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Tag: Lent (Page 1 of 2)

The Sound of Silence

April 7, 2023 / / 0 Comments

In the early morning hours, before the sun began to peak above the horizon, darkness covered the landscape. The air was cool. No one was around. It’s almost as if the earth stopped for a moment. There was an eerie silence that was oddly deafening.

As your feet strolled slowly across the dew covered grass, you notice that nothing was moving. No animals were scurrying about. No birds were chirping. No rustling in the woods. Nothing. Not a single sound could be heard but that silence was so powerful it was almost audible.

The farther you walk, the more uneasy you feel. No noise around you is bringing feelings of fear to your mind. The air is heavy with humidity, yet it is cool on your lungs as you take in a slow, deep breath. You can smell the aroma of flowers cut through the moist air. But still no sound to be heard.

The only sound is that of your feet touching the ground as you make your way across the terrain. Step. Shuffle. Step. Shuffle. You stop walking to see if anything is out there, but alas nothing around you. Not a single moving thing on the face of the earth can be heard.

This sound of silence is reminiscent of the events of Good Friday and Holy Saturday (the day before Easter). It’s the sound, or lack of it, that had overcome the world. The disciples were no longer confident. They were cowering in fear. The soldiers were fast asleep. The enemies of Jesus were dreaming sweet dreams thinking they had won. Satan was even comfortable in the blow of defeat that he dealt to Jesus.

Now displayed lifeless in his tomb, Jesus was gone. No one was looking for him anymore. His cries from the cross were silenced in the moment his head fell. The silence of this moment speaks volumes in our lives today. It’s the sound of silence.

Most of the time we are somber in silence. We are fearful in dark quiet places. We think that victory is loud and boastful. But not today. Today the victory is found in the stillness of that morning. The triumph is experienced in the deafening moments of quiet.

On this Good Friday, pause for a moment. Enjoy the quiet of the early morning. Remember the silence the women heard as they traveled to the tomb. Focus on the quiet and dark of that Good Friday morning. Listen to the silence. What does this moment say to you?

Come Back

February 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

This week we celebrate a different kind of holiday in the church. We call it Ash Wednesday. Yeah it’s the day when you see people with those funny little dirt smudges on their foreheads. Some of us pastors are not good at art it seems! But the idea behind ashes on foreheads might seem weird to some people. So what’s it all about?

There’s a section in the bible written by a man named Joel. He’s one of the oldest recorded prophets in the Bible. He wrote super early in the life of the Israelite people. But his writing followed a pretty typical model for the prophets. Illustration and Warning were the two typical themes of the prophets. They’d write to show how a certain thing happening was an illustration of how they’ve wandered from who they were supposed to be. Then it would also serve as a warning that without correction, things were going to get drastically worse.

A quick glimpse into the book of Joel would be helpful. So he’s writing when things aren’t going well for the Israelites. Actually life is pretty crappy. The economy is tanking. Leaders are lying. They can’t trust their politicians. Recession is looming. Division is everywhere. People are hated simply because they look, act or think differently. I know this is a hard situation to even imagine. Sure glad we don’t know anything about this kind of trouble. (Immense sarcasm intended)

So the book starts with a recap of what’s going on. You see while the regular worldly trouble is lurking around there’s another issue sweeping across the land. Locusts. Lots and lots of locusts. ICK! If you know anything about locusts you know that they can be pretty destructive. And you rarely see just one of them. They come in swarms. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands at once. They lay eggs in the ground. The babies emerge and chomp on anything living. When they get strong enough to jump, they reach for food higher up. Then come the wings and soon there’s nothing out of their reach. It’s awful. Nothing is left the way it was.

If the troubles they were facing weren’t bad enough, the locusts would pretty much make the land unlivable. Ok to really understand the importance of the locusts we need to see how God functions in two different, yet similar, ways. I call them his passive and active judgment or anger.

The trouble they were facing with political upheaval and economic mess and division was all part of what is called the passive anger of God. This can be seen as the natural result of the choices we make. Kind of like speeding and getting a ticket, it’s the natural result and you really can’t be mad about it because you knew it could happen.

Now back to the Israelites for a minute. All the mess they were facing was a result of their lack of focus on God. They pulled away from God and then things started to unravel. Instead of drawing near to God again, they blamed him for their trouble and tried to fix it themselves. This only made things worse than before. Enter locusts.

