Join us Wednesday at 6:00 pm for a contemplative Ash Wednesday service as we begin the Lenten journey to Easter.
We will begin our sermon series “Rotten.” As we enter this season, we remember that Lent is the forty-day season of preparation, awareness, self-reflection, and self-evaluation that leads us into Easter. These days are marked with a more somber tone – a time tinged with the painful acknowledgement of our own sinfulness and mortality. It is a time when Christians confront and confess our neediness and wantonness – and prepare ourselves to receive the glorious news of Jesus’ resurrection. A life of faith is not made. It’s grown.
Such is the goal of Lent: to meditate on what God is doing in, to, and for us; to be aware of how we nurture, water, feed, and prune the holy seeds planted within us by our good confession of the faith; and to allow God’s light to shine brightly upon the fertile fields of our souls. But as God grows a deeper faith within us, there comes a moment when we must harvest and put into practice the faith we believe, for fruit left growing on the vine quickly rots in the sweltering heat of life. Found within Paul’s letter to the Galatians, we read of the beautiful fruit God desires to grow in our lives: the Fruit of the Spirit. Each week, we will focus on one of these virtues by examining the danger that comes when we allow that gracious fruit to rot.