I wish to begin this months conversation with a resounding, “Have a Blessed Easter”.
We will begin our journey to resurrection by going to the Cross during Holy Week. I would like to encourage you to honor your journey with the living Christ by giving yourself the full experience of Holy Week. I urge you this year to attend as many of the Holy Week services as you are able.
The experience you will have as you journey with Jesus and his disciples the days before the crucifixion, leading up to our redemption, will forever affect your spiritual life. There are really no good words to express what we are called to experience during this Holy week. The experience will depend on you and God. The Holy Spirit is calling you to enter into the spiritual space of this Holy week.
The journey will begin on Palm Sunday as we hear the story of the Passion and journey with Jesus to Jerusalem; then on Monday of Holy Week we continue with the plot to kill Jesus beginning. Tuesday we will hear how the people begin to fall away and hear about judgment; Wednesday we will hear of the betrayal of Jesus; Thursday we will hear about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and what we are urged to learn through this practice; Friday we will hear the experience of the crucifixion, including the fleeing of the disciples and the denial of Peter in a Service of Nails.; Holy Saturday will bring the claiming of Jesus’ body and the securing of the Tomb.
What this experience has the potential to bring about in us is a realization of the price that Jesus actually paid for our redemption. We will be invited to contemplate the loss of friends and the betrayal of trust, the humiliation of knowing that those with whom he had lived with, ate with, celebrated with and sorrowed with have fled and left him to face a death of unjust proportion.
When we offer ourselves during Holy Week and set apart time to fully engage in the process we become the beneficiaries of some of the hardest and most blessed moments in the entire year. My prayer for you this year is that you will allow yourself the experience of Holy Week in all its fullness and that you will approach with your heart wide open to receive the extravagant love of God. I pray that you will receive that love with a grateful heart and then that you will be moved by the Spirit to share that experience with someone, so that they too might be touched and accept the gift of Salvation.
May God bless you profoundly on your Holy Week journey and may the coming year in Christ bear the fruit that God hopes.
May Almighty God, who has redeemed us and made us his children through the resurrection of his Son our Lord, bestow upon you the riches of his blessing. Amen.
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Dec 2006 Extreme Makeover by Christ