SACRIFICE - A Lenten Reflection

Three Men Walking Down A Rail Road Track Together With The Word Sacrifice Written On It

I both love and hate lent. I hate giving up stuff; hate that I cant do whatever I want. I love all that it stands for. I love the way that it challenges our hedonistic consumerist mindset and creates a space for something that we rarely do: sacrifice.

For me, Christ is the greatest example of sacrifice. 

 He laid down his life for us. He didn't want to, He didn't have to, He chose to. 

 As His disciples, we are also called to a life of sacrifice, to walk along the narrow, difficult path.

One thing that you learn in life is that some people choose a life of sacrifice, whilst others have sacrifice thrust upon them. This can happen through sickness, experiences, circumstance and many other ways. 

 The picture that is painted of God in the scriptures is one of a God who comes along side us, comforts us, cares for us. 

 The same is called for us as the Church. 

 We are called to walk alongside those who are already walking the difficult path. To make sacrifices of our time, our finances, our quality of living, to help them in their time of need. 

 It isn't easy, but nobody said being a disciple of Christ was easy.

May we learn, that just like Jesus, we do not necessarily want to make sacrifices, we do not have to make sacrifices, but as Disciples of Christ we choose to make sacrifices. That we choose to walk along side those who are traveling on a difficult path. May we show them the hope, love, peace, and grace of Christ.

Comments

Post a Comment

* indicates required

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the f...
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in ...
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich com...
Keep reading