The intersection of hearts and ashes.

Ash Wednesday is the starting day of the season of Lent in the Christian year. Forty days (not including Sunday's which are know as little Easters') that lead us toward the corridors of the cross and resurrection of Jesus that are celebrated on Easter Sunday. The ash smudge placed on greasy foreheads on this day, as if they were shoved into a fireplace, invite us in picture to embrace again that we are dusty, needy pilgrims whose lives depend on the life, death and life again forever of our older brother Jesus. In the season of Lent, we are invited to put on Jesus while we put off symbolic or actual hinderances to our welcome of Him in our lives. That's today. We are invited. You are invited.

This past Sunday, my friend and pastor IlSun Kim led our congregation to encounter God at the Lord's table, remembering the body of our Lord broken for us, the blood of our Lord shed for us. It pointed to what we are journeying towards over the next 40 days. And while we journey through the 40 days of Lent, we are invited, even encouraged as brave and unbrave hearts alike, to walk into our sin stained hearts WITH Jesus. To take stock of our inner life, scary as it might be. As we moved towards the celebration of the Lord's Supper, I read words from a preacher man who lived in the mid to late 1800's named Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He's dead to us, but alive to Christ in ways that we can't even fathom. Sometimes I find that reading words from women and men from other time epochs is really refreshing. I also find it perspective giving to read words from folks who know life in the Godhead now, beyond what their written words of their day could ever capture. That is a hopeful thought for me.

And so on this Ash Wednesday of 2017, I simply offer the words from a really alive dead guy as he wrote about sin and it's defeat through the blood of Jesus. Savor these sobering words written in the 1800's.

"Our Redeemer's glorious cry of 'It is finished,' was the death-knell of all the adversaries of His people, the breaking of 'the battle.' Behold the hero of Golgotha using His cross as an anvil, and His woes as a hammer, dashing to shivers bundle after bundle of our sins, those poisoned 'arrows of the bow'; trampling on every indictment, and destroying every accusation. What glorious blows the mighty Breaker gives with a hammer far more ponderous than the fabled weapon of Thor! How the diabolical darts fly to fragments, and the infernal bucklers are broken like potters' vessels! Behold, He draws from its sheath of hellish workmanship the dread sword of Satanic power! He snaps it across His knee, as a man breaks the dry wood of a fagot, and casts it into the fire. Beloved, no sin of a believer can now be an arrow mortally to wound him, no condemnation can now be a sword to kill him, for the punishment of our sin was borne by Christ, a full atonement was made for all our iniquities by our blessed Substitute and Surety. Who now accuseth? Who now condemneth? Christ hath died, yea rather, hath risen again. Jesus has emptied the quivers of hell, has quenched every fiery dart, and broken off the head of every arrow of wrath; the ground is strewn with the splinters and relics of the weapons of hell's warfare, which are only visible to us to remind us of our former danger, and of our great deliverance. Sin hath no more dominion over us. Jesus has made an end of it, and put it away for ever. O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end. Talk ye of all the wondrous works of the Lord, ye who make mention of His name, keep not silence, neither by day, nor when the sun goeth to his rest. Bless the Lord, O my soul."

Not keeping silent today.

Thanks be to God.

There's more.