Lent Day 1

Joel 2:12-14

God wants us to be in a relationship with Him. It is up to us to decide whether to respond to His invitation or not. Our life is like a journey and each step we take can be toward God or away from Him. Every time we pray we are walking toward the Lord. Every time we sin we are turning away from Him and walking in another direction. He invites us now to turn back toward Him, repenting of our sins and accepting His forgiveness so we can walk toward Him once again.
Sacrifices can be a sign of our repentance. When we break something that belongs to a friend, we apologize and ask for forgiveness, but we also replace the item that we broke. The apology is absolutely necessary, but buying a replacement for the item we broke helps show how sincere we are in the apology and how much we want a good relationship with that friend despite the fact that we broke something that belonged to that person. Choosing to do something as a sacrifice for God can be a part (never the whole) of demonstrating our repentance and our choice to turn back toward Him and our choice to be restored in our relationship with Him.
This is the first of 40 days when we especially choose to recognize that we have sinned, ask God to forgive us, and make sacrifices as a sign of our repentance. Each day we will write down or draw a picture in this heart of a sacrifice we are choosing to make today. It is far too much to make a sacrifice for each and every sin we commit; choose just one or two sacrifices and let that be enough to show repentance for all your sins.

Linked to Works for Me Wednesday