Quote for Lent

Loved in Jesus Christ, United in Our Head and Savior!

“What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—the fact that HE KNOWS ME. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind. All my knowledge of Him depends on His sustained initiative in knowing me. I know Him because He first knew me, and continues to know me. He knows me as a friend, One who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore when His care falters. This is momentous knowledge. There is unspeakable comfort—the sort of comfort that energizes, be it said, not enervates [i.e. does not lose force]—in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.

There is tremendous relief in knowing that His love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion Him about me, in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench His determination to bless me.

There is, certainly, great cause for humility in the thought that He sees all the twisted things about me that my fellow humans do not see (and I am glad!), and that He sees more corruption in me than that which I see in myself (which, in all conscience, is enough). There is, however, equally great incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some unfathomable reason, He wants me as His friend, and desires to be my friend, and has given His Son to die for me in order to realize this purpose. We cannot work these thoughts out here, but merely to mention them is enough to show how much it means to know not merely that we know God, but that He knows us.”

From J. I. Packer’s Knowing God, p. 37 IVP

40 days before Easter, Amen! Lent is a forty-day season before the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the tomb. It begins today on Ash Wednesday, and we reflect on the days of the wilderness-temptation scene of our Lord’s life and ministry. The Sundays are not counted in the forty day period, because each Sunday memorializes the historical reality of His Resurrection. Lent ends on April 3, 2010, the day before Easter.

G. Mark Sumpter