Lent Day 1
Love Letter One: Genesis

God says, I want you to realize that I never underestimated how thoroughly you'd mess up your life or how painfully you would struggle and suffer, and I don't want you to underestimate your failures or struggles either. They're all part of the story I'm telling.

But neither have I underestimated My determination or ability to enter the mess you've made and the pain you feel and turn everything around. I can, and I will, make everything good again. Never, never underestimate Me. I have a plan, a very good one, and it will move ahead to completion. Guaranteed! Trust Me. Why? Because I love you even when you're messing up badly. I love you in the middle of your pain even though I don't relieve it as quickly as you wish. I am worthy of your trust, no matter what happens in your life. I have a good plan, and nothing will stop Me from carrying it to completion.

You must live now in the tension between anguish and hope.

Lent Day 2
Love Letter Two: Exodus

God says, I can and I will detach you from everything that numbs your sacred hunger for Me and makes you feel hungrier for something other than Me.

You will never on this earth depend fully enough on My power to live exactly as I want you to live. When you see how particular I am about all the rules you should obey but never do, let the weight of My holiness draw you into the delights of My love. I still want to be with you.

Don't ever forget: I do have a plan, a plan to make you deliriously happy in the circle of My love. As you read Exodus 25-40 where I record all those architectural details about the tabernacle, realize the lengths I'm willing to go to be with you. Imagine Me, the God of the universe, clothed in splendor and arrayed in glory, living in, by My standards, a simple tent set up in a barren wilderness. Sure, it was fancy, but compare it to what you imagine heaven to be. But that's where I lived, just to be near people like you.

As you consider all the laws I gave that you've never kept, and as you see My willingness to go camping to be with My people, know this: I will do whatever it takes to fully restore My family and to be with them forever.

Lent Day 3
Love Letter Three: Leviticus

God says, You want Me to solve your problems, but you don't know what your worst problem is, the one responsible for all the others. You don't yet realize that distance from Me is the most lethal problem you have.

You assume we're doing just fine together while you run off trying to make life work for you and you expect Me to cooperate. When you read Leviticus, notice that I never solve anyone's secondary problems. In all those verses about skin infection, for example, I never prescribed ointment or simply cured the disease, which I easily could have done. I simply told people they couldn't enter My Presence with an oozing sore. The issue was worship and intimacy with Me, not health, wealth, or personal comfort.

So many people miss that. They identify their needs, then view Me as a God who wants them satisfied and happy before I deal with their unholiness. But because I love them--and you--I've made a way for you to revolve your life around Me as your first thing. Everything else--your marriage, your checkbook, your self-esteem, your cancer--is a second thing. When the first thing (namely, Me) is in first place in your life, every second thing will be yours to enjoy.

You've got a long way to go before that's true in your life, but I have a plan to get you there, to make you holy.

Lent Day 4
Love Letter Four: Numbers

God says, the road to life is rough. You will begin every new adventure in life with naïve hope and excitement. Every wedding will begin with passion then move into problems. Every decorated nursery will receive a baby that will present unanticipated challenges. Every church plant, every new ministry, every small group that starts with happy hopes-everything you do, no matter how well organized and well intentioned-will run into trouble.

The road to life will expose you to terrible failure and crushing conflict. But only that road leads to the life you want, the life I give you. Spiritual leaders who teach that I am here to solve your problems and make your lives comfortable and prosperous underestimate the energy (and badly misunderstand the nature) of unholiness in the human heart that I must severely deal with to get you to My party.

And that underestimation leads them to underestimate the severity of My love. My servant C. S. Lewis got it right: I'm not safe, but I am good. I will not coddle you any more than a good surgeon only hugs a cancer-stricken child. I will not coddle you, but I will purify you. And that takes more, not less, than a hug.

Lent Day 5
Love Letter Five: Deuteronomy

God says, I am the only true God. There is none other. When you don't like what I'm doing, there is no plan B. I brought you out to bring you in. You were locked in the prison of self-centeredness, just as Israel was in painful bondage to Egypt, where all they could think about was themselves—how can we get a better life, not how can we love God.

I brought you out of that prison to bring you into the freedom of love. If you love Me only when I immediately satisfy your desires, your love is merely one more form of self-centeredness. Your love becomes trust only when you choose to believe that I brought you out of something bad to bring you into something good before you experience that something good. Then your love is sustained by confidence in My character, not by enjoyment of current blessings.

