Being that Good Friday is such an important day on the Christian calendar, I have taken the liberty of posting this morning.

Church is meeting via zoom these days and I will be beaming (or zooming) in to my service and leading the prayer session. I thought I’d share that prayer in today’s post and also give you a link (at the end) to the song that I quote to finish it.

Pray it to God in your own time, should you wish to do so. Here it is:

“Man of Sorrows,” what a name for the Son of God who came. Ruined sinners to reclaim! Hallelujah! what a Saviour! Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned He stood. Sealed my pardon with His blood; Hallelujah! what a Saviour!

Lord on this the darkest day of the Christian calendar and during these dark times, we come to Good Friday with mixed feelings about reflecting on the darkness of sin.

We wonder whether we can stomach the weight of considering our own sin, let alone the sins of the entire world.

And yet, perhaps that is what you wish us to see afresh here today.

To be reminded of the darkness that came over the land as Jesus hung on the cross. To feel its weight, to feel the void and the chasm between us and you and the powerlessness we have to fix the problem, when everything relies on humanity. We look around the world at the moment Lord and there is no sense of empowerment. No sense of skyrocketing autonomy to achieve anything.

There’s no “Just do it” or “Because you’re worth it” or “The most important person: you”. The egotism is gone. The vulnerability and need for help, is real.

Perhaps this is exactly where you want us to be as we consider this morning, Jesus, carrying the cross up to Calvary. For him there was no escape from carrying the weight of the sins of all the world.

For there was no other way for the sins of the world to be removed, than for a perfect sacrifice to face the darkness of sin: the sin in every one of us.

And so we come in the darkness of our sins today, to the foot of the cross. To be reminded of the sorrow and of the pain that Jesus took upon himself to take our sins away.

We praise you Lord for his love for us, for Christ’s humility – that he did not consider equality with the Father something to be held on to but made himself nothing. Became a servant for all our sakes, that his blood shed on the cross would cleanse us of our sins.

We thank-you Lord, that Jesus walked head on into the darkness to rescue us from Satan’s dominion, as it says in Colossians that he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

We thank-you Lord for the light that we can see – just over the horizon – knowing what happened three days later after Calvary.

We thank-you for the promise of relationship with God, as we remember the moment Christ breathed his last on the cross that the earth was shook and the curtain in the Jewish temple torn in two from top to bottom – signifying the end to our estrangement from you.

We thank-you that in the darkness there is hope. You may have forsaken your son, but you have not forsaken us.

We thank-you Father, that in all the darkness that surrounds us currently, that we can come to you knowing the forgiveness on offer and the hope available. And it is no vain hope based on empty positivity but rather a real hope. So let us echo the sentiment of these words today in our own hearts and minds:

I bet all I have on Jesus. I will throw myself on him.
The one who died a real death for real sin.
I bet all I have on Jesus and throughout eternity,

I will marvel at the real hope my Saviour won for me.

We thank-you Jesus, Amen.

Yours in isolation,

Alison

Image Credit: Whilst I’m not certain who to credit, I found the image on johnnydtaylor.com