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.
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.
If we are truly followers of Christ, then the Holy Spirit will cause us to act in ways that are exclusively good. Let us pray, this Lent, that the fruit of the Spirit will unfold in our daily lives, and that we may be attuned to his will in our lives at all times.
What are the things do we do, the ways we behave, that might be conditioning our souls to become more – rather than less – sinful?
Paul doesn’t just think sin is something that we do. He thinks sin is something that takes control of us.
That’s what happened at our baptisms – whether we were christened as infants or came to faith in Christ later in life. We died to our old selves – our sin – and rose to new life in the righteousness of Christ. This Lent, let us hold that challenge before us.
Do we really have faith in Jesus? That is the question that the self-examination process of Lent should pose us.