Newtown United Methodist Church

Live the Word to Sunday, a Lectionary Discussion

Preparing the way for the Lord to let God’s Word work in your life during the week to make your worship experience more meaningful. Sermons during Worship services are often based upon the Revised Common Lectionary. You are invited to log onto this site and Leave Comment on the readings presented with your questions and/or thoughts.  If you have not already done so,you may register here.

March 14, 2010 [Purple] Fourth Sunday in Lent

Joshua 9:5-12 Today I have roll away the reproach…

• In the desert for forty years God had prepared a generation of people to receive his promised land. Joshua had led them, he and Caleb from the prior generation alone had faith enough to share in the hope to enter it. In scripture, God speaks of his long awaited deliverance.

Psalm 32 – Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven…

• This person the psalmist talks of, is she or he righteous from the start? How then is she of he covered, and sins forgiven?

2 Corinthians 5:16-21 So from now on we regard no one from an earthly point of view…

• Paul writes in his second letter to Corinth, how it is that we share in God’s act of grace through Christ. We struggle and falter with sin as did the early church. How does God bring us to righteousness? What is the new way that Paul describes to the church?.

Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 – Now tax collectors and sinners were gathered around to hear him…

• So here is God doing what God has always done, forgiving us our sins. But who has paid the price? In Joshua we read that the people paid permanently, it was only their children, the next generation, coming out of the 40 years in the desert, who will be forgiven. Read in the parable of the prodigal, how Jesus describes to those taxpayers and sinners, how this righteousness shall come from the father. But be prepared as the last becoming the first may make some respond in jealousy, from an earthly sense of fairness or justice. Are you prepared to receive? Are you prepared to let the lowly rise, where you have not? Do you relate to the son who never left his father, the son who sinned and asks forgiveness? Or the Father?