I recently was reading in Joshua 6 about the famous battle of Jericho. From a human perspective, it has to be one of the worst battle strategies ever designed. March around the city walls once a day for six days, then march around them seven times on the seventh day and give an almighty shout? That’s your plan?

Actually, that was God’s plan. It might have seemed ridiculous to the people at the time, but they were faithful to obey, and God honored that obedience with success in battle.They completely destroyed the city, leaving alive only Rahab and her family. There aren’t too many examples of God’s people actually doing what God said to do, but when they did, God always fulfilled His end of the promise.

I keep thinking about that verse lately in regard to my own church. We’ve been trying to start renovations on our new property, but we lack one stamp of approval on one piece of paper from one department. That’s all. We sent in the paperwork months ago and have been in bureaucracy limbo ever since.

Maybe the solution isn’t lawyers and litigation, but praise and worship. I was walking the property when I believe God spoke to me. He said, “When you worship loud, the walls fall down.”

I’m not claiming to be any kind of a prophet or anyone who has special revelations from the Lord. I’m not much into people who are always hearing a word from God. I believe that the Bible is the final and complete revelation of what God has spoken.

I do believe that God can speak to people within the context of the Bible to specific circumstances. I believe that God will never say anything that goes against His established and written Word.

I believe that the Bible says God can turn the hearts of kings like water, so He can turn the hearts of a few city council members. I believe God can grant us favor with the city and provide the approval we need. And I believe in my heart that He will when the time is right.

Until then, maybe it’s time to turn the worship up loud.

“We raise our glasses and drink to a love that never gave up.”

Whether your glass has wine or grape juice or sweet tea or just water, I hope you will find time sometime before the day is over to raise a toast to this Easter love that found a way through the cross and the tomb to find you in your moment of darkest despair. I hope you will drink to the reckless love of God that spared no expense to buy you back when so many said you weren’t worth saving.

Because of Easter, everything has changed. We’re no longer outcasts and strangers to the promise. We’re no longer without hope in the world. We’re no longer dead in our sins and trespasses and enemies to God because of our rebellion against everything He stands for.

Easter love is hesed love, the love that gave absolutely everything to those who had the right to expect absolutely nothing. Easter love is the essence of unconditional love with the sacrifice of life for those who would ultimately ridicule and reject it. Easter love is where God so loved the world — that God so loved you and me — that He gave His one and only Son so that we might not perish and be lost forever but have an eternal and abundant life with God.

We drink to love that never gave up every single time we take the cup that symbolizes the blood shed and the bread that symbolizes the body broken. Every time we take Communion in remembrance of Jesus, we are eating and drinking to this love that never quit.

“Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him” (Romans 5:6-8, The Message).

“O God, you enlightened this most holy night with the glory of the Lord’s resurrection. Preserve the spirit of adoption which you have given to all your people, so that renewed in body and soul, we may serve you in all purity; through your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.”

As much as I have been learning about the season of Lent leading up to Easter and the holy week including Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, I haven’t really found out much about Holy Saturday, also referred to as Easter Eve. No one really seems to commemorate the day.

Maybe it’s because nothing really happened. It’s the day between the Good Friday of Jesus laying down His life and the Easter Sunday of Jesus being raised up from the dead. I know there’s a passage in 1 Peter 3:19 about Jesus preaching to the spirits in prison. Some believe that Jesus descended into hell and proclaimed His victory to the spirits there. Some believe it was Jesus preaching through Noah to those before the flood came. I’m not sure what I believe.

I do imagine that feeling of hopelessness the disciples must have felt on that Saturday. All their hopes seem to have died on the cross with Jesus. They couldn’t quite grasp what He was talking about when He said He must be handed over and lifted up and killed to rise again. They had seen their Rabbi whom they had followed and been with every single day for three years die. They had no where to go.

But thankfully, the story doesn’t end with Saturday. The story doesn’t end with the sealed tomb and sorrowful hearts and sad faces. I heard that because of Easter Sunday, the worst thing is never the last thing. Because of Easter Sunday, your story will not end with ashes, to paraphrase Elisabeth Elliott.

