“Spare, O LORD, your people,
and make not your heritage a reproach,
with the nations ruling over them!
Why should they say among the peoples,
‘Where is their God?’”
When we do not keep God first in our lives we do not allow him to be as present to us as he desires. We place ourselves outside his providential protection and open ourselves to all sorts of problems from which he could have protected us or for which he could have given us sufficient strength to face.
Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.
We are called to return the LORD, not simply to certain practices and actions are the external aspects of our yearly Lenten observance. None of the externals matter if they don't penetrate sufficiently to give God room in our hearts, to offer him a new foothold for his Kingdom within us.
The degree to which we have placed second things first is the degree to which forcing ourselves to loosen our grip on them will necessitate fasting, and weeping, and mourning. We had supposed that something other than God might satisfy us. We may experience the death of that illusion as something which involves weeping and mourning. Even more, we will recognize that all of the time we were under that spell we were neglecting God's own offer of love. We can and should let ourselves fully experience these emotions as they arise but we needn't cling to them. They are meant to be at most a temporary aspect of the transformation that repentance brings. If we deny them we may still be in denial about the things that matter most and about our past infidelity to those things. But if we try to keep experiencing them, as though they were the substance in which our Lent should consist, we will be stagnating and preventing God from opening to us the new horizons which he desires to show us.
For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin,
so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.
We are meant to let what Jesus did for us take full effect in us, rather than insisting that we don't really need to receive any more of it, or to say that we did it once and now we're fine. Our Lent must not be about what our efforts if it is to be a profitable season for us. It must be a doubling down on the centrality of the presence of God in our lives and an insistence that the grace given us by Christ must be the starting place and goal that gives our lives direction. In a season marked by so many external practices this may seem counterintuitive. Yet it is precisely a more complete reliance on grace alone that all of the practices and experiences of Lent are meant to embody. The degree to which they do not do so they become distractions.
We may have done poorly in the past when we tried to place Jesus first on the throne in our lives. We may have anxiety or fear that we will not do a good job in the future. But God wants Lent to be about the here and now with him, not the past or the future. He wants to be sufficiently present to us in the moment that our ruminations about past and future lose their ability to limit us.
In an acceptable time I heard you,
and on the day of salvation I helped you.
One reason that it is hard to be present to God is that many of us have grown accustomed to seeking our rewards in the world. When we do good we typically look to the world for our validation. And the world inevitably disappoints us, offering us rewards for things which are bad or indifferent, and ignoring us when we act as our best selves. Lent is a time to practice seeking our validation from God alone, and not from others, nor even from the apparent results of our efforts. We may not see the fruit for a season, but it should be enough that God smiles on us as we plant the seed.
But when you pray, go to your inner room,
close the door, and pray to your Father in secret.
And your Father who sees in secret will repay you.
When we seek our validation from God alone we will experience in a new way the freedom that is the gift of his Spirit. When we experience his gift of righteousness as the approval we seek, rather than that which we must earn according to the paradigm of the world, we gain a peace that the world can't take away.
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