Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Welcome to Lent Meditation and Worship with Westside Church during this lentin season. Meet us here each day as we read scripture, worship, and rest in the presence of God together. Know that as you listen today, you are doing so with others, whether in the same places as you are not, and we pray that the Holy Spirit permeates the places we each find ourselves in right now. For more resources and to find each week's prayer and song, visit westside church.org/lent. Let us start today by clearing our minds and opening our hearts to what the Lord wants to speak to us through His word. Take a deep breath in and out. And another in and out.
Speaker 0 00:01:00 Second Corinthians, chapter five, verses 16 through 21. Because of this decision, we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong. As you know, we certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone. A new life emerges. Look at it all. This comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and Him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We are Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them.
Speaker 0 00:02:15 We're speaking for Christ himself. Now, become friends with God. He's already a friend with you. How you ask in Christ, God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong so we could be put right with God. We end our week in the same place. We started looking at the heart and not the outward appearance. What have you learned or taken away from this week about how to be more like Jesus in this regard? Just as God was looking at David's heart, when he anointed him as king, Jesus is still looking at our hearts. He wants us to be united with him as new creations, living new lives. He doesn't want us to look the same anymore or to be judged by what the world judges Jesus has given us. New life, the old life is gone. Let it go. You are forgiven and made new.
Speaker 0 00:03:20 With this new life comes the responsibility and privilege of showing others the way to Jesus to be the light in the dark world. We have the joy of telling others, as Paul w writes, become friends with God. He's already a friend to you. What a cool job. We have to be Jesus to others, to look at others the way he does. We don't wanna be the Pharisees that make judgments about people based on their rank in society or a sickness or anything like that. We wanna bring those that are sick to the doctor, to the one that heals and makes new, the one that heals the blind man and then again goes back to him to show him he's not alone and has been with the son of man all along. Find ways this weekend to bring light to the world, to live fully in your new life, letting the old go and to be filled with the compassion of Jesus who redeems us. Let's pray. Sinner of hearts, you look beneath our outward appearance and see your image in us vanish in us. The blindness that prevents us from recognizing truth so we may see the world through your eyes and with the compassion of Jesus Christ who redeems us. Amen.
Speaker 2 00:05:03 You
Speaker 1 00:05:57 To
Speaker 2 00:06:00 What you looking for
Speaker 1 00:06:35 Brings Has.
