Ash Wednesday 2024

Good afternoon and welcome again to Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is all about honesty and grace. Specifically, it is us being honest about two things: our mortality and the condition of our heart. Our scripture lessons encourage us from Isaiah, to Paul in Corinthians, to Jesus: be honest with God! And with Grace, if we are willing to open up to God and be honest, he will meet us with his grace both for our mortal life and the condition of our hearts.

If we are honest with God he is gracious towards us.

Since it is not only Ash Wednesday but also Valentines Day, let’s put this in terms of love. When I do couples counseling one of the first things I ask is for each person to be honest about where they are right now in their relationship. I explain, there are four stages of love: Falling in love, being in love, staying in love, and falling out of love. It’s really hard to make any progress if we’re not honest about our love towards our partner. Guess what? The same stages of love can be true of our relationship with God. Each one in fact is represented here in these passages today. Let’s explore each stage of love in our relationship with God and how it is we can be honest with him, and how he is gracious towards us.

Because if we are honest with God, he is gracious towards us.

Maybe you find yourself falling in love/being in love with God. We’ll combine the two today. We see Paul show us what it’s like to fall in love and be in love with God....he’ll do anything for him. Love makes you do crazy things: did you hear that list? All that he’s endured? And for what? Just to tell other people what God has done for them in Jesus Christ. God moved mountains of self righteousness, perfectionism, shame, and anger in Paul’s hearts and maybe your’s too, and in comes forgiveness and acceptance. He falls in love with God. When you’re falling in love or being in love, you can’t stop talking about the other person. If you know the love of God, if his love has been poured into your hearts, then tell others about him. This is the honesty we bear before God- to be honest about him with others. The grace God grants those who are head over heals for Jesus is boldness and courage to speak.

If we are honest with God he is gracious towards us.

We see Jesus teach us what it’s like to stay in love. That hardest stage of love in any relationship. In so many words in his teachings on prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, he’s teaching fake love and real love. Three times he says “Do not be like the hypocrites.” Fake love is doing things you know to do to keep up appearances. Like a marriage hollow to the core, religious spiritual acts just to posture as spiritual but don’t actually seek God are nothing before him. Real love is treasuring God. “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” Praying, fasting, almsgiving which is giving to the needy above and beyond your tithe not to be seen as spiritual, holy, and generous, but to commune with the one who is spiritual, holy, and generous-God himself. There’s nothing sweeter then your relationship with God. It’s an endless journey of beauty, truth, and goodness. His beauty, his truth, and his goodness. Stay in love by adopting these or any practices, and he will meet you there and reward you with his very presence. Honesty here looks like truly naming and removing the things which we treasure above and beyond god that have crept into our hearts. The treasures that have replaced God. The grace of God here is the reign of Christ in your life. King Jesus establishing his throne and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, reordering your desires towards him.

If we are honest with God he is gracious towards us.

So when we’re falling in love honesty looks like sharing that with others and his grace is giving us boldness, and staying in love honesty looks like removing what we’ve treasured over Jesus with Grace being transforming our desires for him .

Finally we have falling out of love. Maybe today God is at best an afterthought. Maybe a relationship with god is something that you think is out of reach for any number of reasons. Maybe there’s pain and confusion you’re carrying that keeps you angry or disinterested, maybe there’s sin and shame that causes you to self select and self sabotage any efforts to approach God, maybe there’s just straight up pride- you don’t see a reason for God, you’re good on your own. It my experience with souls, it’s typically a mixture of all three. One thing the scriptures today make clear is the reasons are not on him, but on us. Sometimes in couples counseling we make a ven diagram and lable “me” - what’s my stuff, “we” what’s our stuff, and “me” what’s the other partners stuff. With Jesus and God it looks like this our “me” side has all this: wounded, patterns of sin, shame, pride, envy....ect… with Jesus’s “me” side it just has one thing: “Righteousness.” Not only a right standing before God, but a rightly ordered life. And yet God in Jesus Christ makes a way no matter the reason,no matter our “me” stuff. Paul says: “God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” All that stuff, your sin, your shame, your pride, even the sin others have done to you-that woundedness-all that sin, Jesus Christ became on the cross. It is as if he came over to ourside, absorbed it himself on the cross and canceled it, it’s done! He absorbed it all and put it to death with him, it is held against us no more, nor does it have to live within us any longer. Not only though does he come on our side, but we come over on his side and obtain his righteousness. We are good before God. Everything within us is becoming right- or how God intended it, how God orders things to be. So now both me and Jesus are on both sides! This is what it means in the most important clasue of Pauls statement “In him.” We are in him. He takes what is ours and puts it to death by his death and gives us what is his which is life in his resurrection. NOW we can come with Christ into the “WE.” Which is God the Father himself with the Holy Spirit. We are one with God in Christ.

If you no longer defined by what we’ve done or has been done to us, honesty here looks like repenting-turning away from those practices and thinking, and handing it all over to Jesus. His grace will heal you, strengthening you, and teaching you obedience. The call is for you to repent from the sin that is keeping you back from God. Turn from being held back and receive the forgiveness, the acceptance, the approval, the healing the wholeness of God in Jesus Christ. All of this is yours in Jesus Christ-and the time is now. Now. Do it today. Don’t delay. Now is always the time for salvation. If you would like to make today the day you return to the Lord, let the service lead you and come talk to me afterwards and I’ll pray with you.

If we are honest with God he is gracious towards us.

We come now to be honest about the second thing: our mortality. We are about to come and receive ashes. The word for dirt or soil which these ashes remind us of in Latin is humus. It’s where we get the word humility from, it’s where we get the word human from. God made us from the dust, the dirt of the world. These ashes are a reminder of who we are before the eternal, all powerful, spiritual One, God. It’s a reminder that without him we are truly nothing- we are made of dust and we’ll return to dust. But with him we have everything, we have life, even his own eternal life in Jesus Christ. We can only receive that life if we first humble ourselves. Each one of these actions of going and telling others about God, seeking God with our whole heart, and repenting from sin-all requires humility. SO let us now honestly, and reverently humble ourselves before him, that we might receive the life he is longing to give us in Jesus.