Lenten Meditation Guide
Week 2 Into New Birth
Genesis 12:1-4a Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.
(12:1 NIV)
“There is no place where God is not.
Wherever I go, there God is.
Now and always he upholds me with his power
and keeps me safe in his love.” ~ Brendon O’Malley, God at Every Gate, p. 26
Psalm 121 The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore (121:6 RSV)
“The Christian life is going to God. In going to God Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same governments, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.
The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we take, we know that we are preserved by God, we know that we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God.…”
~ Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p .40
Romans 4:1-5
Abraham believed God, and because of his faith God accepted him as righteous.
(4:3 GNB)
“At last, as I meditated day and night, God showed mercy and I turned my attention to the connection of the words, namely, ‘The righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written: the righteous shall live by faith’ – and there I began to understand that the righteousness of God is the righteousness in which a just [person] lives by the gift of God…in other words that by which the merciful God justifies us through faith… At this I felt myself straightway born afresh and to have entered through the open gates into paradise itself.”
~ Martin Luther (1483-1546), from the Autobiographical Fragment,
quoted in Eerdmans’ Book of Christian Classics, p. 49
John 3:1-17
In reply Jesus declared, “I tell you the truth, no-one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.” (3:3 NIV)
“I don’t know Who – or what – put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back,’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow.’”
~ Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, quoted in Creative Brooding, Robert Raines, p. 112
A confession of faith
“I call all heaven to witness today
that I have put on Christ.
I choose no other Lord
than the Maker of heaven and earth.
This day I walk with Him
and He will walk with me.
I fasten close to me this day
that same Jesus
who came to us as flesh and blood
and was Himself baptized in the Jordan river.
He died upon a cross to rescue me,
broke free from death, its conqueror.
He left us, to return more certainly.
All these truths and their power
I fasten close to me this day.
Resisting my own selfishness and sin,
refusing to live as a slave to riches,
pleasure or reputation,
rejecting Satan and all his lies,
I call on heaven to witness today
that I have put on Christ.
~ Celtic Daily Prayer
– From the Northumbria Community, pp. 210-1
