Written by Bridge Church Elder Dave Norbeck
Do you ever feel like you are a bit lost? Perhaps a tad confused on what God is up to, or just forlorn for all the things that you have lost in the last 2 years? Perhaps you find yourself angry at the world or maybe even at God. Or maybe you just feel a loneliness that is haunting your soul. When we get like this, we have a need to figure out why, and then to determine what we will do about it. As disciples of Jesus the answer is straightforward. We need to get back on the path and walk with Jesus.
This year The Bridge Church will be having a series of sermons during the Lenten season starting on March 6th. They will be based on the concept of “Walking with Jesus.” We will be looking at sharing life with Jesus and rediscovering and sharing in His mission and vision, His heart, His future, His friendship and family, His temptations, trials and sufferings, but also sharing His joy and victory at Easter. You may ask that since we are not Catholic nor Anglican, what is Lent to us at the Bridge? Historically the Evangelical Free Church broke away from the State Lutheran Church and from all liturgy that was not based on Scripture.
Lent traditionally is a season where we, as the church, examine our lives to see where we have drifted away from Christ. Lent began in the early 4th century around 330 AD and was begun to allow those who had recanted their faith to find a way back to Christ, to confess and find forgiveness. We hope that this Lenten season will be about walking with Christ to discover the holiness that suffering can bring. We hope it will be about bringing good where evil has been and about bringing love where hate has been; about transforming the base to the beautiful and bringing light from darkness. We hope it will mean living as Jesus lived: for the sake of the sick and suffering, the lost, the poor, the downtrodden and for the sinner who see themselves as weak and forsaken. Lent can be the season that teaches us that darkness may overtake us but will not overcome us as we follow Christ and work for His Kingdom. Grief and suffering can be replaced by victory and bear witness to what God has done.
Our hope is that Lent can be a time that allows us to see where we have strayed from Jesus, and to be reconciled to God; to refocus us to the way and the goal of Christ. Lent is often associated with practices of confession, fasting, reading and meditating on God’s word, as well as a renewed prayer life. Perhaps we need to repent of the dillydallying on the road to God and to repent of the time we have spent playing with dangerous distractions and empty diversions. Or perhaps we need to repent of our senseless excesses and our excursions into sin, our breaches of God’s justice, our failures of honesty, our estrangement from God, our savoring of excess, our absorbing self-gratifications and our addictions and habits that lead away from God. May it be a time where we ask the Holy Spirit to confront us with what we have become and prod us to open our hearts to a new deeper time with God in prayer and His Word.
We pray this season will be a time to open ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit that will enable us to face ourselves, to see the weak places in our lives, to feel the wounds in our souls, and to determine once more to live life in a deeper walk with Christ. We will confront our desires for the physical, to rise above the greed that consumes us, to swear off the pride and anger that destroy us, and to fight the sloth that keeps us from a deeper walk with Christ. We hope to swear off the shrine of self and come to the cross and the empty tomb. But most importantly, we come to see what God’s love has accomplished. We end in the glorious victory of Christ over death, and we share in that victory!
It is our prayer that we will walk this journey together, sharing our burdens and stories. During the season we will have more posts on our Bridge Blog that discuss Ash Wednesday and confession, as well as fasting and prayer that can be tools to help us in our journey. It is our hope that it all leads to a deeper and closer relationship with Jesus. Won’t you join us?
Dave Norbeck
Photo by Thomas Willmott on Unsplash