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Quote
“To become one with Jesus Christ, a person must be willing to not only give up sin, but also to surrender his whole way of looking at things.”
—Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest. Updated Edition in Today’s Language. Ed. James Reimann, March 8, “The Surrendered Life.”
Opening Prayer
Spirit of Christ, this Holy Week reach into the crevices of mind and shadows of heart to bring light and life to those parts of our selves hidden even from our selves and not yet made whole in You. We admit that we remain in need of healing and restoration to the vitality for which our Creating One formed us. As Ezekiel spoke to dry bones, speak over us your Word of Life, that we, like those bones, might come together a people infused with your Breath and breathing that Breath into this world much in need of healing and peace, joy and love, hope and graciousness. Amen.
Scripture: Galatians 2.20a (NRSV)
“I have been crucified with Christ….”
Devotional Comments
This having been crucified with Christ, what St. Paul says in Galatians 2.20, is what it means to be on the Christ Path. Indeed, it means even more, for the Christ Way is a pilgrimage, not a stop. The Christ Way is a creating of new memory based on an ever evolving and growing relationship with Christ. Notice how congregations and many Christians that are not growing into the future talk about how it used to be in the past, rather than envisioning with excitement of what can be. God is with us in the present, a present open to what we have never seen before, to go where we have never gone before. The Christ Way is not being anchored to a calcified religiousness that celebrates the Church that was, as though God is only a God of yesterday and the Church was more able to receive afresh the Word in another time and place. Rather, the Christ Way opens to an ever evolving and deepening, an enlarging, dying, which is as ironic as the Gospel, a birthing into an ever new living. Our first dying began with Prevenient Grace, the Grace that gives us a first impulse toward Good. Our last dying, through conscious trust in Christ, never ends in that God being Infinity has blessed us with an infinite pilgrimage that will never exhaust the potential and possibilities of learning, growing, and being. We have died, we will die; we have been born afresh, we will be born afresh. This is the motif of dying and resurrection applied to each of us, one that rests on the potency of the Resurrection of the first Century, but one that is completed continually in the present and in you and me.
Suggested Psalm Reading: Psalm 73
Spiritual Exercise
Reflect on ways you have experienced God working in your life, putting to death the old and birthing the new, again and again, through continuing Grace.
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