SERIES THEME :
“What Wondrous Love, For God so Loved the World…” John 3:16
“What Wondrous Love” takes us on a Lenten journey exploring how deep the love of our Father is. We hear that God loves the world, we see this embodied in Jesus’ death on the cross, we taste it on our lips at communion. Throughout the scriptures our Lord has revealed to us His divine love, a love that spans all time and cannot be overcome. This is a love that when faced with evil and sin sent Jesus Christ to redeem the world. This is perfect love and it deserves our attention during the season of Lent and throughout our lives.
Midweek 1 – Ash Wednesday
Return to the Lord – Joel 2:12-19
Ash Wednesday provides us a time to gather and reflect on our position before God. Over the past weeks during the Epiphany season we have spent time learning about Jesus, who He is and what He has come to do. Last Sunday, at the Transfiguration, we, for just a moment, saw a glimpse of who Jesus truly is: God. Now it’s time to realize who we truly are. It’s this realization that sends us into Lent and prepares us for our Lord’s Passion, and ultimately Easter.
Midweek 2
Pre-Existing Love
The love our Father has for us is perfect and unending. It’s also not new. It has existed since before anything was created. This is the love that the Father shares with the Son, the love that binds the Trinity. This is why we hear in 1st John that God is love. During these midweek services we will see what this perfect love means for us.
Midweek 3
Love Creates
God loved us before we were ever created. Doesn’t make much sense to us! We can begin to understand this when a woman imagines loving and caring for her future child, or a man preparing to be a good husband even before he’s met his future bride. Our God loved us and then created us in His own image. We are His and he gives us everything we need because of His wondrous love for us.
Midweek 4
What’s a Father to do?
We had a perfect relationship with God. We experienced His wondrous love directly, face to face. We followed His ways, and all was literally perfect. Then we walked away from Him, rejected His love through sin. God was offering us perfect unending love and we decided to reject it. So, what will He do? How is He to be perfectly just and respond?
Midweek 5
God’s Answer
We hear in our Epistle reading from Romans today: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Our Father responded to our sin, to our rejection of His love for us, with more love. He gave us His son. His love is so deep, that He would sacrifice His own son to save us. Oh how deep is the Father’s love.
Midweek 6
Ultimate Love
We began this Lenten journey with 1 John chapter four and we return to it again tonight. We return to the proclamation of God being love because we have seen Him prove it! He is love, He created us out of love, He sacrificed for us even when we rejected His love, God is love. May we, His beloved, love one another with the same wondrous love.
