What can God do in you in forty days? Forty days to examine and abstain and fast and pray? Forty days to be marked by God’s grace?
Our series for this Lenten season – 40 days – is Life in the Christ Lane – seven messages (including Easter) on our identity in Christ from the book of First Peter. Peter is writing to a church facing suffering and persecution. He’s writing to remind them of their identity in Jesus – that their suffering was not unknown to their Founder and that their ultimate identity was to be resurrection people – in Christ. Peter was offering the hope of Christ to the early church and to the church today.
Lent – noun /lent/
- The period preceding Easter that in the Christian Church is devoted to fasting, abstinence, and penitence in commemoration of Christ’s fasting in the wilderness. In the Western Church it runs from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday and so includes forty weekdays.
- The 40 weekdays from Ash Wednesday until Easter observed by Christians as a season of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter.
40 is a significant number in the Bible. When the world was flooded, it rained for forty days and forty nights. Moses fasted for forty days while receiving the Ten Commandments. The spies sent to scope out the Promised Land spent forty days in Canaan. Elijah traveled forty days to Horeb, the mountain of God. And Jesus has two forty day periods connected to his life – he spent forty days fasting in the wilderness after his baptism and forty days with his disciples after his resurrection. Lent is forty days of intense spiritual formation and transformation.
Come join us as we travel with Jesus down a road of Peace, Readiness and Self-control.
