OUR NEED FOR FORGIVENESS: A LENTEN REFLECTION

I was twelve years old.

Our church had a small youth group and decided that it would ship off its youth to its first-ever youth group retreat.

I remember feeling reluctant and uncertain about the retreat. I was a worry-laden and awkward kid, and my command of the English language was still shaky. Our family had been at this church for about one year, and my interactions with the other kids in the group had not inspired great confidence.

I remember sleeping in a bunk bed for only the second time in my life. I was on the top bunk, and I slept terribly. I lay awake for much of the first night tossing and turning on a lumpy mattress. I felt bad for the person in the lower bunk.

I remember that we had a guest preacher. I didn’t know where he had come from. I think his name might have been Peter. He didn’t strike me as a typically cool youth pastor. I don’t remember any specific words or phrases he used as he preached to our small group of adolescents.

I do remember this: I had grown up in the church and had already heard many stories and sermons by the age of twelve. I knew that there was a God and that he was very, very big. And a little scary. My faith in God was largely conceptual and impersonal. I am sure I had heard the gospel before, but I had so far failed to understand what it had to do with me.

But something happened in my heart as I listened to this not-cool-pastor preach about Jesus and his death on a cross. For the first time in my life, I sensed deeply in my heart that I was a sinner. For the first time in my life, I felt the terrible pangs of grief over the ways that I had sinned against God, my parents, and my peers. For the first time in my life, I was overwhelmed by a need for forgiveness.

Then I heard the remedy: Jesus suffered in my place and was nailed to a cross of wood to die for my sins. It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but as the lights dimmed and we started singing and praying in response to the sermon, tears came unbidden to my eyes. In my childish way, I poured out my childish heart to the Lord, confessed my childish sins, and asked Jesus to forgive me.

It’s hard to believe that 35 years have passed for me since that summer evening.

The remarkable thing is that my need for forgiveness and my need for the cross of Jesus has not diminished in the last 35 years. In many ways, it has grown greater.

I know that I am forgiven. I know that Christ’s atoning work is finished. I know God loves me.

But I still sin. With my desires, words, or actions, I continue to break the law and heart of God.

Yes, by grace through faith, God has declared me innocent and his holy child. Yes, I am free from the penalty and power of sin. Yet, my heart yearns and groans for the day when I am finally free from the presence of sin.

In many ways, that is what the Lenten season, Holy Week, and Good Friday are all about. It is a season of meditating on the simultaneously glorious and hard reality that we live in the “already-but-not-yet,” or the “truly, but not fully.” We are truly free from sin, but not yet fully free from sin.

But one day, we will be.

And my prayer is that the Lord will stir your hearts powerfully with these beautiful mysteries of the cross this Easter season. To help you in your meditations, we will be providing a reflection and worship exercise to do with your small groups during Holy Week (March 24-31).

On Good Friday, we will gather for our annual Day of Prayer (March 29), from 9 AM to 2 PM, and cap off the day with a Special Service from 3 to 4 PM. We are going to invite you to fast with us starting Thursday after lunch, and we will break our fast together with lunch on Good Friday. More instructions to follow.

And on Easter Sunday (March 31), we will celebrate the resurrection of Christ which helps makes sense of it all.

Church, can I ask you to do something? Can you please invite one person who does not yet know Jesus to the Good Friday Service and the Easter Sunday Service? Just one person.

Invite them. Sit with them. And talk to them about their experience. That’s all. Leave the results in the Spirit’s hands as you pray for them. Just like that twelve-year-old who desperately longed to be forgiven, we are surrounded by people who desperately need forgiveness in Christ.

May the Lord bless you abundantly, New City, during this special season as you remember the cross and the empty tomb of Christ. May we all be able to say with the Apostle Paul, “I am determined to know nothing … but Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2).