So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

–Romans 7.4-6 (NIV)

Here Paul reminds us why we have a season of Lent. God created us to have a relationship with him, to love and enjoy him now and forever. But our sinful rebellion got in the way and caused a rupture in our relationship with God. As Paul reminds us elsewhere, the wages of sin is death and on our own we are powerless to fix the problem.

But God is not powerless to fix the problem. As Paul reminds us here, living a Christian life is more than trying to follow a bunch of arbitrary rules (the Law). The Law exists to provide us with an example of how we are to uphold our part of our relationship with God. It cannot fix us or resolve the problem of alienation between God and humans that human sin caused. It simply exposes the depth of the problem.

So what to do? According to God’s eternal plan, at the right time he entered our history and took on our humanity to die for us, to bear himself the just punishment for our sins and to offer us a real and permanent way to end our alienation and exile from him. We have his very word in Scripture that this is true. We have the Risen Lord to provide us with the historical evidence that he is who he says he is–God’s Messiah. We also have his Presence living in us in the person of the Holy Spirit to remind us that God’s promises to us in Christ are true. God has done the hard work. Our part, hard as it is because we are so badly flawed, is really a walk in the park compared to what God has done for us in Christ.

This brings us back to the season of Lent. During this time we acknowledge that we are the source of the problem regarding our relationship with God. We have to decide whom or what we will worship and make our God. If we decide we want a relationship with God, then we have to work at killing that within us that prevents us from allowing God to be God. We have to clear away that within us that prevents his Holy Spirit from living within us to heal and transform us. For you see, God loves us enough to let us make our own choices regarding the kind of relationship we want to have with him. Like any healthy relationship, both parties must willing commit themselves to it. You can’t force someone to love you. Neither does God force us to love him. That wouldn’t be love at all.

While engaging in the Lenten disciplines of self-examination and self-denial, prayer, fasting, and confession/repentance is hard because we are deeply and thoroughly broken, we must always keep our eyes on the prize. We must remember the great and costly love God showed for us in Jesus so that we do not lose heart or hope. We must not engage in Lenten disciplines for the wrong reasons. Fear, guilt, and compulsion do not constitute a healthy basis on which to form a real and lasting relationship, either with other humans or with God. We must want to engage in our Lenten disciplines because we know that God will use our efforts to strengthen our faith and our relationship with him. Anything else just won’t do.

And as we seek to put to death in ourselves everything that would help keep us hostile to God, we will inevitably see a change in our outlook on life and our behavior. We will increasingly see the need to share God’s good gift of himself with others so that they can get it on the fun. We will increasingly want to live as Kingdom workers so that God can use us to bring his healing love and grace to his badly broken world. And when that happens, frustrating as it can sometimes be, we will find that life has new meaning and purpose. We will find a richness that is not possible to enjoy when we make life all about ourselves. But when we live to bring honor and glory to God for his great love and gift to us in Jesus, we will finally begin to understand what it means to live as God intended for us to live. If you are not already enjoying that kind of lifestyle, a lifestyle that consists of denying yourself, taking up your cross each day, and following Jesus and bringing his healing love to others in the context of your daily life, what are you waiting for?