Third Sunday In Lent

Yes! You are correct! We have come to the halfway mark in our forty days and forty nights walk with our Saviour, Lord and King. This Lord’s Day Sunday is the third Sunday, of the five Sundays before Holy Week. Having come to this landmark, we are bidden to stop, not to sit and rest, and sleep as such, but we are called to a moment of altar building if you like, where sonorous praise-songs of the heart and unabashed thank-words of the mind, are offered to God in unconstrained prayers. We are like Abram, our father of faith, who is on a journey, as we are now, to the place to which God is leading him, and taking him.  By faith we too are being led to the place where Jesus is taking us.

Note most carefully and confidently, how our father of faith has been offered a blood promise from God, which services his faith big time, leaving him no choice but to take God at His promise. Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land. Genesis 12: 7a. We too have a promise, a Blood Promise from God, in Jesus, Saviour and Lord, of abundant life. Led, guided, guarded and sustained by God the Holy Spirit, all through our journey thus far, we are in the middle place. What does faith do at this juncture? We follow Abram, our father of faith as is documented clearly in the Word of God. Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. Romans 4: 16.  Additionally we are told that our father of faith took God at His Word, being fully convinced that what He had promised He was able to perform. And therefore it was accounted to him for righteousness. Romans 4: 21 – 22.  

We, who have received from Abram, our father’s faith, being his faith seed, continue to learn more about the works of faith from him.  Here is Abram at a halfway point also on his journey and he stops to build an altar to God. This is what we are told in Genesis 12: 8. And he moved from there to the mountain east of Bethel, and he pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; there he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD.       

Clearly, Abram, who is faith itself, is in the middle of two places, Bethel on the West and Ai on the East. We are in the middle of two weeks gone and two weeks to come, before Palm Sunday.  Faith takes time to stop, for a two-in-one reason. It is to build an altar to God and it is to call on the Name of God. What a blessedness is ours today, midway on our victorious walk, to be given the wisdom and leadership to stop, on this privileged walk of forty days and forty nights, to follow faith. 

What altar can we build? If, in deed and in fact, each believer is a temple of the living God, therefore our temple altars will be our hearts. How are we to build the altar now? One way of building, is to have our hearts flooded with the promises of God, to be so aware of what we have been given in Jesus, we cannot but offer our entire blessed lives to God. In so doing we denounce and die to all evil, all darkness and all deceitfulness. Only then, with the full, instinctive prompting of the Holy Spirit, will we be able to call on the Name of the Lord, with deep reverence and respect.

By faith, we believe that in this time of offering our lives anew to God, we are being refreshed, revitalized and restored to carry on with greater and stronger faith. Zephaniah 3: 9 renders us another promise to which we can cling. For then I will restore to the peoples a pure language, that they may call on the name of the LORD, to serve Him with one accord.  

One of the ways we must continue to serve God, as we follow with Jesus, is to become the arch enemy of worry. We are to take down worry and irrevocably destroy it, so that it cannot even hope to raise its evil head to weaken faith in us.

We are at the half-way mark! Holy Week is in sight and worry is making a concerted, desperate ploy to get at us. I say this because too many pilgrims on this walk are being deceived by worry and, all the pretty, acceptable and less harsh words in which worry paints itself.

During this week, we shall listen to what God says about worry and the promises He has made to us to totally cancel all worry in us.