Lent begins this week Wednesday, and how excited I am for what God has planned for us! In 2025, our series on the blood and communion drew us into the incredible power of the cross and how Jesus’ blood cleanses us, redeems us, sanctifies us and makes us temples for His Holy Spirit.

 

This Lent we will focus our attention on the cross, on the sacrifice that Jesus made and the victory that He won. But we will also focus on scripture’s clear call for our response: that we follow Christ into this example. We have died, our lives now hidden in Christ (Col. 3:3), we are dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus (Romans 6:11), we must hate and be willing to lose our own lives (John 12:25), we have in fact been crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:2).

 

These scriptures are not always the easiest to grasp or rejoice in! They call us to sacrifice. Yet, they are the foundation for what is a staggering promise – that Jesus Himself lives in us, that to live is Christ. It is as we give up our own lives that we truly live life with Him, experiencing the power and reality of Christ in us, and Christ flowing from us.

 

I believe that God wants to bring revelation to us of the depths of this promise: Christ in us. As Andrew Murray writes in the introduction to his devotional on the cross: “The great work of the Holy Spirit is to reveal Christ in our hearts and lives as the Crucified One, Who dwells within us. Let this be the chief aim of all your devotion, complete dependence on God, and an expectation of continual receiving all goodness and salvation from Him alone. Thus you will learn to die to yourself and to the world, and will receive Christ, the Crucified and Glorious One, into your heart, and be kept through the continual working of the Holy Spirit.”

 

As we ask the Holy Spirit to bring us revelation this Lent, KLC staff are inviting you to join us in a fast. We want to focus on Christ as our life, so we are encouraging the KLC family to fast from something which you are currently drawing “life” from that is not Jesus – not the things that refresh and bless you, but things to which you turn which you know in your heart don’t satisfy, where you look for comfort apart from God. Please ask the Holy Spirit what it is that He would like you to fast. It could be food, a particular meal, a TV show, social media or gaming. But don’t just give it up, use the time and space that fasting brings to pray and to ask the Holy Spirit to make real to you the reality of: “to live is Christ”; and “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”!