GRACE, MERCY and PEACE are YOURS this day from GOD our FATHER, through our LORD and SAVIOR, Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

“Yet even now,” declares the Lord,
“Return to Me with all your heart,
And with fasting, weeping and mourning;
And rend your heart and not your garments.”

Now return to the Lord your God,
For He is gracious and compassionate,
Slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness And relenting of evil.

Let us pray:

Grant us repentance, O Lord.  Lead us in this holy season to acknowledge your holiness and our need for your mercy and lead us to acknowledge your gracious lovingkindness and compassion in rescuing and redeeming us from our sin.  In the most HOLY and BLESSED NAME of JESUS.  Amen.


WE have come again to Ash Wednesday and the beginning of our Lenten journey in preparation for the joys of our Lord's Resurrection on Easter.

In our text, the prophet Joel is telling the people of Israel to return to the Lord which is a common cry of the prophets.  It is so common because the people of Israel were so apt to stray – they were so prone to disobedience and rebellion against God and so often provoked His wrath and His anger.

Joel, himself, had been sent with a decree of utter destruction.  It would be a calamity unlike anything seen or experienced beforehand.  And in the midst of it, we have the call for repentance and hope, “Who knows if He will turn and relent?”

Who knows, indeed.

The reality is that the Lord is gracious and compassionate, full of mercy, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.  The question isn't whether He is willing to relent and turn aside from His fierce anger.  The question is whether or not the people are willing to relent from their rebellion and disobedience.

“Rend your heart, and not your garments,” says the Lord.  Put down and crush the evil that is within you.  Cast down the idols that you hold up in your heart.  Put to death the sinful desires of your flesh.  Cast aside the works of darkness, and return to the Lord who is Righteous.

That is the call that goes forth by the Prophet.

The Lord is desirous to show mercy.  The Lord is predisposed to show kindness.  He desires to richly provide and bestow a blessing.

The problem is, we are not desirous to receive it.  We are not disposed to lay hold of His kindness.  We do not really desire to receive His mercy.

Now, here many will object and claim they are always desirous to receive God's blessing and kindness.  But they have a very limited understanding of what these are.  Most only look outwardly for blessing and kindness from God.  The type of blessing we seek after are those things that make our life easy and comfortable.  The type of kindness we look for are those things that allow us to boast and hold ourselves as more deserving than others.

The natural inclination of all of us is to look at material wealth, the comforts of life, the riches of family and relationships and friends, and believe that the greater presence these blessings have in our life, the more God is pleased with us.  The more capacity we have to indulge ourselves in good things, the more love God has for us, is the way we think about it.  If God does act to restrain us and hold us back, we say to ourselves, then there is nothing wrong with how we are living our lives.  And so, we drift further and further from God and walk further and further from His blessing and kindness and mercy because we are blind to what that really is.

Just look at your own heart and your own life.  Consider the amount of wealth and leisure the great majority of us have and consider how we fill our lives with trivialities and non-essentials.  Just ponder for a moment how little time we need to spend on the most vital things that have to do with our existence like procuring food and making sure we have shelter.  Consider how much opportunity we have to make choices and decisions about how we are going to fulfill those needs – how many different career paths there are – how society is structured to allow for leisure in retirement – and yes, in spite of all the running you do, if you look carefully, most of it is in order to do things that would not even have been possible in your grandparent's or great-grandparent's generation.

We complain about all our doctors appointments, needing to go to all our kids and grandkinds sporting events, needing to zip and zoom 100 miles in a day, then pop something in the microwave or drop by a fast food restaurant and stuff of our face with things that we describe as food but bare little to nor resemblance to the raw sources that they come from.

And in all of this business – in all of this hustle and bustle – in all of this time spent doing things that would have been impossible just 120 years ago or so, we complain that we just don't have enough time to ponder the goodness of God, to receive from Him the mercy He generously pours out, to lay hold of the forgiveness and righteousness and lovingkindness which Jesus has brought into the world through His death for sinners.

With greater access to books, online streaming, telephone devotions, and on-demand instant access to God's Word, we're just too busy to make use of any of it.  And when we do, we close our ears, flip the channel, or go find another preacher to listen to when what we read or hear doesn't scratch our itching ears.  Each time, taking one more step further and further from God.  Each time slipping further and further away.

None of this happens all at once – and none of it happens with an intention of the heart to deceive God.  It happens gradually.  We begin with the best of intentions – we start with the most earnest of motives.  And then, little by little, we slip, we falter, and eventually we fall.

The cause of this is well known to us.  Even though we are rescued and redeemed by Christ, we are creatures born of the flesh of our ancestors who have inherited the sinful root from Adam.  There's a war that goes on within us.  The good that we desire is left undone, the evil that we don't want to do seems to just happen.

But, we know it doesn't “just happen.”  It occurs because we lack self control.  It occurs because we are not able to hold ourselves back.  It happens because we do not have the spiritual strength to persevere and remain in the things of God as we inwardly desire.  We find it a law of our outward members, even when we want to do good, evil is right there beside us.  And we cry out, “Who will save me from this body of death.”

And this is the purpose of Lent.

In part, Lent brings us face to face with this reality – that though we are the redeemed in Christ, we aren't yet free from the sinful nature that seeks to corrupt us and drag us out of Christ's Kingdom.  Lent comes upon us – with it's disciplines and its traditions – to show us how out of shape we are Spiritually – and it presents us with an opportunity to further crush the sinful heart and the desires of our flesh that would lead us astray – and to discipline ourselves and strengthen the new man to resist so that we can more and more live outwardly according to the faith which Christ has bestowed upon us.

This is what it means to rend our hearts before God.  To recognize the sin that is within and not only desire to be rid of it, but to discipline ourselves and enter into that spiritual struggle against sin in our own lives.

To be sure, it's there.  Just beneath the surface – underneath the show we make to others that we are all just A-OK – sin lurks in our heart and makes its way into our members so that we act outwardly according to the desires of our flesh rather than the holy desires of the new man.

But Lent does not come upon us to leave us to our own devices – that is what causes us so often to stumble and fall and fail.  Lent comes upon us to call us back again and again with the call of God to bring us hope and mercy in the midst of our struggle.  Lent is a time to double our efforts at rooting out sin – identifying those things that lead us to temptation – and denying ourselves the pleasures of life in order to bring our outward flesh into to subjection to the new man that has been created in Christ.

Lent comes to us in the midst of our lives and our struggle against sin and points us intently at the one who struggled and won our victory and gives us His blessing and mercy and kindness so that we also overcome.

….....



In the HOLY NAME of JESUS.