John Stonestreet | BreakPoint | Wednesday, February 18, 2015
In many ways, today is one of the
strangest days of the year. Everywhere—at work, the grocery store, shopping, exercising—we’ll
see all kinds of people walking around with dark smudges on their foreheads.
Now whether or not their own church
participates in this ritual, most Christians will know that the smudge is the
sign of the cross, and that today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season
of Lent.
To the unbelieving world, Ash
Wednesday is at best quaint (it’s sort of cool to have traditions, you know).
At worst, it’s somewhere between bizarre and even anti-social. After all, to a
culture committed to the pursuit of self-fulfillment and feeling good about
oneself, this whole fasting and self-sacrifice stuff is an existential smack in
the face.
Think of how these words contrast
with our contemporary illusions of autonomy and self-determination: I am not my
own. And I will die one day. And so will you. As the minister tells us when he
rubs the ashes on our foreheads, “remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt
return.”
And here’s the bolder statement
still, a way-more-weird and counter-cultural claim—We are rotten to the core.
We are sinners. So much so that God became a man and died on a cross in our
place. He loved us that much! And then, get this: He came back to life. His
body wasn’t eaten by worms in a tomb. He was resurrected from the dead.
What happened on that Resurrection
Day, which we’ll commemorate 40 days from now, is the most important event in
the history of the world. As Russell Moore has said, “Christians from all over
the world, despite all this science and all this progress and all this
technology, [still confess] what the earliest believers in the catacombs of
Rome cried out: ‘Christ is risen indeed.’”
We confess it because what it says
about God, the universe, and us is TRUE. On Ash Wednesday and during the season
of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving called Lent, we redouble our efforts to heed
Jesus’ call to pick up our crosses and follow him. We meditate and
remember with Paul that we have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer we
who live, but Christ who lives in us.
Crucified with Christ! Our hopes,
desires, politics, intellect, and yes, even our sexuality—crucified with
Christ. What a thing to say! Jesus, who redeemed us by His blood, lays claim to
all of these things.
This is not the God of what
sociologist Christian Smith has dubbed “moralistic therapeutic deism,” a god
who demands nothing more than that people take it easy on themselves and be
nice and fair to one another.
This is a God who says the two
greatest commandments are to love Him with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and
strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And as Jesus said, to love
Him is to obey Him (talk about counter cultural!) and to believe in the One He
has sent. To love our neighbors, we preach the Good News of Jesus’ death and
resurrection and His triumph over sin and death. We feed the hungry, clothe the
naked, visit the prisoner, take care of the widow and orphans.
Friend, what could be more
authentic, more relevant, than to conform our lives to Jesus, who is the Way
the Truth and the Life? Jesus did not and will not conform Himself to the
culture. Why would we? How dare we urge others to? As Paul says, we were called
to freedom in Christ, which is a freedom from conformity and from the desires
of the flesh and a freedom to serve one another in love, joy peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5).
Now that’s a lot to swallow, which
is one reason that for nearly two millennia, Christians have taken this long
season of Lent as an opportunity to repent of our conformity to the world, draw
near to Jesus, and prepare ourselves to celebrate the day that changed the
universe.
Culled from BreakPoint.org
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