There is much to our faith that is seemingly counterintuitive: Jesus is 100% God and 100% man, we worship one God who is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the last shall be first and the first shall be last, etc. This Lent we will be focusing on one of the foundational aspects of our faith that itself can seem counterintuitive, namely, that true life can be found in the death of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Wednesday evenings in Lent at 7:15 we will be going through a series called "Words of Life from the Cross." Life from a cross? That is odd. After all, a cross is a instrument of torturous death. And yet, as our God and Savior hung upon that cross, He did so in order to give us eternal life. How remarkable! As we begin this 40 day journey of Lent, I want to share the words from the introduction to this new series that I found to be interesting:

The approach in this Lenten series is based on two revelations of God in the following texts:

But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander (Matthew 15:18-19)

For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself. (Galatians 6:3)

We often speak of sinful nature as the "rebel" or our "death within." The sinful nature's orientation is manifested in what are called the seven capital sins of pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth. These are called "capital" because all sins, be they sins of commission or omission, flow out from these seven sins of the heart.

Pride's work in the sinful nature is to insulate the sinner from the reality of his condition, his responsibility to God and his neighbor. Pride does this by casting illusions about our reality, just as Satan did to Adam and Eve. Sinful pride works to keep each of us firm in the belief that we are God-or that we are at least like God.

The seven last words of Christ, spoken on the cross, are seven words of reality spoken by the Son of God, who passively suffers our fallen reality. In this Lenten season, I would have you consider some of the illusions that our sinful price has cast for all of us, and how the words of Christ crucified embrace and overcome our illusions with the reality of His presence, His passion, His death, and His resurrection.

May the Lord Jesus Christ, who has embraced you reality and given us His through Baptism, humble us and keep us before the saving reality of His Word, His cross, and His resurrection. AMEN" (Mark W.Love, Words of Life from the Cross: Daily Devotional. Concordia Publishing House: St. Louis. Page 3.)

This Lent as we hear of the reality Jesus has given to us from the cross, please join us at 7:15 on Wednesday evenings to hear pastors from around the area come and preach the Good News spoken to us by Jesus from the cross!