Glory in Unity (Lent 12, 2023)

Mysterious as the Image of God is (and hard to define!) yet there are characteristics we can glean from observing Jesus and how He talked about His relationship of reflecting God’s perfect Image.

What is reflection, but a return or display of something without absorbing it? We do not absorb the Image of God and consume it. We have it within us and radiate or reflect it back to God.

When God sees His Image displayed well in us—particularly in our unity—God is glorified. When we reflect back to God, the broken (for now) Image, Jesus intercedes for us and makes perfect what the Father sees in what the Christian has radiated back.

Focus for Lent: Repent of cowardice in wrongly exalting, accepting, and reflecting the world and its message. We have been given a better message and a perfect Savior, Jesus Christ. But when 10% of the population (at most) convinces 90% to abandon everything they know from the Bible for fear of being called names or persecuted, we have a cowardice problem and not a pursuit of godly unity.

Questions for further thought:

Jesus has seen God face-to-face before the Incarnation and could reflect His perfect Image even in His perfect humanity. In what way is Jesus the second or “last Adam”?

1 Corinthians 15:45 So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. 46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual. 47 The first man was of the dust of the earth; the second man is of heaven. 48 As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the heavenly man, so also are those who are of heaven. 49 And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man.

When we are finally one with Him as His Church, how will that bring glory to God?

Our culture tries to force unity along secular standards through intimidation/bullying, censorship of alternate voices, power/control of media messaging, repetition (browbeating) in the form of indoctrination called advertising, and through punishment of dissenters. Will that propaganda’s forced compliance ever achieve true unity?

Did Jesus compromise with the devil for the sake of peace and diversity?

Prayer: Lord Jesus, preserve us from our world situation with its unholiness, its adversity, its hatred of all things that You stand for, and its mission of welcoming as many people to hell as possible. In the end, the world standards are conformed only to the god of this world (Satan). May we never accept those standards of compliance! Wide is the path that leads to destruction! We pray that You will open the eyes of Your precious humanity to see the same temptation in the garden of Eden is now at work among us. It is the same temptation that Satan uses every time … to be our own gods … and to do what is pleasurable or wise in our own eyes, believing that You will not issue consequences. As Your people, we repent of any complicity we’ve had in this messaging, and ask, Father, for both Your forgiveness and Your strength to stand against Satan’s messaging in this world. May the fragrance of Christ be ours this day and always, for Your glory we pray. Amen.

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If you’re already signed up on my Home Page sidebar to receive posts, you’ll get the 2023 Lent Devotionals automatically. Or you can “Like” Seminary Gal on Facebook and they’ll be delivered to your Facebook news feed. If you haven’t signed up, today is a great day to do so. Advent and Lenten devotionals remain among my most popular offerings. You don’t want to miss this encounter with God to prepare your heart for Easter! Understanding that prior years’ devotionals continue to minister, you may want to have access to a full series ahead of time:

Lent 2013 looked at The Letter to the Romans: Paul’s Masterpiece to reclaim foundations of our Christian heritage and began February 13, 2013.
A very special and ever popular offering was Lent 2014’s Be Still and Know that I AM God which can be obtained through the archives beginning in March 2014.
Lent 2015 began on February 18, 2015 with a series entitled With Christ in the Upper Room: Final Preparations. We explored what is often called “The Upper Room Discourse” found in John chapters 13-17.
ReKindle, the Lent 2016 series, began on February 10, 2016 and encouraged us to rekindle our spiritual lives.
Light: There’s Nothing Like It was the 2017 Lent series and explored this metaphor often used to portray Christ. It is archived beginning March 1, 2017.
Lent 2018, we explored the questions of Pi and Chi (the Greek letter beginning the word Christos, which means Christ, Messiah, the Anointed One). We asked and answered the questions “Why?” from the movie Life of Pi as we discovered the uniqueness of Jesus Christ in a world of many faiths.
Lent 2019 gave us a deeper window into Easter “More to the Easter Story” since we miss so much when we rely only on a superficial understanding of the work of Christ. These devotionals are archived beginning March 6, 2019.
Our Lent 2020 devotional series offered prayer points surrounding “Be Thou My Vision” and were aimed at helping us to see God for who He is. The full set of devotionals are archived beginning February 26, 2020.
The theme for 2021 Lent Devotionals was how to live between two worlds while waiting for Christ’s return. Into the gap between the City of Man and its fixation upon sin and the City of God with its demand for holiness, two words minister peace: But God. Praise God for His intervention! They are archived beginning February 17, 2021.
Last year’s devotionals, Revelation in 40 offered 40 vignettes, scenes, concepts, and thoughts to inspire us to read the Book of Revelation as it is written and to go deeper. They are archived beginning March 2, 2022.