and cover in the rain.

In the Garden of Eden God said there would be consequences if that apple was eaten, and then as there is now that is case the. Not from God getting in some payback, but from the sin that we brought on ourselves,

And yet when God looks down on all those jigsaw pieces of our world and sees the results of our sin, he also sees His Son on a cross in each of the physical and spiritual battles taking place, in every piece does Christ walk as he has in every piece of your own journey and that He knows that sin will still be in play until the last day, He asks not the impossible, He asks what would seem improbable in such a time in our world, that all would turn back to God and be freed from themselves to be free in Christ.

For those in fare away lands and in parts of our own where we have none or little influence, we can and should always pray that be the case.

For those here in our midst to whom which come before us, we pray this be the case and ask our Lord to guide us in mind and actions that they see His light.

And for us here, pray we, as we run our race continue to be blest to know the truth, that in Christ when we turn to God in asking forgiveness in the name of His Son and our Saviour Jesus the Christ, that we know from His Word and promise that is stronger than any mineral and greater than any condition we find ourselves:

That truly, Christ died on that cross for you, and through Christ and in the name of the Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit your sins are washed away and forgiven. Praise be to God. Amen.

Popper Prayers

Ash Wednesday Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21  Prayer


I have with me the perfect example of prayer:  (pop a popper)  Can you tell me why it seems to us a popper represents our prayers?  Well, here are some reasons why poppers are our prayers:

  • We only use prayer on special occasions
  • We imagine our prayers need to be impacting, like the bang, in order to gain God’s attention.
  • Our thoughts are all bottled up in our minds and we let a barrage of requests shoot up to heaven, like the streamers.
  • Most importantly, just as the streamers came pouring down almost immediately after they were fired up, we want our prayers to be answered immediately and we want the answers from God to stream down upon us and shower us with goodness.

 

The popper prayer most accurately describes our prayer practices and expectations, and if we were honest to ourselves, the popper prayer is really the only way we know how to pray.  Perhaps this is why we struggle with prayer, struggle to pray each day.  The popper prayer may not be how God intended prayer to be.  Perhaps popper prayer is more closely aligned with our plans and expectations of prayer than God’s.  And as you are well aware, anything centred in us, is sinful and against God’s plans and is destined to failure.  When prayer is human centred, prayer is hard.  Its hard because we keep getting the same results, a perception that God is not listening and is not answering our prayers.

 

We try harder, more fervent prayer, or to use my example, we put more gun powder into prayer, hoping God will be awakened by the big commotion and rain down answers.  Jesus likens this sort of practice to the prayers of hypocrites.  Hypocritical prayers are designed to be seen not heard; to be showed off as a perfect word sculpture.  They are prayers that are to be seen by everyone in the church, bible group, or street corner and especially to be seen God…but not heard.  No wonder there is no answer to the popper prayer.  Like the popper, its self serving and designed to be a display, not a way of communicating.

 

Michael Foss, the author of many discipleship books says we are creatures of habit.  We constantly do things exactly the same, yet, for some unknown reason, expect different results.  Not so, the results will remain the same.  Human centred prayer will always return the same results, a sense of rejection by God because he didn’t answer the way we expected. 

 

The feeling of not being heard is the result of sin which is most evident in the difficulty we have with prayer. You would think as a Christian, prayer would come naturally, as natural as breathing, yet we all know this is not so.  Let me quote from John Kleinig’s book ‘Grace upon grace’, in which he gives us some insight into why God allows us to fail in prayer. ‘We know that we should pray.  We would like to pray more regularly, ardently, and spontaneously.  The harder we try, the more we seem to fail.  But that’s how its meant to be.  Christ lets us fail when we pray by ourselves so we rely on his intercession for us.  Oddly, our success in prayer comes from our personal failure and our willingness to carry on as he works for us and in us.’

 

Jesus allows us to fail in prayer, not to make us put more powder into our prayer, but to make us realize our inadequacies and hopelessness without him.  The power of prayer lay not in our success, but in our failures.  Answer to our prayer comes in and through failure and disappointment. 

 

This is why Jesus encourages us to drop the outward displays, let go of the popper prayer, and retreat to a quiet place, a lonely place and let him take over your prayer; let him use our prayer and make it acceptable to God.  I have a picture of what this sort of prayer looks like. (picture of Peter holding onto Jesus after walking on water: ask what Peter was doing just before this)

 

Here we have the perfect prayer.  Peter represents us, sinking into the sea of despair and rejection after failing in prayer, but then Jesus takes over where we fail and takes our hand as a brother and leads our prayers right into the heavenly Father’s ears.  And after lifting us and our prayers into the presence of the Father, Jesus then brings us back into the boat, back into his word, his gospel where we rely on his promises ‘I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.’

 

This Lenten season, I am encouraging you to be involved in this Lenten study on prayer.  It has been compiled by some of our members.  It is a nightly devotional series on prayer and it is designed to help you to discover new ways to pray.  We have taken snippets of advice from Jesus and the prayer he taught us.  From Luther, Hallesby, and others.  Can I commend this to you as a tool to assist you in your pray life over the next forty days of Lent.  To encourage you in prayer and to help you realize prayer is not about us, its about God and how he does indeed hear our prayer.

