Thursday, March 07, 2019

Giving Up – for Lent

Lots of people talk about giving something up for Lent.
Forget giving up sweets, alcohol, caffeine or anything else. 
Giving up specific food and drink choices is kids’ stuff. 

What if we just give up? 
Period.

Isn’t that what the gospel is about?
The only way to live is to die.
The only way to experience resurrection is to be dead.

When the Gospel is proclaimed, it stays light-years away from reliance on success or on any other exercise of what Robert Farrar Capon calls “right-handed power”.

A long time ago, in 1957, Mabel Williamson wrote a little book entitled “Have We No Rights?” in which she shows that as Christians we must be willing to give up the right to the comforts of life, physical health and safety, the privacy in business, friends, romance, family, and home.


However you practice Lent, make sure you realize that whatever you are doing is not earning you points with God. That's the whole point of the gospel - Jesus looked after it all. There is nothing - zilch - nada - zero - that you can do.

Practice Lent by immersing yourself in the Gospel - we are reading the Gospel of Luke this year - not so we can brag about how biblical we are - but so we can understand a little more of...
  • who Jesus is
  • what he did
  • & who we are in him & because of him


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