For these weeks of preparation leading up to the remembrance of our Lord’s death and the celebration of His resurrection, I plan to use these blog posts to share some passages from Fleming Rutledge’s devotional, Means of Grace. Each entry will end with the prayer for the week from The Book of Common Prayer. I encourage you to reflect and meditate on these words as a way to till the ground of your heart.
Repentance is insight. Repentance is not groveling. Moreover, repentance is quite a different thing from saing, “I’m sorry if anyone was offended” a dozen times. Repentance involves trying to understand why people were offended, why people were hurt, why people would like to hear a true and sincere apology, and why we ourselves have been offenders. “Who can tell how often he offends? Cleanse thou me from my secret faults.” (Psalm 19:12)
All of us share in the human condition; that is the secret of this season. All of us have dark impulses that could have become murderous had we been brought up in brutal circumstances or been catechized by a vengeful father of hate. Let me be clear: action has to be taken against evil deeds. But the Christian will beware lest more evil deeds begin to erupt from within as well as from without.
It is God’s plan to have mercy upon us. He “consigned all human beings to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all” (Romans 11:32). The First Epistle of Peter puts it another way: “Jesus Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). The righteous died for the unrighteous: that is to say, he, the only truly righteous one, died for the unrighteous. And again Paul: “While we were still helpless, Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom. 5:6).
A great mistake we could make today is to think of ourselves in the wrong category. The Lord Jesus did not die for the righteous. He did not die for the godly. He did not die for the exceptional so that we, the saved, could delight in our own superiority and gloat over others. The Bible teaches us to see ourselves as God sees us. Suppose you and I were at the mercy of what our enemies think of us. Thanks be to God, the ultimate destiny of human beings is not to be determined by enemies. We live and die at the mercy of God, “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”
… [Jesus] died the death of an outcast; he died the death of a condemned man; he died the death of one who had been declared an enemy of all the righteous of the state and of the church. With the last breath of his body and the last drop of his blood, he has wrought the salvation of his enemies: that is to say, the salvation of each and every one of us.
Prayer
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