When the passive anger of God is allowed to run its course, the next step is the active anger of God. This is the scary one. You see since the people kept pulling further and further away from God and tried to fix things themselves, God helped them go even further away. He sent the locusts to make their problems that much worse. But the intent wasn’t to kill them or destroy them. It was to wake them up. You see there was mercy in the locusts. The point was that the locusts would make life so hard that they would turn and finally ask God for help.

So what about the ashes you ask? It’s kind of like locusts. The ashes are a reminder that the good and healthy and vibrant parts of life struggle and die. Ashes were a symbol of mourning and death and devastation. Ashes were a reminder that all things living will be pulverized and die. The ashes we use on Ash Wednesday to put the little smudge on your foreheads are actually burned up, pulverized palm branches from last year’s Palm Sunday service.

That means that the ashes are a reminder of God’s mercy. There’s mercy in the ashes. It’s God’s way of saying come back! I want you back with me where life is best for you and where you can thrive like never before.

I have to be honest I would much rather have God put a few ashes on my forehead than send a swarm of locusts to eat my garden! Maybe you missed the service on Ash Wednesday. There’s always next year! But in reality it’s not the ashes or the service it’s what happens in our hearts. You can turn back to God without the ashes and without the locusts and without the calamity. So how about it? Are you ready to come back?

Are You Trapped?

April 15, 2022 / / 0 Comments

One of my biggest fears in life is being trapped and have no way out. I don’t like water because I’m a tad afraid of getting trapped below the water. I know it’s one of those irrational kind of fears, but it’s a real fear for me. I don’t care for enclosed spaces and the idea of suffocating freaks the heck out of me. I do not like to feel trapped.

But it’s not just trapped under water or in a small space that is an uncomfortable feeling for many people. The idea of being trapped in a decision or a job or a relationship or a guilty feeling or an addiction are less than appealing thoughts as well.

Imagine for a moment being held against your will. You’re forced to work and treated like something less than human. You aren’t praised for going above and beyond. You’re barely paid enough to live a decent life. You don’t make an honest wage. You’re tired. You’re scared. It’s just not a good place. The dark nights seem darker. The hot summer days feel scorchingly hot. The cold winter nights freeze you to the core. Trapped in this kind of life is a place no one wants to be.

Now imagine that into this trapped life comes someone you’ve never met. He comes in and in a powerful display of force suppresses your captor. He frees you. He takes your kidnapper and restrains him so that you can go free. But you have to make a decision.

Will you stay with your captor or will you go free?

This decision may seem like an easy one for you and me right now. It might seem like a no brainer. But it seems all too often that we tend to choose our captivity over our freedom. Even though it sucks being stuck in the bad moments and trapped in our guilt or addiction or depression, there’s something comforting about the familiar. We like to stay in situations that we know, even if they they’re bad situations.

What do you need to be freed from? What comfortable sucky situation do you keep going back to simply because it’s known to you?

We all do this, in probably more ways than we realize. But the truth of the matter is we need to be ok walking away from the things that trap us. We need to be willing to close doors that aren’t beneficial, healthy or profitable even if it means saying goodbye to someone or something that at one point was meaningful to us.

This will post on the Thursday before Easter. It’s a day that really celebrates freedom from things that trap us. The events of this day in history were a reminder to the people who follow Jesus to flee the things that trap and run toward the freeing presence of a relationship with Jesus. The bread and the wine are reminders of all that Jesus did to forgive us and set us free from the strongest captor we’ve ever encountered.

What holds you today? It’s time to let those things go and rest in the freedom that’s been won for you.

A Different Approach To Lent

March 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments
May be an image of 6 people and people standing

The months of February and March are typically marked in the church by a season called Lent. Lent is that 40 time period that takes us from Ash Wednesday to Easter. Lent is a time of thinking, praying, and being a little more contemplative. Churches add worship services on Wednesdays for an extra time of gathering to remember all that Jesus did for us.

As a pastor, I’ve typically served churches that have done this very thing – gathering on Wednesdays for midweek Lent worship. The services have always looked the same too. We start with a song, read a reading, pray, a short message is preached, sing another song and then go home. All in all it is a mini version of what we do on a Sunday. But this year we’re doing it different.