It may be Friday (or in this case Holy Saturday), but Sunday’s comin’!

Does it strike anyone else as odd that today of all days is referred to as Good Friday? This is the day when they took Jesus, beat Him, tortured Him, nailed Him to a piece of wood, and murdered Him in the guise of crucifixion. In terms of how most people define good, this was anything but a good Friday.

But in God’s economy, this was the fulfillment of all the prophecies about a Messiah and Suffering Servant who by his stripes and suffering would heal us and make us whole. By the worst moment of suffering ever endured by anyone in history, Jesus made a way for us to be right with God.

I love the definition of sin as me trying to put myself in God’s place, while salvation is God putting Himself in my place. The difference is that sin fails to dethrone God but salvation succeeds because God never tried to do anything. He just did it.

Good Friday is good because God so loved the world that He gave Jesus, so that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life. Good Friday is good because He who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in Christ. Good Friday is good because the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many.

That means that even my worst day can turn to good if God is in it. My worst case scenario can be redeemed for God’s purposes and serve God’s glory instead of my pain and my shame. Easter means that the worst thing is never the last thing (according to Frederick Buechner). Easter Sunday makes Good Friday good and can make any day of mine good, too.

One of my new favorite traditions is observing Maundy Thursday. It’s only recently that I even know what Maundy Thursday is or what it means. Apparently, Maundy comes from the Latin word for command. As best as I can understand, Maundy Thursday is a reflection on the last Lord’s Supper before the arrest, trial, and crucifixion on Good Friday.

The service is typically a come and go service. It’s subdued and reflective. There’s usually a minimal amount of music and lighting with the majority of the focus on the cross looming in the foreground, a kind of foreshadowing of what’s to come.

It’s hard to see the bread and the wine (or the juice if you’re Baptist), and not see the body broken and the blood spilled out. Jesus was preparing His disciples for the next 24 hours, although they didn’t grasp His meaning until after the fact, after the cross and the grave and the resurrection.

Easter is a celebration. Maundy Thursday is a reflection, not only of what Jesus did but of what that means for us as followers still caught in the struggle of sin in the midst of a sinful world. Easter is not possible without Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and the Saturday in between.

May we prepare our hearts even now to truly receive the joy of the coming Easter.

“Be strong enough to admit your weaknesses. Be brave enough to show your fear. Be honest enough to confess the sham you’ve lived and all the masks you’ve been wearing. Love people as they are, not as you hope they will be. Let the love of Christ fill you and spill out into your world. Because His love alone can heal and make whole and set you free. His love alone can transform you into something like Himself” (Me, circa 2011).

I’m 98% certain I wrote those words, but I have no memory of the context of what I was thinking or feeling. I was definitely more in my head back then and a lot more fearful of what other people thought of me (or more accurately, what I thought other people thought of me). I probably scuttled a few relationships out of projecting my own self-rejection onto other people, but there were a few who were brave enough to look at me and see the diamond beneath all the coal.

I believe when someone is looking at you to see whether your Christ is real or not, what they want isn’t perfection but authenticity. They want real not religious. They need to know that someone like them who has messed up like them can find a new hope and a new direction. People need to know that they matter, that they are enough, that they can love and be loved.

Unfortunately, most look in all the wrong places, looking to broken cisterns for living water. Sometimes those people are the ones who have already found the true fountain, but they go back to busted wells because that’s what they know.

Honesty with yourself and God brings healing. Honesty with others brings restoration. Truth without love is worse than a lie but the truth spoken in love will set you free.

In the South, we have an expression called “losing your religion.” No, it’s not about deconstructing your faith. It’s more about where you get so mad that you act in ways contrary to your religious beliefs. And nowhere does that happen to me than sitting in traffic.

I can’t speak for your town or city, but Nashville drivers are nuts. And if I’m honest, I’m probably one of them. It’s amazing how aggravated I get over someone else’s dumb driving while I tend to be more lenient on myself. Talk about the ultimate double standard.

