Hello Church Family,
The last two weeks we talked about the relationship between our faith and God’s faithfulness. The faithfulness of a person is measured by their consistency and reliability. It’s easy to doubt in God’s faithfulness when he allows suffering into our life. When God’s purposes contract our comfort it’s easy to doubt his wisdom and his goodness.
To resolve this tension we looked at Lamentations 3. In that passage, the author rediscovers his faith in God’s faithfulness by reflecting on the LORD’s covenantal love and never ending mercy. Fortunately for us, we have something even better than the Old Covenant to anchor our soul in the faithfulness of God.
The death and resurrection of Jesus has inaugurated a New Covenant, a better one. We, like the author in Lamentations 3 only have to look back when we find ourselves questioning God’s wisdom in our pain. Whatever he reasons are, there are two things we know it cannot be.
It cannot be because he doesn’t love us. It cannot be because he doesn’t care. His unconditional love and never ending mercy were both proven at the cross of Christ. You can accuse Jesus of many things but being indifferent to our pain isn’t one of them.
He entered into our pain. Fully. He took on flesh. He suffered. He bled. He died. He absorbed the penalty for our sin through his substitutionary death on the cross. He experienced first hand the effects that our sin has had on this broken world. He has felt our pain and cried our tears.
We see all of this supremely in the cross of Christ. If the faithfulness of God is to be measured by anything, it should be measured by that. At the cross, God’s consistency to his own purposes and character are supremely displayed. God’s love and justice are poured out simultaneously. Great is His faithfulness!
My favorite part of studying God’s faithfulness was the discovery that the most common word for God’s faithfulness in the Old Testament is the word “aman.” In Greek it’s transliterated “amen.” Now you can tell your friends you know Greek and Hebrew. I’m sure you’ve said this word on more than one occasion in your lifetime.
Starting this Sunday we’re kicking off a new series on this word. I’ve entitled the series “Amen: Little Word. Big Truths.” Jesus uses this word whenever he’s about to address something of great significance. You’ll find it translated as “Truly Truly I say unto you...” in the Gospels. For this series, we going to look at three of these sayings during the Passion Week.
As you may know, the weeks leading up to Easter are ones in which we historically focus ourselves on the cross. The passages that we’re going to study these next several weeks will do just that. I hope you’ll join us and invite a friend.
This Sunday will be special because we’re officially kicking off our Multiply: Bless The West strategic resource initiative. I’m really excited to see what the Lord does through this campaign. This is one of two strategies we’re launching this spring towards our 2020 Vision. The second is a spiritual growth campaign entitled “Greater: Overcoming the Lesser Life.”
You can read more about both of them on our website. We are still in need of people to sign up as small group H.O.S.Ts for the campaign. It’s only a six week commitment. I hope you’ll consider it! As always, if there’s anything I can pray for you about, please let me know.
Blessings,
Pastor Wes