Holy Week is here and I want to make something of it.
I want to read about it, talk about it, share it, undo it, and tie it up on my insides.
In our house this week, amongst squirmy bottoms in dining chairs, and spatting siblings, and long evenings, and much on the agenda – I want to weave Jesus into it all. I want Easter to be something we intentionally walk toward over the next seven days. If you’d like to journey with us, I’ll be sharing snips here daily, with the door of my blog wide open this week.
Our Christ.
I picture him in the heavens, willing to leave and enter into despair, willing to be housed in the womb of a young woman, gasping for air like all the rest of us as we take in earth for the first time.
The One! The One who spoke it all into being, becoming a babe, and saving us all if we’ll take Him up on it.
His life wasn’t swiped, it was offered. Angels standing by to intervene were never commanded by Him to do so. Completely God yet completely human, coming and living amongst those He created – ah! We need more than a week, we need a lifetime to live out all the grace of it.
Spurgeon said that our Savior had “taken on a nature full of needs”. He needed amongst the needy by choice and it sends me into wonder and awe and faith and action.
Last month I found myself walking through an old home in Washington D.C.. This home serves as a spiritual retreat of sorts, and has books in every room, tucked away in crevices, soldiered up on shelves, resting on side tables. As I walked through one of the nooks, I glanced down and saw an old blue book resting next to a lamp. It was separated from the rest and I felt compelled to pick it up. It was O. Hallesbey’s book on prayer. I randomly flipped to the middle of the book and my eyes landed on a passage about the difference between doubt and unbelief. I wrestle with these topics on the regular, and the words I read were like a balm I didn’t even know I needed that day. I ordered a paperback version of the old read as soon as I got home.
Hallesby says, “As air enters in quietly when we breathe, and does its normal work in our lungs, so Jesus enters quietly into our hearts and does His blessed work there.”
He also says to, “Notice how graciously prayer has been designed. To pray is nothing more involved than to let Jesus into our needs.”
And one more thing. “Prayer is a definite attitude of our hearts toward God, an attitude which He in heaven immediately recognizes as prayer, as an appeal to His heart. Whether it takes the form of words or not, does not mean anything to God, only to ourselves.”
And I sit here this morning, typing faster than I’d like, frustrated in parenting a bit, my arms full, and my lists full, and in a rush to get the children to church.
And my heart is pulling at His already, before I even utter a formal word of prayer about it.
Yes. Thank you, Jesus.
Today, on this Palm Sunday, let prayer waft up to Him again. Just tell and listen and keep your ears wide open.
I think it’s going to be a special, set-apart, revelation filled week.
Lord let it be so. Let believers and unbelievers alike encounter your love and interaction over the next several days. Make Yourself known to us in the places we ache and flounder the most. Help us to walk after you this week. Set the gospel deep within us and let it catch fire again. In Your most holy name, Amen.
If you feel the urge, read John 12:12-19.
The Message version ends the passage like this…
“It’s out of control. The world’s in a stampede after him.”
And everything in me says YES.
