Every year, it is the same.
Lent begins and I start thinking about how to get my heart in the right place. I ask myself what God is doing in me this season and how I am to respond.
Palm Sunday rolls around and we sing "Hosanna in the highest!" and we rejoice as Jesus enters Jerusalem. During worship, I lift my voice, my heart and my hands to sing His praises and we celebrate!
And all that emotion continues over the next week. I find myself reflecting on scripture and feeling moved to tears as I think about my Lord, my Savior being ridiculed and beaten mere moments after the celebration has ended.
On Maundy Thursday we are convicted by Jesus' humility as He washes the feet of His disciples. I ask how I can humble myself and serve others with the love that Jesus called us to have for one another.
And then it is Good Friday. I feel my heart severed in two and my emotions at odds. I consider the scene of Jesus' being humiliated, beaten, mocked, bloodied, and lead to a rugged cross where He will endure an agonizing death. I find myself in tears as I place myself into the scene, and imagine what terrifying desperation His disciples must have felt to witness this horror.
But before I allow the grief to settle in, I turn to Isaiah 53 and read what truly is the Good News of this Friday. I remember and internalize that Jesus was fully human, fully God, and fully blameless in the life He led on this earth. I consider His obedient, selfless behavior and the way in which He used those on the margins of society to proclaim the glory of God. I stand in awe of His ultimate sacrifice and take to heart that it was for me! All of the ugliness of the sin in my life (and trust me, there is plenty), He took off of me and placed it onto Himself. His sentence was what I deserved and yet, He so freely gave Himself over to it on my behalf!
For a long time, I carried with me the crushing weight of sin and guilt. I knew the Lord loved me but had never experienced the freedom of grace and forgiveness. But as I have grown closer to the Lord, it has become abundantly clear that when Jesus said "It is finished", He meant it. And so it is by His wounds that I am healed.
So this year it will be different.
I may still cry in service tonight, but they will be tears of joy and thanksgiving at what Jesus has given me. A clean slate and the opportunity to know my Heavenly Father. Dear friends, take to heart today the sacrifice of the living God. You are healed. You are forgiven. It is finished.
Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.
Isaiah 53 (NIV)
