![]() We welcome this Lenten season as a time of personal renewal. Then at least we may recognize our need to depend on you. We can be thankful even for the trouble and suffering that brings us closer to you in prayer. You forgive our failures and give us further opportunities to restore some of the beauty of your image. Maker, Sharer and Shaper of the human spirit, we are thankful that we have not been cast in stone that cannot be reshaped. Then only you will know what we have done and we will be content with your private reward. Having received God's grace in Christ, do not let it be wasted, but express it to others enriching them as well.ĭistinguished and distinguishing Spirit, grant us wisdom, so that both our fasting and our charitable actions are inconspicuous. Hear the Good News! God appointed the sinless Christ to share our sin in order that in union with him we might share the goodness of God. May such fasting and penitence as we may practice enable us to balance things out and to bring the spiritual and the physical into equilibrium, following the example of Jesus Christ. Your own Spirit infused life into the lifeless so that the human race should be distinct not in its physical properties but in its ability to control behavior individually and socially, Forgive lack of self-control, for abuse of what you have created for the good of all. God above all, you have created us from the ground up and in Christ came to our turf, to show us again that the earth is yours and you have made all things to be good. David’s prayer to be cleansed with hyssop takes on prophetic significance as we recognise that only God has the power to cleanse us and make us whiter than snow.Take joy in your salvation and be willing to obey God as the Spirit prompts you. The Bible makes it clear that it is through the life, the shed blood, the death, and the resurrected, eternal, glorious life of our God and Saviour that we can experience the ultimate cleansing and purification: our sins, though red like scarlet and crimson, can be whiter than snow (Is 1:18), but only through the blood of Jesus Christ (see Heb 9:14, 19-22). ![]() Later, in John’s Gospel, we see that Jesus’s last drink is offered on a sponge lifted up to him on a hyssop stalk ( Jn 19:28-30), thus connecting him with the Passover lamb slain centuries before in Egypt, associating him with the sacrificial and cleansing ceremonies which His death superseded and reminding us that His death is the means by which we can all be purified from our sins. Later on, hyssop is used as a cleansing agent for people with skin diseases or houses affected by mould and mildew (see Lev 14:1-7, 33-53), as well as being tied into bunches for use in sprinkling the blood of the sacrificed animals in sacrifices. In Ex 12:12-13, we see that hyssop is dipped into blood and used to daub the doorframes with blood, the signal to the angel of death to ‘pass over’ these households during that final night of death before the Exodus from Egypt. In Ps 51:7, however, David prays to be purged or cleansed with hyssop, and this reference to the aromatic herb reminds us that in the Bible, water is not the only method of cleansing. Water is, of course, traditionally the medium used in cleaning, and the Bible often talks about water in this way (see Jer 33:8, Ezek 36:5 and Eph 5:26). ![]() (Ps 51:2, The Message), ‘Soak me in your laundry and I’ll come out clean scrub me and I’ll have a snow-white life.’ (Ps 51:7, The Message) David prays for God’s cleansing: ‘Scrub away my guilt, soak out my sins in your laundry. Sin stains our lives more effectively than mud, red wine or blood stains our clothes and we are powerless to clean sin in our own strength. It’s not just clothes, however, that need to be white. The washing powder adverts proclaim that their detergents wash whiter than all the others Persil Automatic washes whiter than the others Daz Ultra gets clothes ‘ultra white.’ ![]()
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