Skip to main content

Holy Wednesday

Each day of Holy Week Jesus would come into Jerusalem teach in the temple, then retire to the Mount of Olives where he continued to teach those eager to understand themselves, God and how to live in this world. 
Jesus’ message to His followers was very different than what He shared with the Pharisees.  He mainly spoke to them about being prepared for His return.  He didn’t go into the gory details about the imminent events of the next three days—His arrest, crucifixion and burial.  He didn’t even spend most of His time preparing them for the third day—His Resurrection from the Dead! 
Those events, so familiar to us, perhaps needed to be experienced by them first before their significance could fully be grasped. 
Rather, Jesus used these last moments of face to face ministry and interaction with His followers to prepare them to carry out their part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world.  He was handing off the baton to them and now us.  He made it very clear that our job is to share the Gospel and to live our lives ready for His return.
He tells us to live like the wise servants in the Parable of the Talents, using whatever God has given us—whether great of small—to further multiply His Kingdom.  He expects these to be discovered and used not buried and forgotten.
He taught the Parable of the 10 Virgins, 5 were ready with enough oil to burn their lamps until the Bridegroom came while 5 were not ready to meet the bridegroom because they did not have oil in their lamps.  Oil represents the Holy Spirit in Scripture. 
He gave them the sign of the saved in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats which is feeding, clothing and giving to those in need.  Jesus’ true followers will be His hands and feet to meet the needs of others.  When we serve others in this way, Jesus tells us that we are truly serving Christ Himself. 
Jesus gave a few details about the Signs of the End of the Age and let us in on the knowledge that even He does not know the day of His return.  He doesn’t need to know that specific day.  The only One who knows the exact day it will take place is God.  Jesus is content with “the unknowing” and we should be too.
Jesus’ second coming marks our final freedom from the effects of sin.  It should play a predominant place in our thoughts each day.  One twentieth of the New Testament speaks about His return.  There are over three hundred references to His second coming in the Bible.  Twenty-three of the twenty-seven New Testament books speak about His return.
As you prepare your heart for Easter ask yourself:  “Am I preparing my heart for His return?  How do you live that reveals that you are preparing to meet Jesus?  How have you used the gifts He has given you?

(Matthew 24-26:5)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fifth Monday in Lent through Palm Sunday

Fifth Monday in Lent: Righteousness Needed Jesus is all about bringing us righteousness yet we are too worldly focused to think we have much of a need for righteousness. Most of us think we need healing or exciting miracles. We might try to get a little righteousness by going to church on Sunday and giving some spare change to a beggar. God sees the bigger picture and knows that there is nothing which we are more bankrupt than righteousness. He sees that we are totally incapable of getting the righteousness we need through our own actions, so He sent Jesus to give us His righteousness through His sacrificial work on the cross. Lent is a season of repentance and preparation for the Easter celebration. No matter how sacrificial your Lenten fast, it could never be enough to earn your righteousness. I have been practicing Lent for   years, and every year at the end of my fast I come face to face with how far I am from righteousness. Some of the first recorded words of Jesus in th

Lenten Devotions

First Monday in Lent: Lent—Winter/Spring I took a weekend Silent Lenten Retreat and learned how special the season of Lent (which means Spring) really is. Being in the lovely setting where winter-spring becomes its own season; I discovered that the transformation from winter to spring reveals the transformation of our souls in Lent. We had an absolutely gorgeous weekend to enjoy solitude with God. Lent is a perfect season to see in nature what God is drawing out of us through the spiritual disciplines we focus on through penitence and preparation for Easter. It is the in-between season that shows us a lot about what we are doing spiritually through our focus on confession. From a distance winter can seem stark and ugly. I feel the same way about confession. But if you take the time to see the winter you can see that the winter season reveals realities that get masked over by the growth of summer. In winter you become aware of what needs to be cleared away. In the same way the con

The Troubled Christian Life

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness.  I was only helpful to them because I relied totally on the word of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit