The “mind of Christ” is displayed most clearly in Jesus’ conversation with Satan after forty days of fasting in the wilderness. It is there that logic and persuasion are employed by Satan in order to sway Jesus to transfer his loyalties to himself. The powerful tool the enemy uses is the Scripture itself, and Jesus responds in Scripture. It is a wonderful display of the mind of Christ in opposition to the mind of Satan, but more importantly it is a window for us of the mind of Christ: “It is written that man shall not live on bread alone,” and, “It is also written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test,’ and “For it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only.’”

The “mind of Christ” that Paul tells us belongs to all Christians (1 Corinthians 2:16), is full of the Word of God in Scripture. It is Scripture that Jesus resorts to when he is alone and weak and hungry. Scripture fills his mind and provides him with the strength he needs to fend off Satan. It is the priceless gift of the written Word of God that is the “mind” we can share with the son of God.

The Scriptures have never been more accessible than they are today, and perhaps they’ve never been more neglected. Pope St. John Paul II wrote: “ Yes, the heart is to be a library of the Word of God, uttered in the Scriptures.” (In God’s Hands, the Spiritual Diaries, Pg. 172).

In Christ both his heart and mind feed his spirit through the scriptures. The Scriptures ground him in his ministry as they form the framework for his appearance among the Hebrew people. Jesus quotes Scripture even on the cross. (Ps. 22:1, Ps. 31:5)

Lent is the time to draw close to Jesus by reading Scripture, sampling the passages we love, reading and re-reading the Psalms to drink in the written word. As Holy Week draws near we can re-visit the events of the crucifixion as all four gospels give us accounts. When we try daily Bible reading we find that our Lord wants it of us even more than we do. Scripture is a strong link to our God, and it is written for us.

Love in Him,

Prue

When I took violin lessons I learned more about life than I did about the violin. My teacher said that I must learn to focus, concentrate, and relax, simultaneously. I argued that concentrating and relaxing were mutually exclusive. She answered, “Nevertheless, you must achieve this, or you will never play the violin.” As she was an accomplished violinist I had to believe her, and so I launched myself on a program of self discipline that I hoped would achieve my goal of successfully playing the instrument.

What I really learned was that many, maybe most of the limits we place on ourselves are truly artificial.

“My Father’s house has many rooms. . . (John 14:2). In the same way our souls have many rooms. We’re only dimly aware of the contents of those rooms until we undertake something new. Then we learn of some of our own weaknesses, selfishness and strengths. When we open those rooms to the One who also has many rooms, and who loves us more even than we love ourselves, the parameters of the limits we place on ourselves are shifted, and we grow.

St. Paul wrote, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love”

(1 Corinthians 13:12&13) Three of the rooms that exist in all Christians are these three. During Lent we can visit each room and witness the shrunken parts and be forgiven for the withered, dusty rooms that we have neglected, knowing as we do, that the light and fresh air of Easter lay ahead of us.

Our Father also allows us to see the flashes of grace in each room, and recognize that He has been present in our rooms of faith, hope, and love. Our time to to stay in the wilderness of Lent is shorter and shorter. Now is the time to visit the many rooms of our inner lives and prepare for the expansion and light of Easter.

Love in Him,

Prue

Once when I was sitting on a bench in a nearby park I met a young man from Bosnia. He was accompanying his two nephews who were playing nearby. He had immigrated after the Bosnian war and spoke very clear English.

He told me that, though the park wasn’t really like his home, it reminded him of home and he enjoyed coming there frequently. He showed me pictures on his phone of Bosnia, of beautiful forests and a waterfall. This young man had escaped from some great horrors that had happened to his own family. Visiting the park seemed to help him. He had a buoyant spirit.

“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.” (Psalm 121:1&2).

When God created the earth he pronounced it “very good!” (Genesis 1:3), and from then on, men and women have recognized “goodness” in the natural environment. When we receive a restorative spirit, a movement toward goodness or joy in nature, however dimly , we are in touch with the Creator of that nature, the reality of goodness: “ He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul” (Psalm 23:4).

Believers and unbelievers both experience the restorative quality of nature. It is a powerful reality. Some have stopped short of recognizing the Creator and have worshiped His creation. Nevertheless, for those who know the Creator, nature becomes one of the great evidences of His presence and His healing and restorative character.

“Come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:28-30). As nature was declared good, and we experience good from it, we participate in the very character of God when we receive the restoration nature affords. That goodness we experience catching a breeze on a hot day, the sweet smell of fresh air, the sight of hills and trees and water, birds and animals, extends to us the timelessness of God. We experience a glimpse of eternity that both restores our souls and gives us rest. Jesus reminds us that it is his work toward that end. During Lent, allow the fresh air to speak of Him.

Love in Him,

Prue

For forty days Israel and her enemy the Philistines were at a stalemate, the two armies facing each other across a valley with a stream running through it. Aggressive arrogance on one side met fear and trepidation across the valley. It was a forty day stand-still that was close to erupting when young David approached Goliath and , undeterred by the giant’s taunts, answered, “This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands,. . . all those who are gathered here will know that it is not by sward or spear that the Lord saves; for the battle is the Lord’s, and He will give all of you into our hands.” (I Samuel 17:47).

The enormity of David’s words and action could hardly be measured. Not only did he secure a great victory for Israel and freedom from the Philistines, but he successfully reaffirmed the presence of their God in the midst of their lives as a nation and a people with a history of God as their very identity.

This story is thrilling for children and adults alike. It touches the yearning we all have of participating in a wholly righteous cause and successfully reaffirming that righteousness.

From the time when Samuel anointed David, and perhaps even before, David had “tunnel vision” (I Sam. 16:13) , the capacity to focus so thoroughly on God that he saw God in circumstances that others found obscure. David never doubted who really enabled him to kill bears, lions and Goliath. He saw through almost every tunnel to the light at the end, and he recorded this in his many psalms: I love you, Lord, my strength.

The Lord is my rock, my

fortress, and my deliverer;

my God is my rock, in whom I

take refuge. (Ps. 18:1-2).

David’s love for the Lord sank deep into his spirit. In the rest of the forty days of Lent we could imitate David’s “tunnel vision”, and seek God in the most adverse times and conditions. It won’t be hard to find such conditions in our world; the challenge of Lent is to seek out the “tunnel” and find the light that lights our paths today. Simply reading David’s words daily in Lent is a good way to reach for the light.

Love in Him

Prue

“I have had enough, Lord,” he (Elijah) said. “Take my life, I am no better than my ancestors.” Then he lay down under a bush and fell asleep.

All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again.
The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” So he got up and ate and drank. Strengthened by the food, he traveled forty days and forty nights until he reached Horeb, the mountain of God. (I Kings 19:4-9).

On our journey through Lent, it is well to contemplate our own mortality. Elijah feared for his life and asked God to let him die, a prayer that God denied, as Elijah is one of only two in the Bible who, in fact, never died. (2 Kings2:11).

As the Israelites walked forty years in the strength of the manna that God supplied, so Elijah walked forty days in the strength of the bread and water supplied by the angel.

As we walk through Lent we go in the strength of the “bread of life” that came from God to us in Jesus. It’s true for every one of us that we could not make the journey without it, for as the angel said, “ Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.” It is indeed too much for us to reconcile a world full of contradictions, denials, and separations. It’s too much for us to seek vainly for peace within ourselves.

There is only one peace that passes understanding, (Philippians 4:7), and it comes as food to our spirits: Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. (Jesus of Nazareth, John 6:35).

We are well into our forty days of Lent; there is nothing preventing us from tasting the food of our God in scripture throughout the rest of the time, and afterward as well. The forty days are a gift of time; the food is a gift of eternity. During Lent we have only to remember that the journey is too much for us without the food.

Love in Him,

Prue

Type 

Forty Rainy Days

“Aslan, said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”

“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.

“Not because you are?”

“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.” ( Prince Caspian, by C.S. Lewis.)

