Lent Devotional Week 1
"Jesus and the Snickers Bar"

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Have you seen those commercials enticing you to reach for a Snickers Bar?  The ones that say
“You’re not you when you’re hungry”.  

 

In Matthew 4, the Devil is hoping for a Snickers moment with Jesus. 

 

Jesus has been fasting in the wilderness for forty days and nights.  At the end of that time, the Devil comes to him with temptations to satisfy his physical hunger, and appeal to his sense of personal power.  

 

But Jesus doesn’t bite.  He has something greater than bread (probably the first century answer to the Snickers Bar), or the false promise of safety or human power to sustain him.  Jesus has spent the last forty days in solitude with his father - God.  He is spiritually grounded in his role as  God’s son.  He knows who he is, so he knows what to do. And now, he can face the challenges before him.  Jesus can draw upon the spiritual truth of his identity to be Christ in a physical, social and religious world.

 

The season of Lent is meant to resemble the forty days of Jesus in the wilderness.  It is a time of reflection and opportunity to see how our spiritual limits are being pushed and to re-fortify ourselves in our identity as people who follow the wisdom and values of Christ.  

 

These forty days represent our opportunity to put integrity back into our spiritual lives.  A time to reflect on the depth of our relationship to God.  A time for soulful self-cleaning and a time to purge self-doubt and pursue the things in which God delights - things like justice, compassion, mercy. A time also to experience grace, and to give grace to ourselves and others.   A time to become whole, spiritually, and then let it inform all other parts of our life.  

So that we will know what to do, because we know who we are.