Monthly Message | March

Grace and peace to you — and Welcome to Lent!

We are in the beginning of our forty days (plus six Sundays) of the season of Lent, which takes us from Jesus’s ministry and walk toward Jerusalem, His triumphal entry into the city, His arrest, and His death on the cross. The season ends, of course, with Jesus’s resurrection on Easter!

When we enter into Lent each year we are invited and reminded, even called, to turn more of our focus onto Jesus and others; to perhaps give up things we enjoy that sometimes stand in our way of living into the life Jesus calls us to live. It is an invitation I extend to you.

In February, on our social media accounts, I posed a question wondering if we are in the middle of a “Jesus revolution” — are more people are becoming interested in Jesus? I based the question on the fact that the series, The Chosen, which we are discussing, has become widely popular around the world and has done very well at the box office when it has been shown in theaters; the fact that two ads during this year’s Super Bowl were about Jesus (“He Gets Us” campaign); and that a movie called Jesus Revolution, about the Jesus movement that took place in California in the 1970s, is being released into theaters at the end of February. And now we can add the Asbury Revival to the mix, where a worship service that began February 8 at Asbury University in Kentucky has continued for weeks after students refused to leave a chapel, instead choosing to continue to worship together.

Are more people turning more of their focus onto Jesus? Are more living into the life He calls each of us to live?

I can’t definitively answer those questions, and I don’t know if Jesus and the Christian faith’s being more in the spotlight and news are just temporary. What I can say is, first, it doesn’t matter if this is temporary or not. Jesus and our faith in Him aren’t about being in the news but about being in our hearts — if they happen to make news, great, but that’s not the priority.

Second, I do believe, as followers of Jesus, we can embrace this moment that we are in — whatever is happening. It seems clear that there is a hunger out there for the good news that Jesus brings. Many are seeing what’s been happening in our country and the world and how we act with each other as humans, and it feels off, to say the least. It is tiring. There has to be a better way, a different path than the one we are on. Jesus is that way.

Call it a revolution. Call it a revival. What truly matters is the other “r” word — resurrection. We are in a season of Lent of making our way to the resurrection, and we are possibly in a time when more are turning toward Jesus. What we can do, what we can always do, is live our lives having faith in knowing Jesus has already done it! He rose from the dead. He defeated those things that bind us — sin, death — so that we can live more freely and fully into the life He desires for us. We can go forward knowing that while we are “dust” and we are broken, we are, above all, eternally loved by Jesus. Let our focus turn more toward Him and that fact this Lent.

Pastor David