Andy Cornett | living in the new creation

endlessly captivated by the person and work of the resurrected Jesus

on dust and ashes

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Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent. For a long time I discarded that tradition and went without celebrating Lent in any real way, but in recent years I have come back to do some thinking about it and recover a sense of worshipping with the whole church.

The season of Lent is an opportunity for reflecting, for remembering, for repenting as we recall the death and resurrection of Jesus. Lent isn’t for navel-gazing or moping: it’s for a clear-headed and far-sighted facing our own condition in light of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ. We never repent thinking we could justify God’s forgiveness, but we always repent because of his staggering love for us that has wrecked and remade our very selves.

I don’t have much to add here, so here are two wiser voices that each offer a powerful mediation: one on Lent, and one on Ash Wednesday.

Sin ravages God’s Shalom in my life and in the world around me. I tell the truth about myself with the ashes on my forehead. I’m a sinner in need of grace. But friends, remember also, the ashes are placed on our foreheads in the sign of a cross. We are not without hope. We take our sins seriously with the ashes, we take God’s grace seriously by receiving them in the sign of the cross, because in the cross is the promise of resurrection, and new life in Christ right now.

Read all of Fred Harrell’s marvelous 2012 post “A Season, A Discipline, A Sign.”

I’m thankful that the ashes are about more than my own death. They’re about the death of the God whose brokenness and ultimate restoration heals my failure, who brings purpose to a life that could easily be written off as ordinary.

Read the full version of Micha Boyett’s 2011 personal “Ash Wednesday” post.

Find an Ash Wednesday service tonight and remember that you, too, are dust and ashes. You, too, have a faithful Savior – Jesus Christ. If you are local to Chattanooga, join us at Signal Mountain Presbyterian at 6:30pm. May your own heart sense the call of Jesus to leave life as you know it and follow him in the fire of love with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

a prayer for the church on this day

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Lord, we come to you this morning on this new day, and we give you praise.
We say together with our lips: “This is the day The Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
You teach us to fix our eyes on you, to keep before us all that is pure, right, true, noble, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy.

And yet, Holy Father –
There are days we we have a hard time rejoicing. There are days when we have a hard time seeing the right and the good. When instead we are weighed down by grief, when we are sick with anger. We know what we have here: this gift of this church, this community, these generations of adults and students, parents and kids. And we know that right now there are churches gathering in Connecticut who are missing adults and kids whose lives were taken from them on Friday.

You are the God of justice – why do you allow suffering like this? And how do we praise you in the midst of it?

God we often don’t know how to keep our eyes on you when we live in a world so sick and broken that we suffer catastrophes like this.

But we know you speak the truth when you teach us that all of us have fallen short of your glory. We confess that we live in a sinful world and we ourselves are sinners. Lord, on behalf of our culture, we pray that you would cast down our addiction to violence, our cynicism about it, our delight in it.
By the cross of your Son Jesus, root out anger and pride and hardness of heart among us. Shed the light of your unfailing love into our hearts to heal our wrong desires. Keep us fixed on the truth that you are near – you are not a joke, you are not a fiction, you are real and you are here and that must shape every aspect of our life.

Lord Jesus, We come this morning to praise you in the midst of our pain and fear. If we don’t speak that truth, then we’re faithless to our own community of kids and the generation after them. In You, Lord, is our only hope and trust.

So come, Lord Jesus. Bring a hope in You, our hope for Your new heavens and new earth. Make it a fire in our hearts that keeps us going. Keep before us that which is good, true, beauitful. Let our gentleness be evident to all, because you are near. Make us agents of your kingdom who redouble our efforts to witness to the life we have in you – life now and life to come. Help us to learn the new habits of mind and heart that you use to shape us into people who are truly Christ-like – who love and lead this world toward your purpose.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Stott on church

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in context of a discussion on the church as the house/household of God in 1 Timothy 3:15:

But when we come together as the church (ekklesia, ‘assembly’) of the living God, every aspect of our common life is enriched by the knowledge of his presence in our midst. In our worship we bow down before the living God. Through the reading and exposition of his Word we hear his voice addressing us. We meet him at his table, when he makes himself known to us through the breaking of bread. In our fellowship we love each other as he loved us. And our witness become bolder and more urgent. Indeed, unbelievers coming in may confess that ‘God is really among you’ (1 Cor. 14:25).

John Stott, Guard the Truth: The Message of 1 Timothy and Titus, 104-05.

a stubborn stereotype

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One stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in blue-collar communities and small towns, and, more generally, among Americans who do not have college degrees. That was true in the 1970s. Yet since then, attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic ambitions than seniors used to be, and are as trusting of other people as seniors a generation ago; their peers from less affluent households have become less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm—which did not exist 40 years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago—has developed between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society.

Don Peck, “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?”

I’ve heard hints of this in different places, but I’ve never seen it put so baldly. If you couple it with the author’s later (in the article) examination of “meritocracy” in schools and a growing gap in educational achievement and corresponding financial success … is the church increasingly if uncritically successful among the only the successful? If so – it’s a shadow mission, not the gospel mission.

a new way to be human

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to preach at all three services at New Hope on our Kickoff Sunday for new classes and fall ministries (click the link if you would like to listen). Since I knew we would have more parents and students around, I wanted to talk about the church and the new kind of community God was creating through his Son and by his Spirit. The text came from Ephesians 2:11-22. I tried to get into the passage and speak about the new realities here (and the theology behind them) before teasing out an implication for each one. The outline is below.
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1) Why we need Christ: remember who you were.

2) What He has done: united us in Christ Jesus.

“His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross by which he put to death their hostility” [Eph 2:15-16]
— There’s a new way to be human

3) What‘s the plan: one new people of God – the new temple.

Now people are more important than place. (a new temple)

Now our participation is more important than our personal preference. (united in Christ)

Are we proclaiming the walls are down? Or propping them back up? (remember who you were)

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I had great fun doing this and am thankful for the opportunity to make much of Jesus. If you take the time to listen, I’d invite any comments, feedback, or correction!
grace and peace – Andy