Thank You Jesus

As this final week in a fading month begins, I am also quite aware that it is the final full week before we enter into our Season of Lent. God has been bountiful, gracious and most merciful to us, in giving us this Lord’s Day Sunday. I invite you to look to Jesus, our Brother and Friend; our Saviour and Redeemer; our Hope and Help. Jesus and Jesus alone is our Living Water, our Living Bread and our Loving Shepherd. To Him we want to give thanks. We therefore ask for the Holy Spirit, He who is our Comforter, Counselor, Guide and Teacher, to help us in prayer, as we give thanks to our Lord and Master, Jesus.

Holy Jesus, Saviour, Redeemer and Lord, through Your Holy Spirit, we come with grateful hearts and minds to say thank You. Thank You for Your dying Love. Thank You for Your never failing Love. Thank You that Your Love continues to woo and call us unto You. Your Love, O Lord has found us and captured us and we are so in love with You, we cannot express this received love with any adequacy and sufficiency. All we know Father, is that our hearts are brimming over with Love for Your beloved Son in whom You are well pleased. May our lives, in all we profess, confess, publish and give testimony to, lift high the goodness and grace of our Saviour of Love. Amen!   

As we stand on this first day of final full week, before the season of Lent commences, may we ever remain thankful, with each hour of each day that has been given to us. It is with this gratitude and this thankfulness, ever alive in our beings, that we look forward to all that has been prepared for us. It is with thanks that we want to be prepared to celebrate another Lenten Season, with deeper and greater appreciation and love for our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Who is our Lord and Saviour? He is the One Divine and the One human. He is our God who deigned to come in human flesh and live among us. He is our human Brother, with a human genealogy. Both Matthew and Luke trace the genealogy of our Brother in Matthew 1: 1 – 17 and Luke 3: 23 – 38, and though these are not always read through by many, including me, this all changed for me. In preparing this offering and being prepared through it, the reading, hearing and receiving of these once dead and boring verses, took on new and different life, vibrancy and intimacy, as never before. For the first time, I was seeing the ancestral history of a person, a real human being called Jesus, son of Joseph.

Dare you read them, even if you have read them before? Read and receive the Spirit’s covering, as He clothes you as perfectly one with Jesus, in flesh, as your own history is traced to Jesus.

One of the mysteries of the birth of Jesus comes to Joseph in a dream. When Mary, the love of his life became pregnant and he knew that it was not his human seed, he decided to quietly divorce her, to avoid any public scandal or suchlike. However, he was stopped by God, who sent His messenger to Joseph in a dream and after explaining about her pregnancy, told Joseph to name the child, Jesus. An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins. Mathew 1: 20b – 21. Right in the angel’s announcing and explaining, Joseph was made the father of Jesus. Listen carefully to these words, with Spirit-enabled hearing. Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife. Has not the Holy Spirit, in His incomprehensible, mysterious and miraculous ways, made this son of David, to be the father of Mary’s Holy-Spirit conceived Child? Has not the Holy Spirit placed Jesus, in a human family with a genealogy? There is divine mystery which we can only believe, know and live, by faith. Faith is fact, and this is all the doings and workings of the Holy Spirit. 

We have spent this time to receive from our Father in heaven, truth about our human Brother. How then, can we come to our heavenly Father, to say thanks for our human Brother?

During this week, as we are heading on to Lent, we shall be receiving, some faith-breaking and faith-building times, which will all be to our greater good.