This year, instead of a message being preached, we’re facilitating a conversation about a new set of Bible verses each week. We turn to the section of the Bible. I read it aloud and everyone follows along in their own Bibles. Then I turn the group loose to interact with the text. We’re using this as a time of training one another on how to eat all the words of the Bible. Kind of like teaching a child how to use their fork and knife, except here we’re teaching how to use the bible and some of its tools. Here’s what it looks like.

Know your tools

The first thing we do, before being sent off to work on some study questions, is unlock a tool. Better yet, we show how to use the tool that’s already in our hands a little more efficiently. You see, your bible is a great tool to access all of the goodness of God. But the problem is that many people don’t know how to use it to its fullest. So this Lent we’re giving people some fun tips and tricks for how to use the Bible to its fullest.

Throughout Lent we’re asking everyone to bring their bible to church. And I don’t mean bring a phone with a Bible on it but an actual paper Bible (yes they still make paper Bibles). The paper copy has some fun little extras inside that many might not be aware of! The goal is to help you learn how to best use your Bible so you can get the most out of it. And a side benefit is that you won’t have to rely on me to do the work for you because you’ll know how to dig into what the Bible says. The goal is simply to empower you to become obedient to God’s words, to eat on your own, to become mature in your following of Jesus.

This week we looked at the simple things. These tools are nothing earth shattering, but they’re really great things that can help a person in their study of God’s word. Our two tools this week were the little section headings and those mostly overlooked cross references.

The point of the headings in your Bible is to help you better navigate through reading. They weren’t part of the original text. They were added as little tools to make reading the Bible easier. We used them to help track down the same passage in multiple books of the Bible.

The second tool we highlighted was the use of cross reference notes. These are really useful additions to the Bible to help you see how the rest of the Bible talks about a given topic. If you trace those cool cross references around the Bible, you could gain a significant insight into what the Bible means when it says a given word or phrase and why it might be important still today.

Talk about it.

After we read the text and introduce people to the tools available to them, we literally turned them loose to answer a few simple questions and have a healthy discussion about what they read. It was totally different than anything we’ve done before, but it was great to watch and even listen to the various conversations happening. A normal worship service is so one way and the congregation is largely quiet. The style we are using through Lent is very much like what the New Testament book of Acts describes when the church was first formed.

I’m not sure what your routine is with the Bible, church or Lent; but it’s ok to try something new. It’s ok to do things a little differently in an effort to gain a little deeper understanding. The focus of the church should really be about raising people up and empowering them with the right tools to be able to grow in their faith on their own.

It’s called discipleship. It’s what Jesus commanded the church to be about in Matthew 28. It wasn’t a suggestion or a good idea. It was a command. It was a command given to the disciples to make more disciples. Not to the pastors. Not just the apostles. Not just the seminary educated *because they didn’t have seminary educated people back then! It was for the everyday follower of Jesus who was being transformed by the renewing of their minds.

So, what new approach can you take to your time in God’s word that will stretch you and allow you to feast on what God has put in front of you?

Selfishness Is NOT Cool

March 23, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I have to tell you when I hear people that they’re in this whole living life thing to make themselves happy something inside me goes a little crazy. It’s like fingernails on a chalkboard. There are some people that want life their way. They want things handed to them on a silver platter. It just has to be about them.

Have you ever had that person who just likes to find problems in life? I mean you give them a compliment and they somehow turn it to a knock on you? You thank them and they tell you that you’re not doing enough? Or they just want everything to be done their way and if not they’ll let you know all about it?

Well selfishness and self aggrandizement is called out by Jesus in Mark 10. There were a couple of his close followers that wanted to get something from him. They asked Jesus to give them whatever they wanted. Pretty bold I know!

Hearing that passage it’s pretty easy to think well how dare they! I’d never do anything like that… But is that really true? Can you honestly say that personal happiness and having things done your way isn’t driving your decisions from time to time?

I think in the world today, we’re seeing a lot more prominently displayed a self-centered approach to life. We see people who want to be the center of attention and for life to revolve around them. We are seeing people take disagreements as personal attacks. There has to be a better way.

Yes there is. Jesus takes the whole selfish pride outlook on life and flips it on its head. He says that for you to be great you have to be willing to be least. To be first you should be last. To be best you need to be ok with serving other people instead of asking why you didn’t get picked first.