Then I discovered a book called Every Moment Holy. And I found within this book an amazing liturgy for road rage. It both convicted and challenged me. It reminds me that traffic may be one of God’s ways of shaping and molding me into a disciple. Slow traffic and bad drivers are God’s way of showing me my lack of patience — while growing that patience within me at the same time.

The worst witness is someone with a Christian bumper sticker who cuts people off and drives overly aggressively and who is generally impatient and rude. I guess it’s a good thing I don’t have any Christian bumper stickers on my car. Not that I consider myself a rude driver, but I do have my not so great moments. I’m thankful the life of faith isn’t one of perfection but of a grace that leads to repentance and transformation.

Traffic can be a crash course in learning how to dispense and receive grace, patience, and understanding to yourself and to others. And yes, that pun was intentional.

I made my first trek to Radnor Lake State Park since December 25, 2022. It’s been over 3 months, and I was definitely going through some Radnor withdrawals.

I didn’t stay long. The sky was threatening rain and I didn’t quite have the time I wanted to stay longer, but I whet my appetite for some outdoor magic. There really is something therapeutic about being outside in nature, alone with your thoughts. Groups are fine for hiking, but sometimes it needs to be just you and God, and nature is one of the best places to be tuned in to what God is saying to you.

I found out quickly that I’m not nearly in good shape like I thought I was. I felt fit until that first incline hit me, then I felt very much old and out of shape. It will take a little bit to get my hiking legs back, but the scenery and the peace are worth it.

I get why Jesus went off into the wilderness alone to spend time with His Father. It was more than just an escape from the crowds. It was being in the middle of creation — His creation — that took away the distractions and the noise and helped Him find His resolve for the journey to Jerusalem and to the cross.

So my plan is to hike as much as I can in the next few months while there is still enough daylight. I want to count the deer and turkeys. I want to be in the middle of the woods with the rain falling. I want to catch the sunset over the lake. I want to find God in the middle of His creation again.

I heard my pastor say something that has stuck with me all day: Jesus was not who we deserved or who we were hoping for, but He was exactly the Savior we needed at the moment when we needed Him most. He’s not the one we would have chosen if we had been given the choice, but He’s the only one who could make us right with God again.

Even on Palm Sunday, Jesus didn’t choose to be served but to serve. He chose to heed the cries of two blind men who had nothing to offer in return. He healed these men by touching their blindness when He could have merely spoken the words. He heard the shouts of Hosanna by the crowds who wanted Him to be a Conquering King but did not waver from His purpose to be a Suffering Servant. He knew that some of the very voices that cried Hosanna would later be calling for His crucifixion only a few days later.

I’m fairly certain that victorious warriors ride into town on majestic stallions, not on a colt following its mother. Jesus’ purpose was not to overthrow Rome but to overcome our sin by taking the death of a criminal on a cross. The people of Israel were not looking for a Messiah who would take on the form of a slave and become obedient to the point of death, but that’s the one they needed even more than a deliverer from Roman oppression.

Jesus may not have been what we hoped for or wanted, but He is exactly who we need right now. And He always meets us exactly in our moment of greatest need. Always.

I imagine these days the number of people who actually wash their cars by hand is small. Most people prefer to run their vehicles through the innumerable car washes around town. But I’m old school. There’s something innately satisfying about seeing the immediate results of all that dirt and grime washing away, especially if it’s been a while between car washes.

I gave my Jeep a bath today. She was quite dirty. So you can imagine the satisfaction of seeing a clean car, inside and out. It’s funny, but after a wash, my car looks like it’s a different color. I guess the ol’ Red Sled really was dirty.

I guess washing a car by hand is a lot like the spiritual disciplines. There are no shortcuts. Not at least if you want a job well done. It takes time and effort, and the more time and effort, the better the result.

I’m not saying that your spiritual maturity depends on you. God does the work in you. But the more time you devote to disciplines like prayer and Bible study, the more you will be able to discern God’s voice and God’s will. The more you will be able to help others attain spiritual maturity. The more you will be able to help others find healing and hope in Christ.

I imagine I might be a little sore in the morning. It’s probably wise for me to take an ibuprofen or two before going to bed. But it was worth it.