I ask nothing of you but that kind of love, which includes respecting Me for who I am, following Me wherever I lead, serving Me with your whole heart, and obeying every command I give.

But that's asking something neither you nor Israel could give. You are not capable of loving Me like that. No one can please me unless I put the life of My Son, who always pleases Me, into their hearts. And that's what I promised to do. That's what I have done. I'm faithful to faithless people. Believe that, and know that now you can be faithful to Me, not perfectly, but you can learn to live in rhythm with My Son, a little more gracefully each day.

Lent Day 6
Love Letter Six: Joshua

God says, invite Christians to live for Jesus and imply that the Christian life is all about blessings, about entering a land filled with milk and honey with no real battles, and they'll all come forward. Churches that never deal with the real fight that following My Son requires often grow large but mostly with small Christians.

Defeating their enemies involved conflict for Israel, failure, and the need for discernment, just as it does in your life. Israel had to fight real battles with real swords that shed real blood. Some of the people, like Achan, preferred blessings to battle. That preference led to failure as it will in your life.

Discernment, too, is hard to come by. Even Joshua mistook an enemy for a friend, a terrible lack of discernment. And despite Joshua's best efforts, My people sometimes squabbled over their enjoyment of blessings. Pay attention to that. A spirit of entitlement and jealousy will plague you until you die. You'll need discernment to identify it, recognize it as wrong, and know how to navigate your way through it.

Your leaders, all of them, are imperfect, but you will need them to more effectively fight the real battle, to resist compromise and deception, and to enjoy your blessings without the spirit of entitlement corrupting your gratitude. Substantial victory is available in this life but only with struggles that remain until heaven.

Lent Day 7
Love Letter Seven: Judges

God says, I never heal superficially. Many of My people wish I did and think I do. I don't. My plan is to change you from the inside out, to change your motives—why you do what you do—and to change your impact on people so that how you relate to others will make them thirsty for Me and will draw them to dependence on Me.

When you love Me above all else, what you do will bring Me pleasure because your motives, though never pure, will be holy. And when you love others with an authenticity and passion that draws them toward Me, you will feel a little of the pleasure I feel.

Only when people look deeply into themselves will they truly repent. My people in Judges never repented. They remained in love with their own sense of well-being, with no understanding that love, real love, the love that defines Me, involves suffering the loss of well-being for the sake of another.

That lack of understanding is epidemic, not only in culture but in churches today. And it is in you. You and everyone else are inclined to depend on Me for the good life of blessings and to mistake that dependence for love. You're more afraid of losing the good life than of losing (or never gaining) a close relationship with Me. You do not yet see that being with Me is your greatest blessing, no matter what else may be happening in your life.

Lent Day 8
Love Letter Eight: Ruth

God says, no matter what happens in your life, I can reach into your heart with the power to form you into someone who values Me above everyone and everything else. I am determined to reverse your values.

My plan has a happy ending, a wonderful finale far better than you can imagine, but the happy ending is only for the holy. I am committed to your holiness at any cost to Me, required by My nature, and at any cost to you, required by yours, and on whatever timetable is necessary. There are intractable obstacles I must overcome to make you holy. I deal with three in Ruth: natural disadvantages that to you seem more important to overcome than an unholy value system, shattered dreams that bring so much pain into your life that it's difficult to welcome the opportunity they provide for new levels of trust, and material resources that make it easy to disguise narcissism behind non-sacrificial generosity.

Ruth's life is a they-all-lived-happily-ever-after story, but it is not a parable of My power to make life comfortable; it is a parable of My power to make people holy. Know this: holiness and only holiness brings joy. No problem in your life, whether difficult problems such as disadvantages and loss or agreeable problems such as wealth, can stop My plan. Faith and hope together release love. And love is holiness. Hear what I'm saying in this love letter: no matter how dark the world around you, no matter how difficult the world inside you, My plan overcomes all obstacles to holiness.

Lent Day 9
Love Letter Nine: First Samuel

God says, I'm aware that things go wrong in your life, that family and friends don't always treat you well, that nothing goes exactly as you want it to. I grieve with you over the pain that life causes you. But our priorities differ. You ask what will work to make your life better, to correct the injustice you suffer, to see to it that more things go as they should in your life. I want you to ask what holiness would look like in your situation, whatever it is; holiness that might not right the wrongs you suffer but that would let us enjoy each other.

