Thursday 28th January 2010

Taken from Minister’s Letter: February Church Magazine

Next week we enter February, the month when Lent begins.  Time for us to eat the pancakes and start our spiritual preparations for Easter.  We are glad, I think, that the days are ‘lengthening’ (that’s where the word ‘Lent’ comes from), and we are equally glad to be looking forward to the joy of Easter Day.  But first we think of Jesus in the wilderness being tempted, and then His crucifixion on Good Friday.

During Lent we often sing that hymn 40 days and 40 nights.  It refers to Jesus’ time in the wilderness immediately after His baptism.  That Judean wilderness is an inhospitable place.  It is 35 miles long by 15 miles wide and reaches down to the Dead Sea.  A dry place.  An isolated place.

Today we sometimes refer to our dry or difficult times as our Wilderness Experiences.  Moments when we confront our fears and battle with the hard challenges thrown up by life.

Can we learn from Jesus as He spent time in the wilderness?  How did He cope?

He trusted in God His Father.  Tempted by the Devil – who misused scripture – Jesus reads the bible with the eye of faith and puts scripture into practice. 

We don’t really know what Jesus went through in the wilderness.  I don’t think we can understand the full extent of His temptations. Yet we can learn from the way He got through them.  He did that by trusting in God and believing God’s promises in the bible.  And by doing so He shows us the way that every Christian can cope with their own times in The Wilderness.

May you know God’s blessing as we travel together through these days of Lent.

In Christ,