Jesus tells his followers that we need to look different than the world looks. Check out this message on struggling with pride and selfishness.

Ashes & Dust

February 16, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Tomorrow is a day in the church known as Ash Wednesday. It marks the beginning of the season of the church known as Lent. This season of Lent is about reflection and focus on getting ourselves ready for Easter. As followers of Jesus prepare for Easter they take time for a penitential (reflective) walk through the life of Jesus. This season is marked by confessing (admitting) sins, prayer, often fasting, and meditation.

I know that a lot of that might sound a tad too deep for many people or almost impossible for others, so we need not make this a hard and fast rule to follow. The idea behind the fasting and the prayer, the confession and the meditation is to draw us closer to Jesus. These actions serve as intentional ways in which we put off a little bit of ourselves and put on a little bit of Jesus in return.

Take for instance the fasting portion, which we’ll hit on more in a future post. The purpose of fasting in its simplest explanation is to replace a craving for one thing with a fulfillment in a relationship with Jesus. So in a sense it means we need to lose the sugar to help focus on the savior. The same can be true for the other things mentioned above. We use them as ways to more intentionally focus on who we are in this relationship with Jesus.

But what about the ashes and dust thing on Ash Wednesday? I mean that’s kind of odd if you really think about it.

What we may not realize is that Ash Wednesday and the pomp and circumstance that goes along with it didn’t really start until around the 11th century and wasn’t widely accepted among Christian traditions until the early 1970s. The Bible never talks about having ashes marked on our foreheads. There is no real rule saying that we have to do it this way. So if it’s not specifically Biblical (mandated by God) why do we do it and what does it mean?

Why ashes?

There is great symbolism in the ashes on Ash Wednesday of which many may not be aware. The ashes used to mark a cross on your forehead are made by burning the palm branches from the previous year’s Palm Sunday celebration. This means we’re taking the victorious welcome of Jesus as King and combining it with our humble approach to him as sinners.

Additionally, ashes in the Old Testament were a sign of humility and mourning. So when we receive the ashes on our heads formed in the shape of a cross, we’re essentially saying that we humble ourselves before the one is King of kings. Since Ash Wednesday marks the start of Lent, they also serve as a mark that we are mourning what this seasons brings – namely the suffering and death of Jesus.

The words spoken on Ash Wednesday are another reminder of why we do them. You are dust and to dust you shall return. This connects the ashes of victory with the dust of our beginnings. Where we have erred from God and wondered from His ways, the ashes are our humble journey back. We are reminded of our simple beginnings. Dust. Dirt clods formed in the hands of God. Breathed into with the very breath of the Father. The ashes connect us with Adam who is the symbol of our sinfulness. The cross connects us with the new man, Jesus who is the symbol of our forgiveness.

In a year that has been wrought with so much upheaval and turmoil and confusion, the normal Ash Wednesday might not be possible. So do we have to have ashes on Ash Wednesday? Simple answer is no. We don’t need ashes or fasting or any of the outward signs to connect us to the meaning and intent and purpose of this season as Christians. Whether you receive ashes or not this year, humble your heart and spirit. Remember your beginning as part of creation formed in the hands of the creator. Ponder the death and resurrection of Christ that promises bring new beginning to the old ways within us.

Whether you got ashes or you didn’t, if it wasn’t about Jesus you just got dirty.

Empty Grave

April 6, 2020 / / 0 Comments

These days seem darker than ever. People don’t smile. Simple greetings of Hello are met with empty stares. Shelves are bare. Churches are gathering virtually. Friends can’t hang out in the same place. Gyms are closed. Barber shops and hair salons are forced to keep customers away. Nothing is normal. Darkness has descended on this land. But…

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Remove the Queen

April 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

In a recent conversation with faith leaders from around the country and terrific illustration was used! I have to apologize that I can’t remember who said it but wow this has been on my mind since I heard it. I’m not 100% sure if this is how it’s actually done but the premise of the illustration was built around training a professional chess player on how to more successfully play the game.

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Christ Our Hope in Life and Death

March 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments

It’s been said that only two things are certain in life – death and taxes. But really only one thing if we’re being honest. You can adjust your deductions and even lose your job and your tax situation will change drastically. But you can’t escape the reality of death. It happens all around us. It sees as if death is knocking at the door of so many of our lives and we are having a hard time determining how to handle it.

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