Share the love of God with women through the study of His word. Share the love of Christ with women through spiritual encouragement and support. Create a safe environment where women can freely share their hearts with one another.
Written by Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895). She was the wife of a bishop in Northern Ireland, and along with her sister, she founded a school for the deaf. Of the four hundred hymns she wrote, a number were focused on instructing children in the faith. For Easter she wrote “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” in which she explains that only Christ could pay the price of sin.
There is a green hill far away, Outside a city wall, Where the dear Lord was crucified, Who died to save us all.
Refrain O dearly, dearly, has He loved, And we must love Him, too, And trust in His redeeming blood, And try His works to do.
We may not know, we cannot tell, What pains He had to bear; But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there.
He died that we might be forgiv’n, He died to make us good, That we might go at last to Heav’n, Saved by His precious blood.
There was no other good enough To pay the price of sin; He only could unlock the gate Of heaven and let us in.
O dearly, dearly has He loved, And we must love Him, too, And trust in His redeeming blood, And try His works to do.
And He said, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” (Exodus 33:14)
The devout soul rejoices in God as his great Inheritance. When He is always present to our mind, when we are constantly making use of Him, when we find ourselves naturally turning to Him through the hours of the day, then such quiet peace and rest settle down upon us that we cannot be moved by any anxiety of the present or future.
Adapted from “Our Daily Walk” devotional by FB Meyers
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed.Luke 23:44-45
Following Jesus’ crucifixion, right around midday, the land was swallowed up in darkness. Imagine how unsettling that must have been! All of a sudden, people surely felt more vulnerable, more on edge. There may have been some who had been present at the arrest of Jesus and remembered that He had warned, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). But the majority probably said to one another, I wonder what this darkness is about? I wonder why this is taking place?
In one sense, they should have known the answer to that question. Jesus’ death occurred during the celebration of the Passover in Jerusalem—a celebration that had taken place annually for hundreds of years. During this time, the Jews would recall that the final plague God sent over Egypt before the arrival of the angel of death and the death of the firstborn sons was that of darkness over all the land. They would recall that after the darkness came death: that on that occasion, only those who were protected by the blood of the Passover lamb awakened in the morning to find their firstborn still with them. And now, here, in the greater exodus previewed by that first one, darkness preceded the death of Christ, who was and is the perfect Passover Lamb.
It is as Sin-Bearer—as the perfect, spotless Lamb—that Jesus entered into the presence of the sinless God. What’s more, He carried with Him no substitutionary sacrifice aside from Himself. Prior to this moment in history, to enter the holy place of God’s presence in the temple in Jerusalem, the high priest had to make a sacrifice for his own sin, and then make sacrifice for the sins of those whom he represented. But this High Priest entered the heavenly presence of the holy God carrying nothing. Why? Because He Himself needed no sacrifice, for He was perfect, sinless; and yet He Himself was the sacrifice. Jesus was the Lamb. There was nothing else He could carry, and nothing else He should carry. As Peter explains, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).
And so the darkness of God’s judgment did not have the last word. Because Jesus became sin, incurring the full fury of God’s wrath, we can be transferred into God’s kingdom, “into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). There is nothing else in all the world that demonstrates how real God’s love is for sinners and how real our sin is to God.
Well might the sun in darkness hide And shut his glories in When Christ the mighty Maker died For man the creature’s sin.[1]
Isaac Watts, “Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed” (1707).
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.Luke 23:44-45
As Jesus’ ministry progressed, one of the great concerns of the Jewish religious establishment was that He had, it appeared, claimed that He would destroy the temple and raise it again in three days (John 2:19). Indeed, this was one of the main charges brought against Him (Mark 14:58). When Jesus was on the cross, then, passersby mocked and ridiculed Him, shouting, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!” (Matthew 27:40). But there He remained, hanging on the cross, in the darkness.
And then, in the midst of the darkness and the upheaval of the crucifixion, all of a sudden something mysterious and utterly unexpected happened: God Himself desecrated the temple.
“The curtain of the temple was torn in two,” Luke tells us. This was the very curtain that hung in the temple to symbolically bar the way into God’s presence. It was the great sign that imperfect people could not be in the same space as the holy God. All through the Old Testament, anyone who had presumed to come into God’s presence without observing the ceremonial cleansing rituals and making the necessary sacrifices had died (for instance, Numbers 3:2-4). But now, suddenly, as Jesus was on the very verge of death, this symbol of restrictive exclusivity was destroyed. By destroying it, God declared that the old priestly ritual for entrance into His presence had been abolished and the barrier of sin dividing humanity from their Maker had been obliterated. There is no longer any need to keep our distance from God. Instead, “we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain” (Hebrews 10:19-20).
Our access to God isn’t restricted to a temple or a church or any other building, nor must it be through a merely human priest or a guru. No, 2,000 years ago God broke into history to establish direct access to Himself through Jesus. Now there is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5-6). The temple curtain being torn in two was divine vandalism on your behalf! You don’t have to be sidetracked by priests and rituals anymore. They can be nothing but pointless. Instead, you can come to God, just as you are, confident of welcome and mercy and help, all because of Jesus.
Heart2Heart Women 