Blessed Lord Jesus,

Before Your cross I kneel and see the heinousness of my sin, my iniquity that caused You to be ‘made a curse,’ the evil that excites the severity of divine wrath.

Show me the enormity of my guilt by the crown of thorns, the pierced hands and feet, the bruised body, the dying cries.

Your blood is the blood of incarnate God, its worth infinite, its value beyond all thought.  Infinite must be the evil and guilt that demands such a price.

Sin is my malady, my monster, my foe, my viper, born in my birth, alive in my life, strong in my character, dominating my faculties, following me as a shadow, intermingling with my every thought, my chain that holds me captive in the empire of my soul.

Sinner that I am, why should the sun give me light, the air supply breath, the earth bear my tread, its fruit nourish me, its creatures subserve my ends?

Yet your compassions yearn over me, your heart hastens to my rescue, Your love endured my curse, Your mercy bore my deserved stripes.

Let me walk humbly in the lowest depths of humiliation, bathed in Your blood, tender of conscience, triumphing gloriously as an heir of salvation.

Abba,

How humbling and heavy are these words prayed so long ago.  How timely and true.  How often do we TRULY stop to feel the weight and shame of our sin.  Sin that placed Your Son on the cross.  Sin that demanded such a price.  Sin that caused such excruciating agony for You, THE eternal God. 

Abba, our failure to truly grapple with and understand the depths of such love is the very fault for why there is so little awe of you; why you do not capture our hearts, consume our imaginations, and dominate our choices.  We have failed to deeply appreciate the riches of a love that would pay the ultimate price of  the eternal Son of God’s precious blood in order to satisfy the same eternal God’s holy justice against sins of the created. 

Why is the world abandoning and rejecting you?

Why is your own church turning aside from it’s first love?

Because the depth and glory of this truth has not captured our hearts and compelled an overwhelming sense of awe, wonder, and worship at your name.

This Good Friday…this year…let the glory of that truth shine forth into our hearts and through our beings to a world lost in the darkness of sin.  May they come to see a God so good and glorious that they too kneel at the foot of the cross and allow the blood of the Savior to wash over them, covering their sin, and ushering them into the glorious intimacy you offer through forgiveness and reconciliation. 

Oh Abba…Oh Abba…that we would both feel the weight of the sin from which we are freed and the wondrous weight of glory that took it for us!