I will establish my covenant with you, and you will enter the ark—you and your wife and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. (God’s words to Noah, Gen. 6:18).

From, the moment that Noah heard God’s voice and purposed in his mind to obey, Noah grew larger in spirit. When he finished the ark and worked patiently to fill it with food and animals, Noah grew, and when he watched and waited forty days and forty nights while the rain poured down without an end in sight, but the words of God in his mind,he grew yet again. Noah, like Lucy, in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, was a child of God; in fact he was the only child of God in a hopelessly corrupted world when he began his adventure with his God. None of it was easy, but Noah ( and Lucy) grew into relying on God and walking in His way.

I have heard it said that “God will never love you any more than He loves you right now.” Whatever truth there may be in that, the Bible and life display a different experience for the children of God. Noah obeyed and talked with God through colossal experiences and was rewarded with a spirit of communion with his God, and an unbreakable covenant sealed with the rainbow.

As we grow in Christ, Christ grows in us. People who know the Lord grow in love, and find an ever larger supply of love waiting for them. Perhaps the supply does not “grow”, but the experience of the love indeed does.

More than two millennia after Noah watched forty rainy days, the apostle Peter wrote to fellow believers, You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praise of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light. (I Peter 2:9)

During Lent let’s wait with Noah doing God’s will in preparation for the wonderful light of Easter.

Love in Him,

Prue

In his “Confessions” St Augustine mulled over the meaning of time and eternity. He passionately desired to discern their meanings. Augustine believed, as did everyone in his era, that the sun rotates around the earth. For a while he judged that time could be measured by the duration of the sun’s journey from east to east around the earth in a day, but this did not satisfy his quest for a definition of time.

When God told the Israelites that they would not enter the Promised Land for forty more years, He said, For forty years-one year for each of the forty days you explored the land- you will suffer for your sins and know what it is like to have me against you.”

(Numbers 14:34).

God chose forty years as years of remembrance. He chose the time so that all the people would be reminded of Him and of their connection to Him daily.

Centuries later God would say of a disobedient Israel, I am now going to allure her, I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. . . there she will respond as in the days of her youth, as on the day she came up out of Egypt. (Hosea 2:14).

The forty years of “suffering” in the wilderness were a time of bonding with God. They were a time of allowing a whole generation to grow old in the knowledge of their God, and for the younger generation to prepare for the fulfillment of God’s promise to them of occupying the Promised Land. What was delivered as punishment worked for the people as a time of growing and maturing in their relationship to God. Forty years of suffering became a time of blessing.

ST. Augustine worried and wondered over the concept of time until he didn’t. You, my Father, are eternal. But I am divided between time gone by and time to come, and its course is a mystery to me. My thoughts, the intimate life of my soul, are torn this way and that in the havoc of change. And so it will be until I am purified and melted by the fire of your love. . . (Confessions, book xi, 29).

During Lent we don’t have to wonder about the nature of time or eternity. We have forty days to experience forty years of the manna in Scripture every morning if we choose. When Augustine tasted that manna he received a measure of the fire of God’s love, and knew that it would be sufficient for the intimate life of his soul.

Love in Him,

Prue

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the forty days of Lent when we tighten our hold on the hand of God, and loosen it on the hand of worldly cares and our private demons.

There are several “forties” in the Bible, among them the forty days and nights of Moses on mount Sinai receiving the Ten Commandments from God (Exodus 20:1-17), the forty years in the wilderness by the whole nation of Israel, learning to be the people of God,(Numbers 14:34), Elijah’s journey to Mount Horeb for forty days and nights in order to meet with God, (1Kings 9:8), the forty days and nights in the wilderness by Jesus while being tempted by the devil, ( Matthew 4:2), and the forty days from the resurrection of Jesus to his ascension after establishing the church. (Acts 1:3).

All of these times are pivotal for Christians everywhere, and worth revisiting in Scripture during Lent. Each period of forty was a time of major growth in the spiritual relationship between God and His whole people, or between God and an individual, even between God and His own son Jesus. Each forty brought a closer, clearer relationship between God and person or persons, until at last Jesus gives the Holy Spirit, establishing the church.

