Easter will soon be upon us. The day that we have been waiting for. Lent will finish, our waiting will end and Easter will come. The day when everything changes. Easter reminds us of when Jesus gave everything so that we could know God. Lent reminds us of our need and longing for God. It also reminds us of all the longings and needs that we still have in this life. How life isn’t all it should be. And easter reminds us that there is a day coming when Jesus will return and all things will be made new. All will be as it should be, all our needs will be met, we will be all that we were made to be and we will fully know God.
But waiting is hard. Especially when we can’t see how it will happen and don’t know when it will come. Doubts easily fill our minds, hope can wane, and the burden can feel too heavy to bare. This can be true even when we know when our promises will be fulfilled or that our hope is certain. You may have chosen to start a new habit this lent or chosen to give something up. It might be feeling hard to keep going, or you might have even given up. In life too there will have been time and places where things have been too much to bare and you have not done all that you wanted to.
I am doing two lent courses this year, one of them is following the life of Abraham. He was given a promise from God, that his wife Sarah would have a son. But it didn’t come quickly, and waiting was hard. So, they decided to take matters into their own hands. Abraham had a son with Sarah’s maidservant, but this wasn’t the promise. This is a theme in the old testament; God wanting to give blessings, but those to whom he promises blessing being unable to trust and therefore try to take the blessing for themselves on their own terms. In the end they fail and cause a bit of a mess. But this isn’t a message of despair, it’s one of hope. We are not alone, and neither were they. Their impatience and lack of trust never caused God to withdraw or give up on them. God still gave the blessings he promised and even the messes that are left behind he turns for good. Sarah gave birth to a son as promised and Abrahams other son was blessed too and became a nation.
God doesn’t give up on us. Nor does he leave us in our mess. This is the hope of Easter. This is the power of the cross. Not only have we been forgiven and restored, we are also continually being forgiven and restored. In the words of the Lord’s prayer we ask God “to forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”, but the word we translate as sins has a meaning closer to debts. We are really asking that God takes away damage caused by the mistakes we make, which we can’t repair ourselves, knowing that He can. And where we can, we heal the damage caused by other’s mistakes towards us. This doesn’t that we then say that it doesn’t matter if we make mistakes, but rather it enables us to try be all that God wants us to be, knowing that this is what He is making us; His handiwork, all that we were made to be.
Originally written for the April 2023 ABC Newsletter
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