Winter Term: Week 8
This is the final week of our winter small group term. The 7-week Spring term will begin on April 6th and continue through May 24th . We won’t be providing guides during the break, but your group is welcome to continue meeting – or not – as seems best to your group.
Entering Conversation
Consider this quote from author Micha Boylett, on Lent:
“Lent exists, not to be a moment of forced piety, or an attempt at sacrificing enough to please an angry deity. It is not an obligation, or even a yearly tradition. Lent is an invitation to check our pulse.
God doesn’t need Lent. There’s no commandment in scripture to follow a particular sacred calendar. Lent has no foundation in any scriptural stories. All time is sacred to the Holy One so Lent doesn’t exist for God.
It’s for us. Humans need shared sacred moments, spaces, and calendar days. What Lent provides is a season in each year where we’re invited to pause, to check our spiritual pulse, to ask the Holy Spirit what is most needed, and listen for whatever next right thing God is inviting us to move toward.”
On Sunday we listened to the self-revealing claim of Jesus who said, “I am the light of the world.” When we look through the story of Israel, we remember that God guided his people out of Egypt using pillars of light – of cloud by day, and fire by night. The idea of light became a symbol of God’s salvation, of the revealing of His plan to redeem (see Psalm 27:1 or Isaiah 9:6,9, among others).
Light describes both the place where God is and also the effect of being near Him: it reveals. Particularly, light reveals the broken and sinful parts of our lives. The Christian practice of confession has sometimes been described as a “bringing into the light” these hidden parts. For this reason, we may be tempted to avoid confession because we fear condemnation for our sin. In reality, we are invited to find healing through the practice of confession. John would later say that when we come to God in the act of confession, we find a God who is “faithful and just” to forgive us and cleanse us from our wrongs (I John 1:9).
If Lent is a season in which we are invited to “take our pulse” as Boylett says, it is likely we will find ways in which we are out of rhythm with God. In the act of confession, we are invited to find healing and forgiveness for any and all of those things, whether they be from this past week or some moment in our past that we have worked to keep covered for many years.
So, we ask the Holy Spirit to reveal what is “most needed”. And we give God permission to do whatever He may want to do in this season.
Questions for Discussion
What experiences do you have with confession within a church or church community? What emotions would you associate with those moments?
“All are invited to find healing through the practice of confession.” In what ways do you think confession could be healing?
Close your time with prayer. Consider allowing space for some silent listening, letting individual members ask God to help them identify what He may want to do in them in this season. In your praying – whether leader-led or shared by the group – ask God to show you the next right thing He is asking of you.