Lenten Devotion

You are invited to the Good Friday Service at 7:00 P.M. this evening.  Your ACC Bell Choir will play a special musical number.  Take time this evening to enrich your Holy Week experience.
 
Pastor Ken
 
April 2, 2010

Good Friday 

Excerpt from Hebrews 4: 14 - 16; 5: 7-9

"Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession."

Reflection by Anthony B. Robinson

Good Friday, and Easter for that matter, is not all that much about our doing. It is all about God's doing, God's doing on our behalf. The idea is that we desperately need something, some saving, some help, and some mercy and that this isn't something we can do for ourselves or by ourselves. We need saving. We need a Savior.

But that is, well, kind of embarrassing. In fact, it goes against the grain for some of us, and against the grain of a world that teaches, "we can handle it," "we're in charge here," we are self-sufficient, self-reliant people, thanks very much. If you think along those lines, confessing Jesus as your Lord and Savior may be a little (or a lot) embarrassing.

I once heard an older minister wonder aloud if, in our branch of Christianity, our poet laureate might be the one who wrote, "I want no Jesus Christ to think He could die for me"?

Here's good (if embarrassing) news, you need a Savior and you have one. While you and I were yet sinners and couldn't fix things ourselves, Christ came looking for us. Jesus came to find us, to lead us out of the shadows and death to the light and to life.

Prayer

"Beneath the cross of Jesus I gladly take my stand,
the shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land;
A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way,
From the burning of the noontide heat, and the burden of the day."

Lenten Devotion

Remember the Maundy Thursday Service at 7:00 P.M.

 

Pastor Ken

 

April 1, 2010

Commanding Love

Excerpt from John 13:1-17, 31b-35

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another"

Reflection by William C. Green

Jesus does not command feelings. He commands duty, first to God, then to others.

It's often hard to love what needs doing, like pay attention to those we disagree with, or forgive someone as we have so often been forgiven, or love "enemies" in our own midst or beyond, as Jesus admonished.

But the commandment to love is not a commandment to condone or agree; it's a duty to respect. I can't find help and hope apart from respecting a world bigger than my own feelings. The church is meant to be a model and an entry into that larger world, one made up of people we have to be with, not people we choose to be with. Jesus commands us to pass on the love and respect we have already received. Without this, any personal difference or grievance is magnified and distorted, and we're lost in ourselves with no way out.

This is the day in Holy Week when we remember the first communion, the Last Supper. Here was love beyond personal feeling, not thrown by the betrayal of a close follower and impending death. This is God's love for us. Not even the disciples understood it. But they were changed by it, and given the duty to pass it on. They did so, however imperfectly. And so can we.

Prayer

Gracious God, may I not make a god of my own feelings, and pass on the deeper love you make mine. Amen.