If you were experiencing food sensitivity but couldn’t quite pinpoint the cause, your health specialist might recommend the Whole30 elimination diet. Your doctor would tell you to strip away everything, reducing your diet to whole, unprocessed foods exclusively for 30 days. Then you would gradually reintroduce each item (e.g., sugar, alcohol, dairy, gluten, etc.) to help you pinpoint precisely what might be the source of your distress. This nutritional reset does wonders to help people pinpoint and permanently eliminate the toxins wreaking havoc on their bodies. Our souls work similarly, requiring a spiritual reset to pinpoint and eliminate the things that are making us sick.

As faithful followers of Jesus, we find ourselves ingesting lots of toxins from the broken cisterns of our culture. These toxins, which Paul calls “works of the flesh” (Galatians 5), stir us up to despise others, to be envious of others and what they have, to give full vent to our anger in both petty and destructive ways, to demonize those who are different from us, or to dehumanize the bodies of others. Like the toxins that make their way into our food, these spiritual toxins make their way into the content we consume, the habits we develop, the words we speak, and, eventually, our very souls.

As faithful followers of Jesus, we all likely recognize the pain and discomfort, or the angst and anxiety, that comes from this highly processed diet. We also know that we don’t have to drink from broken cisterns. What we celebrate at Easter is the lavish outpouring of God’s grace through Jesus Christ. In Christ Jesus, we encounter the wisdom, love, peace, goodness, mercy, and justice of God not only gloriously displayed in Him but gratuitously offered to us through Him. It’s like a spring-fed well with water that refreshes and sustains us (John 4). It’s like a pool of water stirred up by the angel of God to bring us healing and wholeness (John 5).

During the Lenten season, we invite you to journey with us out of the angst and anxiety of our culture and toward spiritual, emotional, and relational wholeness.

Through prayer, we’ll rediscover the reality of God’s grace, goodness, peace, mercy, and justice;

Through fasting, we’ll unplug from the broken cisterns - the media content and habits - that stir up anxiety and angst, hostility and outrage, envy and discontent within us;

Through mercy, we’ll extend God’s grace, goodness, peace, mercy, and justice to others.

Each week, you’ll discover, via the card you receive during the Sunday worship gathering and the “In the Loop” email, an invitation to a particular practice of prayer, fasting, and mercy for that week. These practices can be done as individuals, couples, families, or groups, with resources adapted for even the youngest among us.

We invite you to discover wholeness with us this Lenten season and, in doing so, to continually turn away from the broken cisterns that poison our souls and toward the life-giving water that refreshes, heals, and restores in and through Christ Jesus.

Prayer