Ash Wednesday | Pastor John Hardie

Most Christians are familiar with the Christian Calendar’s “feasts,” more commonly known as holy days or holidays. These feasts include Christmas Day, Easter Day, and Ascension Day.  But we also have fasts.  

Fasts are important, too -- not as days to celebrate, but days to mourn and seek forgiveness.   The primary fasts are Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. 

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the season before Easter.  Lent is a season for careful self-examination. We don’t want to begin Lent on a Sunday, because Sunday is ever the day of Creation and the day of Jesus’s Resurrection. The time to launch a season of deep penitence over our sin is best done during the week.  

This year, Ash Wednesday is February 14.  City Church will hold a service at 6:30PM.  This is a day of “Christian obligation.” This doesn’t mean that everyone is invited. It means that everyone who can make it, should make it. 

This is not a day for indulging our appetites. It’s a day to note where our appetites have taken us. It’s a sober day of thinking about how, in many ways, we’ve let God and our neighbors down by not living according to the best and most beautiful teachings and standards God has given us through Jesus Christ. We receive ashes on our forehead as a sign that we are humbling ourselves before God. 

The good news is that God is faithful to use our honesty, to use our contrition to serve the purposes of His grace. He renews us by setting us on a path of regeneration that leads us right back to the Cross - but with more appreciation and gratitude and power than before. 

I invite you to join your fellow congregants on Ash Wednesday, February 14 @6:30pm.

See you there!