I tell Samuel's story to let you see how Israel's spiritual leaders, when they saw trouble brewing at the end of Samuel's life, forgot Me—no, they rejected Me—and honored their own agenda to make life work according to their own wisdom. They insisted Samuel appoint a human king, a king other than Me, to lead them. They wanted to fit in with the way other people ran their lives that seemed to be working for them. Israel had never had a king other than Me.

It hurts Me to see My people chase after a lesser good than knowing Me. It disturbs Me to watch them follow so-called proven methods to make good things happen and to value those managerial methods more than the holy and self-denying relating that pleases Me no matter what happens. You will understand My central message in this letter when you understand the tragedy of asking for a king other than Me. Following the ways of another may work for a season. It often leads to the shallow and short-lived laughter of pride in an accomplished agenda.

Following My ways will lead you through trouble and emptiness to real laughter, to the laughter that only persons in holy relationship can enjoy.

Lent Day 10
Love Letter Ten: Second Samuel

God says, only when you see the moral evil in the human heart will you surrender to the mystery of My plan.

In this world, I am destroying moral evil in My people. In the next, I will eliminate natural evil. You must trust that I permit terrible things, natural evil that grieves My heart far more than yours, as part of the process of destroying the moral evil that offends My heart. In ways you cannot understand, I have the power and wisdom needed to move My plan forward through the evil of bombs and the injustice of suffering.

No matter how great your pain or how confusing and intense your suffering, live in the mystery of My love. Struggle to trust Me.

Do not live with the priority of making your life in this world as good as you can make it. You will suffer, at times unfairly, but you will be given what you need to enter strongly and wisely with supernatural love into every circumstance you face.

Doing so will be your joy, your hope, and your deepest fulfillment now as you look forward to a world where every child runs and laughs.

Lent Day 11
Love Letter Eleven: Ezra

God says, as soon as My people were settled in the land of promise, they rebuilt the altar on the same site where the original altar had rested. The altar of sacrifice symbolizes "yieldedness" to Me. To return to the narrow road, you need only surrender your will to Mine.

And as my beloved and for so long troubled servant John Bunyan described in Pilgrim's Progress, you will take the broad, more comfortable road through "bypath meadow." But know this: I will not leave you there!

Draw courage from this history.

I will strengthen you to fight the good fight and to finish well. You will make it to the party. There is always a way back from sin. Tears of hope will flow every time you experience My loving mercy when you fail.

I still love you. I will not give up on you. I have a plan.

Lent Day 12
Love Letter Twelve: Nehemiah

God says, whatever anyone does out of a sincere desire to know Me and draw others to me is a great work. And as you engage in that work, sometimes you will be energized as you catch a glimpse of My plan unfolding. More often you won't. Either way you are doing a great work.

Every father who repairs a leaky faucet and then prays with his kids before dinner is doing a great work. Every mother who prepares that dinner and joins in that prayer is doing a great work. Every single person who works hard to pay the rent and reads the Bible before bedtime is doing a great work.

I see it all. And I am pleased. Their reward is coming.

Whatever is done to know Me and make Me known, to advance My purposes, is a great work. And I will use every great work done by My people, no matter how small it seems, to further My great plan.

When you see the fullness of that plan and its end result, you will be plunged forever in a sea of joy.

Lent Day 13
Love Letter Thirteen: Psalms

God says, the Psalms are not an anesthetic. They are not a cup of hot chocolate on a cold night. They are the prayers of someone lost in a dark wood, shivering in bitter cold, unable to stand in fierce wind. They are the praise that flows from that person's heart when he abandons himself to Me for deliverance, when he trusts that My hand has grasped his and that I am leading him home, very slowly but very surely.

Face the hard questions that life requires you to ask. Gather with other travelers on the narrow road, pilgrims who acknowledge their confusion and feel their fears. Then, together, live those questions in My Presence.

Your tears will become the melody of a new song. Your darkness will become the window through which new light will appear. Your doubt will become new ground, solid ground, on which to stand. Your longing to feel your emptiness and ask your questions in My Presence, in the company of other authentic pilgrims, is good. That longing releases true worship and opens your ears to hear the music of heaven and to awkwardly but rhythmically begin to dance.

