Ash Wednesday Reflection: Fellowship And Suffering

Philippians 3:10-14

Today is known in the Christian Calendar as Ash Wednesday.” We also refer to it as the first day of Lent. Lent is a period of forty days starting with Ash Wednesday and leading up to Holy Saturday which is the Saturday before Easter Sunday. It commemorates Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation in the Wilderness right after his baptism in the river Jordan. (Matthew 4:1-11) It is also known as a time of repentance, alms giving, prayer, and fasting.

Many people who observe Lent traditionally seek to give up something that they consider precious or habitual to them like chocolate, coffee, certain meats, or maybe television. These are all good if they are replaced with some spiritual exercise or reflection. But I think is goes much deeper than this.

If we focus and meditate on Jesus’ time and temptation in the Wilderness, we’ll see that life is more than just the Abstinence of pleasure, especially worldly pleasures that do not profit and hinder spiritual growth and commitment. It is also the Embracing of suffering. Jesus’ time in the wilderness reminds of how Jesus spent the last three years of his life in suffering with us before he ever suffered for us on the cross.

It teaches us that there is meaning in suffering and that suffering can bring forth spiritual fruit while pleasure seeking can bring forth carnality, indifference, and spiritual death.

So In this season of Lent my reflections will be on the sufferings of Christ and how suffering leads to triumph. It is through Alms giving, Prayer, and Fasting, along with Enduring trials that we advance forward into the kingdom of God. But the focus is not on these things in particular, but for that prize that we press on to which Paul’s refers to as the Upward call (Philippians 3:13,14) when Christ comes again.

Over the next forty days let us strive to have that same desire Paul had when he said in Philippians 3:10 that we “might know him in the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings.”

Pastor Robby