Today is Good Friday to commemorate the death of Christ. There are church services, sports fests, Mass, or whatever the thing is you want to do the most.
In my childhood, Good Friday was a Holy Day. We went to church and meditated, and if you were a child, you became bored stiff. Easter eggs were made of sugar and decorated with sugar flowers. For me, one egg was my parents' concession to Easter. Today, sugar eggs have given away to chocolate rabbits and chocolate eggs of all sizes. Most children receive more than one chocolate egg or rabbit. We celebrate Easter today by indulging in every type of seafood imaginable. As a child, our diet didn't change. Those who embraced the Catholic faith then ate fish. Because they believed fish didn't shed any blood and they were not violating the death of Christ. How things have changed. God does not change. Jesus died. These are immutable facts that remain unchanged. Food fads have changed, the things we worship may have changed, Good Friday has become a sports fest, but God has not changed. He hasn't upgraded; he hasn't become trendy. He doesn't change his mind every decade or millennia. To quote the gospel of John 3: 16, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believed in him should not perish but have everlasting life." God so loved – that he gave -. Through the death of Christ, God's only son, God wiped out our sin of independence and worship of things. We have willingly replaced God with gods of our own making. At the death of Christ, God not only wiped out our rejection of him, but he threw it as far away from him as the east is from the west - he forget we chose to do life our way. Psalm 103: 12. God is waiting for us to recognize our need for him. He is waiting with open arms to embrace us, enfold us to himself, in the way a parent will cuddle the child, God wants to cuddle us. Jesus became the Sacrificial Lamb who willingly took all of our lust, depressions, hates, horribleness on to himself. He carried them to the cross so we could become the children of God. God now wants to endow us with all his love and care. Jesus is the door to heaven and a loving God. All God requires of us is faith that he is, acceptance of Jesus as our saviour. Unless we accept Jesus as our rescuer and our deliverer, God can only love us from afar. Our desire to do life our way and its consequences exclude God from our life. To accept Jesus as our saviour will bring God into our very being, change us and our world completely. We will know a love like no other love.
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