Psalm 103:9-10 God will not constantly accuse us or remain angry forever. He does not punish us for all our sins; he does not deal harshly with us, as we deserve.
Tomorrow we’ll be halfway through Lent! How’s it going for you? Here’s my Lenten calendar so far:
Litany of Penitence 6:
For our dishonesty in daily life and work,
Our ingratitude for your gifts and our failure to heed your call.
Lord, have mercy upon us:
For we have sinned against you.
Tuesday my daughter arrived home from her work as a wound care and ostomy nurse just as I was leaving after babysitting her two young children. I wish I had a photo of Talita running as fast as she could into her mother’s arms—and then repeating it with her dad when he came out from his home office to greet his wife. Radiant joy!
What a vision of our Father/Mother God! (Take a look some time at the female images for God in Scripture, both Old Testament and New.) It didn’t matter at all that Talita had needed a time out earlier for not “heeding my call.” She was so confident of her parents’ love that all sadness melted away in their embrace.
Can you picture God reaching out his arms to embrace you and whirl you around in pure delight?
When I was a child, we sang this song at my boarding school. I had fun finding and singing it again. I’ll include the lyrics.
Day by Day, by Carolina Sandell Berg, written after the death of her father
Day by day, and with each passing moment, Strength I find to meet my trials here; Trusting in my Father’s wise bestowment, I’ve no cause for worry or for fear. He, whose heart is kind beyond all measure, Gives unto each day what He deems best, Lovingly its part of pain and pleasure, Mingling toil with peace and rest.
Every day the Lord Himself is near me, With a special mercy for each hour; All my cares He fain would bear and cheer me, He whose name is Counsellor and Pow’r. The protection of His child and treasure Is a charge that on Himself He laid; “As thy days, thy strength shall be in measure,” This the pledge to me He made.
Help me then, in every tribulation, So to trust Thy promises, O Lord, That I lose not faith’s sweet consolation, Offered me within Thy holy Word. Help me, Lord, when toil and trouble meeting, E’er to take, as from a father’s hand, One by one, the days, the moments fleeting, Till I reach the promised land.
Psalm 103:1-2 Let all that I am praise the Lord; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name. Let all that I am praise the Lord; may I never forget the good things he does for me.
I didn’t manage to write a post yesterday, so I’m a day late with my ideas for this year’s Lenten season. Here they are:
Key off Psalm 103, one or two verses at a time, so we keep in mind God’s character.
Use the Litany of Penitence, one strophe at a time so we can think carefully about each one and make whatever confession we need to make, based on the Spirit’s conviction. The Litany has twelve stanzas, so using two per week will bring us to Holy Week.
Keep track of our progress using a Lenten calendar. The one I’ve chosen (thanks, Suzanne Werder) is a journey with Jesus to the cross. I suggest you download and print this and use color and symbols of your choice to represent your experience day by day. Of course, you can use other Scriptures to enrich this plan.
It would be great for us to use half an hour each day for prayer during Lent, but anything we manage to do is better than nothing, right? Decide for yourself how much you want to invest in this spiritual heartcleaning.
Today, and the next couple of days, as we think with King David about God’s holiness in the context of how praiseworthy he is, let’s start with a general confession. “We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength” fits with the first two verses of Psalm 103. Try to write down at least a paragraph of response to the psalm and the confession (below). What does God’s holiness mean to you?
Most holy and merciful Father: We confess to you and to one another and to the whole communion of saints in heaven and on earth, that we have sinned by our own fault in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart, and mind, and strength.
We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We have not forgiven others, as we have been forgiven.
We have been deaf to your call to serve, as Christ served us.
We have not been true to the mind of Christ.
We have grieved your Holy Spirit.
Lord, have mercy upon us, for we have sinned against you.
John 3:19-21 God’s light came into the world, but people loved the darkness more than the light, for their actions were evil. All who do evil hate the light and refuse to go near it for fear their sins will be exposed. But those who do what is right come to the light so others can see God at work in what they are doing.
I just spent a weekend with my grandchildren. They love, love, love playing hide and seek, from the baby to the six-year-old. The two three-year-olds can’t bear for long the tension of being hidden: “Here I am! I’m here!” The six-year-old can wait a long time in his increasingly inventive hiding places.
In the course of their play, this six-year-old knocked his sister to the ground. Immediately he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” and rushed to help her get up. I noticed, though, that minutes after she was happily off chasing her cousin, my grandson stood in place, tears pooling in his eyes. When I asked him what was wrong, the tears overflowed.
“I didn’t want to hurt Talita,” he sobbed. “I did something bad.”
I had a choice: Try to convince him that accidents happen and not to worry about it; Talita was fine. Or honor his sense of wrongdoing. “Sweetheart,” I said, “there’s something we can do when we’ve done wrong.”
“What?” he asked, wiping his eyes on his sleeve.
“We can tell God what we did and ask him to forgive us. When we do that, he promises to make our hearts clean. Would you like to do that?”
After doing so, he stood for a moment looking at the floor, then gave me a brilliant smile and ran to find his sister and cousins.
And I had the joy of seeing God at work, lifting my grandson’s distress from his shoulders.
You and I have the same opportunity: to bring our wrongdoing to the light so we can receive forgiveness and restoration of our joy and freedom. Often this requires restitution as well for the way we have hurt someone.
We may think we’re protecting ourselves when we hide our sin, but in fact we’re internalizing the harm we did, thus dimming our internal light, making it harder to see our own hearts clearly. We need the Holy Spirit to shine his light, to seek and find and deal with what is hurting us inside.
If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth.But if we confess our sins to God, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness (1 John1:8-9).
Debra Kornfield 