My Vision of Your Wrath-Lent 33, 2020

Prayer Focus: Unpleasant as the thought may be, God’s wrath is real

Father God, I know Your wrath is real. But if I’m honest, I prefer to see You as “God is love.” Yet the two are equally weighted sides of love. Your love without Your holy wrath would be meaningless. Your wrath without unconditional love would be heartless. Maybe I’m frightened at the knowledge my sins are ever before me. You know them too. Nothing is hidden from Your eyes. Apart from Your mercy and forgiveness, Lord, I’d experience Your wrath. Maybe too, it exposes my heart. I want to see Your wrath against those I think deserve it, who have wronged the least of these in ways unthinkable. I want to see them punished and yet I remember that You are the only One able to Judge perfectly. You alone are holy. You tell us, “‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ and again, ‘The Lord will judge his people.’ It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” When I think about You, the One who “treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty,” I know You mean business. You wouldn’t be loving if You didn’t act to protect and preserve the innocent little ones, the weak, and the least among mankind. The nations are as a drop in the bucket to You. As You sent the plague upon the firstborn in Egypt, yet You provided a way safe within their homes for those who love You, who showed their devotion by their obedience with the blood of the Lamb protecting them. May I have a healthy respect for and fear of Your wrath. To know that it is real. When You come to judge, we will all tremble before You…not a baby in a manger. Not a dead man on a Cross. Not a vanishing act telling us always to wait for the end of days. No. Your return is a fearsome thing to behold. Your Word tells us that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that You are Lord to the glory of God the Father. You do not bear the sword for nothing. On Your robe and on Your thigh You have this name written: KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS. We bow before You. Have mercy upon us, Lord Jesus! In Your mighty Name we pray. Amen.

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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.