Welcome to Lent. When
the passage begins "Seek the Lord and live…" and continues with
judgment you know it must be Ash Wednesday.
We need Lent as a corrective to the idea that we're either pretty good
people or good enough people to deserve eternal life. We need to be reminded that we are
sinful. We can come up with the idea
because we don't do certain things that we aren't bad people but that isn't the
standard is it? We are called to be holy
as God is holy. We are called to justice
and mercy and too often we fail in both regards. The message of Lent is to look a little more
deeply, look beneath the surface and the veneer of our lives and see the grimy
underlayer that still needs cleansing. We
can be filled with bitterness, envy, covetousness, lust, and other sinful
desires and never attend to these issues.
We are called in Lent to a season of discipline in our lives, a
re-orienting of desire to seek the kingdom of God rather than our own kingdom
or our own will for our lives. Let us
remember this Lent not with gritted teeth but with longing to be more like Jesus.
What is justification and how are we justified? Each week in our worship we work through the
liturgy and its designed purpose is to point us to the answers to these
questions. Here, Jesus makes it plain in
this little parable. Justification is
the process of recognizing and confessing sinfulness to a holy God who judges
sin as rebellion deserving death and asking for mercy from that same God whose
property is always to have mercy on those who confess their sins. We recall His holiness, His merciful nature,
His covenant promises to forgive those who ask, Jesus' finished work at the
cross of atonement and propitiation, and we recall our sins that separate us
from Him. In those two acts we are
justified, just as this tax collector was justified by confession and pleading
for mercy. So long as we think ourselves
pretty good we go away without being justified.
Have you compared yourself with Jesus lately?
Ash Wednesday is our encouragement to lay aside every weight
and sin that hinders us from running the race.
Weariness is a product of
dragging those things along on the journey. I may train for a race by carrying weights
with me to build the muscles necessary to run well but once the race begins I take
them off and the feeling of running unencumbered by them is truly amazing. Jesus has set you free from the weight of
judgment for your sins, you need not carry them or the self-justifying stories
you tell about them any longer. You need
not carry the weight of the past, your sins or the sins committed against you,
any longer as you run the race. The
invitation to a holy Lent begins with the knowledge you are forgiven, justified
not by your story of victimization but by Jesus' willing, loving sacrifice for
those sins. You need only confess them
to Him. Lent is meant to be a time of
gaining freedom from every weight and sin in order that you might run as a
champion.
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