C Cycle – Ash Wednesday 25

Joel 2:12-18

How many times have you been asked “what are you doing for Lent?”  It is always a question about giving up something or adding something to your daily prayer routine.  However, God through the Prophet Joel, tells us precisely what we need to do more than anything else.  God desires something more than a forty day sacrifice.  Our faith training as children was designed to forming us as well as providing us with the discipline to live the Christian life.  Lent was a time of sacrificing or giving up something we enjoyed drawing us closer to God.  Through alms giving we give up resources to assist a greater cause than ourselves. Through prayer we become more likely to continue praying beyond the mandatory period of Lent. Through the “sacrifice” of denying ourselves something we enjoy we become less dependent on things and move closer to a deepening relationship with God.

The problem what we learned as children still influences what we do as adults.  Perhaps that is why we fail to fulfill all we have committed to do during lent. Our intentions are high, but our lack of discipline is also high.  We get busy and it interferes with our prayer time, or we inadvertently eat, drink, or watch something we vowed to give up. The real issue is not a lack of discipline.  It is we have not engaged our hearts in the process.

We are too focused on doing something instead of becoming something. By   focusing on doing, we have become the hypocrites Jesus is talking about.  How do we “rend our hearts” as opposed to just giving up something?  The answer lies in “what our goal is this Lent.”  Whatever we do needs to be a means to change us. Not just during the season of Lent but change us forever.      

What we need to grasp is why Lent leads us to Easter.  Lent is a time for us to develop a plan to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us into the very image of Christ. For us to grow closer to God over those forty days.  So that when Lent is over, we welcome Jesus into our lives and appropriate the grace of Christ death to free us from the guilt of past sins. We should approach Lent with a plan to invite the Holy Spirit to change our hearts.  Our focus is to give our hearts not to give up something. The goal is for us to be less dependent on ourselves and more dependent on the gifts of Christ and the Holy Spirit to change us.  Depend on what God has done through Christ and through the Holy Spirit to change us.  The goal is to know who we were created to become by the God who created us.

Our destiny is to be like Christ not for forty days but over a lifetime.

Have a blessed Lent, Deacon Dave