Because if what matters is not what we do outwardly or who we are but rather what sort of relationship with God we have, then our relationship with God is really the most important thing in our lives. We do well in Lent to take stock of the quality of our relationship with God, and to seek to patch it up where necessary.
Mid-way through Lent it’s a good thing for us to do the same: to stop, praise God for his inestimable grace, for his power, his might, his cunning, his self-sacrifice in Christ; and to rejoice that we are his and he is ours through Christ.
So when we are suffering, when the sorrows of life crowd around us, let us rejoice in this: God has chosen us since the very beginning, and he will never, ever let us go.
“Tripp has written a genuine Gospel devotional…that reminds you every day of your need for grace and the wonderful mercy of God in making that grace freely available”.
We must give all our pain over to God, and in so doing, ask the Holy Spirit to pray through us, to open up in us such a yawning hope for a better future, that our very lives become petitions for a renewed creation to God our Father.
We, who have done nothing to deserve it, have by the sacrifice of Christ been made princes and princesses in the kingdom of God our Father. And that means we stand to inherit on exactly the same terms as Christ will.
If we want to be holier for God this Lent…we’ll only be able to do it by getting to know God better through Christ, and asking him to align our will with his.
This is “one of the best expositions of Jesus’ command to love our enemies that I have ever read.”
It’s far harder to live with the war going on inside you than it is simply to give up and allow the ‘flesh’ – worldly self-interest – to govern your actions.
What we need is a whole change of heart – a conversion, if you like – that stops us wanting to disobey in the first place, and instead aligns our will with that of God himself.