Today is Good Friday*. A day absolutely central to the gospel story and to our lived experience as followers of Jesus.
One of our scripture readings in our monthly BAM Prayer Call this week was of the suffering servant in Isaiah 53:
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
This is the picture that we have of Jesus on Good Friday – our wounded healer.
And we are reminded that as followers of Jesus, we too are called to be wounded healers in a broken world.
As we contemplate Christ dead on the Cross, our thoughts turn to the countless injustices and sufferings which prolong his passion in every part of the world. I think of the places where man is insulted and humiliated, downtrodden and exploited. In every person suffering from hatred and violence, or rejected by selfishness and indifference, Christ continues to suffer and die. On the faces of those who have been “defeated by life” there appear the features of the face of Christ dying on the Cross. Ave, Crux, spes unica! Today too, from the Cross there springs hope for all. – Pope John Paul II, Good Friday, 10 April 1998.
The Joy of the Lord is Your Strength
In just a few short weeks we will be gathering together at our BAM Global Summit, an online connecting point for the global business as mission community.
Doing BAM out of a place of brokenness and weakness, with a posture of humility and dependency on the Lord, has been a theme that the Lord has highlighted to us.
As we have been praying and preparing for the Summit, ‘the joy of the Lord is your strength’ from Nehemiah 8 is one of the verses we’ve been drawn to. Like the people in Nehemiah, these past years have been a battle in the midst of building for many of us in the BAM community, and we are ‘mid-restoration’ – aware of our own brokenness and weakness! We too want to gather together with a longing for the Lord, to say ‘yes’ to Him as we celebrate together, despite our failings and our brokenness and despite the challenges and suffering.
The other passage that has been drawing us, and will be the focus of our opening Summit devotional, is ‘Mary’s Song’ from Luke 1. When Mary was given a surprising and quite outrageous assignment from the Lord, she responded in worship, with a posture of humility and obedience – even though she knew that saying ‘yes’ would lead to suffering.
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