It’s no wonder that the number forty for a time span came to mean a deepening of our love for God and our surrender and commitment to Him. It takes reflection and reminding to renew that “surrender”, and hence the many ways we celebrate Lent: eating fish on Friday (or any other day), sacrificing dessert, attending church services, reading the Bible, shedding our defensiveness or “touchiness”, increasing our kindness, and allowing ourselves to be vulnerable for forty days.

That Lent has survived for so many centuries suggests that Someone more than ourselves is in the mix, Someone who seeks the closeness that we seek, who looks for us even more than we look for Him, and who knows the “look” because He has it, too. He has said, “Ask”, “Seek,” “Knock” because He wants us to find Him. There is no better time ( and there is no bad time) to respond to Him than for forty days before glorious Easter.

Love in Him,

Prue

My high school art teacher was passionate about “modern” art. Nature, he declared, was the raw material of art, but never art itself. Art required creativity, imagination and intelligence, none of which, he asserted, exist in nature. Even then I wondered how that could be true.

On Friday when I stepped outside I saw on the shrubs near or house icicles encasing the branches and hanging from them, no two alike, glistening and flashing rainbow colors in the sunlight. I remembered the words of John Adams , our second president writing from Quincy, Massachusetts: The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have see a Queen of France (Marie Antoinette) with eighteen millions of francs in diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones. ( John Adams by David McCullough)(my parenthesis).

The queen’s clothing was a true work of human art. Her very appearance was artistically achieved, but Adams was moved even more deeply by the artistry of ice on trees and bushes. If the purpose of art is to reach and touch human spirits , then God ‘s imagination , creativity and intelligence on display qualify as undeniable art.

It is impossible to measure the impression that Adams received, but I know that the impression I received was sheer joy, not unlike the joy that saturates much of the Bible:

Let the mountains sing together for joy. (Psalm 98:8), I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. (John 15:11), I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. (John 16:22), . . . you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible joy. (1 Peter 1:8).

If joy is so embedded in the character of God, that even a shrub full of icicles catching the sun can convey it to a soul, it is certain that our Father God is the greatest of all artists in the universe. His artistry displays endless creativity, intelligence, and imagination. In icicles on branches we are invited to share His joy, to rejoice with God at His very character and His creation. True art must be God freely sharing His creativity and finding us receptive.

Love in Him,

Prue

One of the most heart breaking stories in the Old Testament is the return of the spies from the Promised Land, and the general decision by the people not to attempt to enter the land: The land we explored devours those living in it. The people we saw there were of great size. We saw the Nephilim there. . . We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked like the same to them. (Numbers 13:32-33) The Nephilim were a tribe of giants who were believed to have supernatural qualities.

Two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, tried desperately to counter this negative report, reminding the people of God’s supernatural rescue of them from Egypt, and His faithfulness in their travels, all to no avail. The spies even brought back with them samples of the abundant grain and fresh fruit , just as they had been told would be waiting for them in the Promised Land. Mention of the Nephilim was the turning point in their decision not to go any farther.

We all have Nephilim in our lives. In fact, we’re bombarded by terrifying Nephilim many times a day through multiple forms of the media: “taxes”, “variants”, “supply chain”, “deadly weather,” “war,” and an even longer list of personal Nephilims. They are fears that appear to have supernatural proportion, and at least partly succeed in paralyzing our wills to move forward. For the Israelites the fear cost them forty years in the wilderness learning to trust God and turn away from fear.

For us the cost of giving in to our Nephilim can be counted only in each individual. In both cases God does not remain neutral: This is how love is made complete in us so that we will have confidence. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear. . . We love because He first loved us.( 1 John 4:16-19)

When God sent His son Jesus to us He sent a love that would make it possible for us to defeat the Nephilim in our lives and even in the world . Because God is greater than all the Nephilim in the world, through His love for us we have all we need to escape the paralysis of fear, and the destruction of despair. God is love.

Love in Him,

Prue