Lent: An Opportunity Holiness - Introduction

Since the first of the year, in our worship services we have been following Jesus from His infancy through the early stages of His earthly/bodily ministry.  We heard the wise men from the east ask the question so many before and after them have offered, ''Where is He?''  We followed Jesus from His hometown, Nazareth of Galilee, down to Judea where He was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River. We watched as He moved northward back to Galilee where He would do the bulk of His teaching and miracles, assimilating along the way an inner core of twelve disciples as well as a large grass-roots following that unsettled the authorities, both religious and civil.

We saw his predecessor, the greatest prophet, John, imprisoned and ultimately executed for preaching the Kingdom of God.  With John behind bars, Jesus assumed his message and his followers, proclaiming everywhere He went the Good News of the Kingdom.  The lame walked, the blind saw and the dead were raised to life again - the crowds could only grow.  And grow and grow they did until He could no longer enter cities for the throng.  So He recessed to the rural places where the masses filled the open fields and seashores to be near Him. 

At the height of His popularity and in the midst of His busyness we followed Him, in the early hours of the morning, to a ''lonely place'' where He spent precious time in prayer.  We saw the disciples find Him there, reminding Him of the neediness of the people looking for Him.  He conceded, following them out of that devotional solitude into an encounter with a leprous man whom He miraculously healed, setting the Mosaic Law on its ear in the process.

Last week we moved ahead to the end of His Galilean ministry and observed Him take James, John and Peter up a mountain where He was transfigured before their eyes.  As if that weren't enough, they also saw Moses and Elijah appear from the netherworld to converse with Jesus about the implications of His impending death.  Upon descending the mountain, Luke said, ''He (Jesus) steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem.''  We used that text to prepare our hearts for the Season of Lent, the season the Christian church annually sets aside for the purpose of refocusing, reflecting and realigning our lives with the purposes of the Kingdom of God.  I have high hopes that our GP community will take this time very seriously and in a few weeks find ourselves celebrating Resurrection Sunday with a renewed vigor and deepened commitment.

This Sunday we will do some good backtracking, chronologically speaking, in the life of Christ.  Immediately following His baptism and just prior to launching His Galilean ministry, Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell us that Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness where, for forty days, He was tempted by Satan.  As far as I'm concerned, those are forty of the most intriguing days of Christ's life.  So intriguing are they, that we as a church have lifted the number of those days, imposing it upon the time we call Lent. 

The gospel writers say that Jesus fasted the entirety of those forty days and was ministered to by angels.  Furthermore, they say that Jesus went into the wilderness ''full of the Holy Spirit'' yet came forth ''in the power of the Spirit.''  While I'm sure I haven't fully wrapped my mind around the differences between those two phrases, I am sure that there are differences.  And I am also confident that the supremacy of Christ's latter relationship to the Holy Spirit was directly related to the forty days of special devotion He committed Himself to in the wilderness.

This confidence translates for me to a deep conviction that if we follow Christ's example we will enjoy the fullness of His life.  Come Sunday, and let's process this incredible text and story from the life of Jesus together.  It's one of my favorites, and I think you'll see why, not only as we study it together but even more as we LIVE it together.

See you Sunday,
Stan