 

Prayer is certainly a wonderful gift.  Yet it would be wrong of me to say that after you have studied the booklet, everything would be fine.  Rather, let me finish on a sober warning from one of the desert fathers, a man called Agathon ‘The brethren also asked him ‘Amongst all good works, which is the virtue which requires the greatest effort?’  He answered, ‘Forgive me, but I think there is no labour greater than that of prayer to God.  For every time a man wants to pray, his enemies, the demons, want to prevent him, for they know that it is only by turning him from prayer that they can hinder his journey.  Whatever good work a man undertakes, if he perseveres in it, he will attain rest.  But prayer is warfare to the last breath.’

Amen

If you would like a copy of this booklet please email Pastor at Brenton.fiedler@lca.org.au

 

Ash Wednesday 2008

 

Over the past week or so we have had some pretty scary thunderstorms.  You can see them building up in the distance.  You know they are coming.  The rumbles, the flashes of lightening and the growing darkness announce the coming wrath of nature.  We go into hiding, go under cove to protect ourselves from facing the elements and the dangers.  We stay in doors, locked away until the darkness passes.  To illustrate the coming of something to fear, Joel uses the imagery of an Army coming to attack.  The trumpets announce the coming wrath and warn the people to take cover; to go into hiding for fear of being killed.

This imagery of a thunderstorm; the darkness, the flashes of lightening or the imagery of the fierce army coming and the fear it produces in us, is literally how you and I feel when caught in sin.  I don’t mean being actually caught doing something wrong, and the fear and darkness we experience when we know the consequences.  No, I mean the darkness and fear we experience when our guilty conscience is pricked.  Perhaps someone says some thing as innocent as ‘It terrible how people could lie like that’ or ‘fancy Johno being a violent abuser’ and instantly, bang, like a clamp of thunder our conscience darkens, and guilt, like lightening strikes us to the heart.  We ourselves have done just that, or are still doing just that, or similar.

Our feelings of guilt make us act as if a severe storm is coming.  We want to hide to protect ourselves; we want to hide our secret, lock ourselves away with it for fear that if we were to be found out we would be struck down.

To hide means to be a captive, stuck, locked up in one place.  Guilt produces shame and shame holds us in a state of captivity, like we were enduring a storm in a tiny cellar. The only difference is, storms eventually move on, whereas, guilt always remains and so we remain locked up by the shame.  Feelings of unworthiness, or anger at ourselves that we let others down, or even anger that we let ourself down, stop us from coming out of hiding.

So how do we get of this?  Do we find comfort inside ourselves, not daring to mention to anyone our secret?  No, secrets make us prisoners in our own body.  What about lying, could we lie to others or even to ourself?  No, lies also lock us up; Do we act like a doctor and explore ways to cure the pain that is in us?  Drink, medication, sleeping tablets. No, the cause of the pain is not physical, though there are physical symptoms, sudden weight loss or gain, depression, or a weak immune system, but to fix the symptoms is pointless, the pain is originated in our actions.

So how do we get out of our hiding place?  Can we even?

When a thunderstorm comes, we fear, and with good reason; the lightning strikes the ground and the thunder crashes all around. But then, have you noticed what happens next?  After the storm cell has passed, it begins to rain.  Everything we fear has moved on, and we are left with rain; rain that renews, restores and refreshes the earth; rain that is life giving.  We had to face the storm, but after the storm we have the rain.

Guilt and shame over sin is our storm, its the army approaching to attack us, and it’s the thunder bolts of guilt that continue to strike us; it hangs around as long as we remain in hiding; but if we come out and confess our sins, admit our guilt, then the storm goes, and the healing rains come pouring down.  The prophet Joel puts it this way ‘The day of the LORD is great; it is dreadful. Who can endure it? That’s the storm, but then he goes on.  ‘Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.’  That’s the rain after the storm.

To stop hiding is to return to the Lord, to the one who is the storm, but is also the rain; the one who destroys, but also the one who heals.  Return to the Lord is to recognise his wrath and anger against sin; our sin and to admit our guilt and ask to stand in the rain of his grace.  For in him is washing; cleansing and healing; renewal and restoration.  This is the incredible focus and emphasis of the Lenten season, the two actions of God; his anger against sin, which in fear, holds us in hiding, and then his raining grace of forgiveness for the sake of Christ Jesus, which frees us from our hiding places.

So let us take up his offer this Lent.  Let us admit we are under his storm of anger and that in guilt and shame we are hiding from him.  Let us confess our sins and ask for his grace; the grace that rains down upon us from the cross.  Let us cry out to Jesus and receive his forgiveness.

How can we do this?  Well, a good way is to go without something we like, that way, as we crave for it we are reminded of our sinful desires and our need for Christ.  It is an ancient custom to go without something and it is a good spiritual exercise.  When we crave, we can confess our sins by even just saying the Lord’s Prayer. Perhaps this is some thing you could do.

Yes, what an opportunity we have! An opportunity that far too few have or even know about.  So make this lent your time; your time to weather the storm and come out of hiding and into the rain of God’s grace in Jesus.