Ash Wednesday 2026
Notes
Transcript
Let us open in prayer:
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.
Ash Wednesday begins the forty days of Lent. Which the early church adopted to model the 40 days that Jesus spent in the desert prior to beginning His ministry. The Holy Spirit lead Jesus into the desert for 40 days and He ate nothing during that time. He was sustained by the Father. Jesus completed what Israel could not complete in the Exodus story. Their journey to the promise land was supposed to take 40 days and instead it took 40 years.
Usually I go through the three temptations of Jesus but this year I wanted to focus on something different. We all at one point or another go into the desert. Because we need to time to understand that there is but one sustaining force in this world. We need to go into the desert because we need to re-align our lives to Jesus. To many times the world distracts us from truly following Jesus. The world creeps in and the satan is there tempting us and trying to pull us away from the Lord. Instead we need to strip away all the distractions and look what Jesus says it takes to follow Him
Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit their very self? Whoever is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.
The world tells us to affirm sin and to disregard the these tough verses. Jesus says that if we want to be His disciple we need to deny ourselves. We need to lose our life. That life that was before Jesus. Before the world changed the way we track time, it was called BC and AD. Before Christ and After Death. It was a clear distinction in the world, before Jesus and after Jesus. Is our lives a reflection of that? Is there a clear distinction between before Jesus entered your life and He did. When we lose our life to Jesus we truly save it. It cannot be any half measures. It requires sacrifice.
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
This is true and proper worship to offer our entire selves to the Lord. The patterns of this world are not for us. We are separate but it takes the desert to see that those that follow Jesus are set apart.
This time is for setting aside anything that distracts your from follow the Lord. I want to close looking at the book of James
Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you. Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.
James is telling us to get away from the filth and evil. Instead turn to the Word of God, turn to Jesus and give your life over to Him. He is the one that can save. But do not simply listen but put the Word of God into action in your life. This is what this time of the year is about, it is about taking those steps of obedience in following Jesus and making a sacrifice to get you closer to Jesus. What in your life is taking you further from the Lord.
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
We have to be single minded in that our mind is always on Jesus. We intentionally come near to the Lord each and every day, to purify our hearts and humble ourselves to the Lord.
Let us pray
