Pastoral Letter 203
Dear Members of St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Friends and Adherents,
Grace and peace to you all.
It’s already the eleventh day of the Lent Season. On Ash Wednesday, we embarked on our journey to reflect on the life of Jesus during His final week when He suffered and died on the Cross to give us hope for eternity with His glorious resurrection from the dead. In these forty days of Lent we stop, ponder and reflect on our own faith journey and to recommit ourselves to Christ with the hope of being part of His Kingdom for ever and ever. In these few weeks we try to strengthen our faith in God and trust Him in all our life challenges that we face in our daily lives. We reflect on the life of Jesus – His sacrifice, suffering, death, burial and resurrection and contemplate on our own life and how we put our faith into action. This is a time to sacrifice something to learn what it means to rely on God and share what we have with those who are less fortunate.
Today we reflect on the concept of denying ourselves and taking our cross to follow Jesus on the Journey to the Cross. It is a time of commitment and rededicating ourselves to God, promising to reconcile with Him and put our trust in Him. If we are heavily ladened and struggling, dealing with uncertainties, illness or sorrows, all we have to do is to put our trust in God and follow His instructions. He promises to be with us on the journey and help us to go through the unexpected and uncertain. It is a time to rely on Him and His divine power as we move through unchartered waters.
Next Friday, 1 March 2024 at 10:30 am, we are invited to attend the World Day of Prayer, which will be held at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church, down the road, 1 Chritina Street, Longueville. This year the program is prepared by the women of Palestine and the theme is: “I beg you… bear with one another in love”.
If you are not able to join us tomorrow, please light a candle and join us following the attached Order of Service.
Please let me know if you or anyone else has prayer points.
Here are some prayer points for this week:
- Pray for this Lent season, as we ponder and reflect examining our faith in Christ.
- Pray for the outcoming World Day of Prayer this Friday.
- the Middle East, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
- Pray for the people Artsakh who are refugees in different parts of Armenia facing many challenges.
- Pray for the poor, the sick, the struggling and the stressed.
- Pray for those who are going through a difficult time with health and financial issues.
- Pray for our church and our future plans as we seek God’s guidance.
Best Regards
In Christ
Krikor
MESSAGE
Follow Jesus on the Journey to the Cross
Mark 8:31:38
In today’s second Bible reading Jesus talks about bearing our cross, which makes us to ask the question:
“How do you work this thing?”
Peter didn’t know how to work or deal with the cross either. As on some other occasions here too, at Caesarea Philippi, outside of Galilee in the shadow of Ancient Palestine, where Caesar was a God, Peter discovered that a wandering teacher from Nazareth, who was heading for a cross, was the Son of God.
There is hardly anything in the entire gospel story, which shows the sheer force of the personality of Jesus, as does this incident. It comes in the very middle of Mark’s Gospel and that’s intentional because this is the peak moment for Mark. The cross is the very heart of the gospel.
Whatever the disciples might be thinking, Jesus knew for certain that an inescapable cross lay ahead and He was on the journey toward the cross.
The problem confronting Jesus was this:
With the cross looming, had He had any effect at all?
Had He achieved anything?
Had anyone discovered who He really was?
If He had lived and taught and moved amongst these men for three years and no one had glimpsed the spirit of God upon Him, then all His work had gone for nothing. There was only one way He could leave a message with people and that was to write it on someone’s heart.
Here we see Jesus talking about us denying ourselves and taking up a cross and following Him.
And yet we should ask the question:
“What does that mean?”
Before we go any further, we should consider two things:
First, that Jesus is honest and lets us know that the life He offers to us is promised to be full of blessings and His presence, but at the same time it is not an easy life.
Many missionaries have come to understand what Jesus meant when He said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. It’s not an easy road! It is a road full of challenges and difficult paths. We know and learn this from our own experience.
Secondly, Jesus never calls upon us to do anything that He was not prepared to do Himself. What He asks us to face, He has already faced. And when He calls upon us to take up a cross, He, Himself, has already carried one for us.
This perspective seems to go against what the world teaches us. The world teaches us that anything that bothers us or becomes difficult, we should avoid. Sadly, some churches seem to have adopted that attitude, too.
And yet, the words of Jesus are still there: “If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”
So, once again we ask: “What did He mean? What does it mean to “take up” or “bear a cross”? What does the Bible teach about “cross bearing?“
1. The Bible teaches us that bearing our cross is voluntary
Bearing the cross is not something we are forced to do. It is not like having to accept a fact about our situation or things that happen in our lives, being it an illness, tragedy or a disaster. These things do not happen by our choice. But following Jesus and serving Him is something we choose and commit ourselves to do that for His glory.
In this lent Season let us remind ourselves that we are invited to follow Jesus and walk on a similar road that He took, totally by our own decision and choice.
2. The Bible teaches us that bearing our cross is an act of love
Bearing the cross is not something accidental, unintended or unavoidable that we must face. It is an act of love that we choose to do as He did for when He went to the cross for our sins. Cross bearing is a task that we undertake and a price that we pay following His example. Christ demonstrated this in His action of unconditional love. He demonstrated it by going to the cross for our sake.
1 Corinthians 13 we sometimes change the word ‘love’ with ‘I’, today I want to do that by the changing to ‘cross bearer”, which will demonstrate what I am trying to say about the bearing cross to be an action of love. That is what “cross bearing” means. It means taking the love of God to the very ends of the world. To touch the lives of people who are unlovable. It means denying and sacrificing. It means paying the price.
In this lent Season let us remind ourselves that we are invited to reach out to people who are unlovable and unlovely and who may never return the love. Yet we are to keep on loving because that’s what He did.
3. The Bible teaches us that bearing our cross is hard
Bearing the cross is hard to accept such an idea. See what the disciples did when Jesus talked about His death, Mark says that Peter rebuked Him and objected to the idea. It seems that he was happy being with Jesus and never wanted for Him to leave them. That’s why they even tried to keep Him from going to Jerusalem. They said: “We don’t want you to die.” When He did die on the cross, they hid behind locked doors, fearful of what might happen next.
Paul wrote about the cross in 1 Corinthians 1:22-24: “Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
That hasn’t changed much. We can understand the Jews stumbling over the idea of their Messiah hanging on a cross. They were an oppressed people. They had been oppressed by Assyrians, Babylonians, Greeks and now by the Romans. But the thing that kept them going was the promise of the Messiah, who would come one day and deliver them.
The Messiah was there, but not as they had expected. He came as a carpenter, a preacher from Nazareth. Some called Him a madman. His army was made up of twelve men. And instead of great military victories, there was a crucifixion.
So, the cross was a stumbling block to the Jews. It wasn’t what they expected. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Bearing the cross and dying is something hard to accept. But it is something that has been talked and preached about for so many years.
In this lent Season let us remind ourselves that we are invited to bear our cross even though it is a hard thing to do; it is not an easy task and even something expected.
This morning the offer we receive is a cross. Not an easy and relaxing life or a church that is perfect with all the solutions to our problems. We face many challenges as individuals, families, community and as a church. We struggle and try to find solutions for our problems. We can’t guarantee to have positive results and everything we try, and plan will work.
All we can offer is Jesus Christ, His love and His cross as a perfect example for us, His followers.
Let us remember that the Lent Season is a time to repent but also a time to bear our cross as our Lord Himself did for our sake and follow Him on the journey to the Cross. Amen!