The One About Holy Week and The Life of Tension
Dear West Family
Every year, in preparation for Holy Week, I like to return to a few resources which help me to prepare my heart and my mind. I always read this sermon from Spurgeon on John 20:15. I always read excerpts of Stott’s masterpiece, The Cross of Christ. I make sure to gain some inspiration on the resurrection from Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God.
But there is one writer that I get excited to return to every Easter and that is Fleming Rutledge. Her profound and intense treatise on the cross, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus is borderline compulsory reading (warning that it is more than 600 pages of pretty dense content), but there is a smaller work of hers that my heart enjoys returning to every year. She has a series of Good Friday sermons collated in a work called Three Hours which I just love.
The book is really seven sermons covering the seven utterances that Jesus spoke from the cross. I was reading it this afternoon and Rutledge said something that stopped me in my tracks and won’t leave my mind. She said …
““ … the life of a Christian is lived in the tension between ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ and ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.’””
We are not entirely sure of the order of the utterances that Jesus spoke from the cross as we have have them as a collation and combination from all four gospel writers, and so we do not know how much time passes between these two statements (though it isn’t more than three hours), but what happens in the gap between them is the key to the victorious and obedient Christian life.
Friends, there will be days when we feel abandoned by God, forsaken and cast out, and His presence and goodness will feel so far and so foreign that we might wonder if we will ever experience them again. The key to our lives will be how we get ourselves to a place of surrender and trust as we go through those days though.
Just like Jesus did.
This year, as you prepare for Holy Week, I pray that we will be a people who will know the goodness of a God who sent His Son to go all the way down into the darkest of pits to suffer for and like us, and I pray that we will trust in a God, whose beloved Son trusted the Father even while at the bottom of that pit, surrendering His life to the purpose of God, and in so doing, finding the most triumphant of victories in what looked like the most spectacular of defeats.
There is so much tension in this life we live where it is obvious that we are not home yet. May we be people who commend our spirits and our lives into the hands of our heavenly Father.
Trust Him.
The music this week is from Dustin Kensrue and it is for those (who like me) might be exhausted by the ugliness of this world and need a reminder of beauty.
Dustin Kensrue - What Beautiful Things [With Commentary]
Press on.
Ross