Decide, again and again either to cling to Me as I AM or reshape Me into who you want Me to be. The stakes are high. Either you will find yourself in finding Me, or you will lose yourself in creating Me to fit your foolish expectations.

Make the right choice.

Lent Day 14
Love Letter Fourteen: Song of Songs

God says, I love you. I delight in you. I will do whatever it takes for you to enter into the exquisite, life-defining pleasure of the communion My Son and I enjoy. I invite you into the feast of love.

I am arousing the desire I put in every human heart to experience satisfaction in an
undeserved relationship of love. To arouse desire without providing hope is cruel. To feel desire without hope of satisfaction is hell. Dante's words written over the door into Satan's world were apt: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

But desire with hope is sweet. It is the abundant life...for now. I want you to nibble on the appetizers now. But to do so requires wisdom.

Relate authentically with Me.

Hurt and celebrate, lament and praise, weep and laugh.

Be all that you are without pretense, in My Presence.

Lent Day 15
Love Letter Fifteen: Jeremiah

God says, I make no promise to protect you from suffering in this world.

I do promise the power to believe in My goodness when bad things happen, the power to hope with confidence that a good plan is unfolding when nothing visible supports that hope, and the power to reveal the goodness of My love no matter how distraught or empty you feel.

Kierkegaard, my nineteenth-century Jeremiah, had it right. He confronted the culture of his day with these words: "Not until a person has become so wretched that his only wish, his only consolation, is to die-not until then does Christianity begin."

Without an ongoing consciousness of sin, any sense of nearness to Me is counterfeit. But with consciousness of sin, the fire of purifying holiness will sustain your faith. I rescued Jeremiah-and I will rescue you-from faithless unbelief, from hopeless despair, and from unloving self-obsession.

And now My Son has made it possible for you to live a life of abundant though severely tested-faith, abundant though seriously challenged hope, and abundant though painfully sacrificial love.

.

Lent Day 16
Love Letter Sixteen: Daniel

God says, when I toss My children into the air, terror comes before delight. Put yourself in the place of My people in Daniel's day. They felt thrown into the air with no safety net beneath them. They couldn't see their God ready to catch them.

Jerusalem lay in ruins. They had no king. Heathens had entered the Holy of Holies and lived to bring home the sacred treasures they stole. And the theology of My people, all their expectations, crumbled.

The greatest danger My people face today is prosperity, blessings that reinforce the false hope that nothing serious will ever go wrong in their lives if they just keep believing, expecting, trusting, and smiling.

My people in Daniel's day were wrestling with hard questions that the prosperous church of today never asks.

When every expectation of how your life should turn out is shattered; when I seem to you like an indifferent, cold sovereign, a promise-breaker, a useless God, an abandoning parent, rejoice! You are ready for the unveiling, to meet Me as I AM.

Lent Day 17
Love Letter Seventeen: Obadiah

God says, never exact vengeance on another. Only one who is not worthy of judgment himself can administer just retribution without sinning. Vengeance is My prerogative, not yours. My vengeance is always rooted in redemptive desire.

Forgiveness builds community. Getting even destroys it. Always. I stand against everything that stands against community. And pride, the energy behind getting even, heads the list.

I intend to allow things to come into your life that will seem inconsistent with My good plan for you. Little things, small irritations, and big things such as health concerns and relational fractures. As before, you will still hesitate to trust Me. Nothing blocks My plan to bring you to My party more than the conceit of presumed independence, which gives rise to an attitude of entitled vengeance.

Take heart.

I can and I will tear down every obstacle to building My kingdom, where My people will live in line with My plan and with My character.

Lent Day 18
Love Letter Eighteen: Jonah

God says, you are growing up. You can no longer celebrate My love the way a little boy celebrates the care he receives from a good mother, from a tender woman who provides her child with a nutritious meal and a sweet dessert and then, after an hour of play and reading, tucks him into a warm, comfortable bed with the promise of another fun day tomorrow.

Part of growing up, of seeing Me as I am, tempts My followers to run from Me, to establish a safe distance from the distinctly unsafe and inexplicably disagreeable ways I sometimes involve Myself in the lives of those I love.

You are growing up. Your days of naïve worship and shallow but exciting intimacy are
over. It is always difficult for a child to become an adult, to draw close to Me as I AM.

You are wrong to demand My cooperation with your understanding of life. Because I love you and because My plans for you are good, I demand your cooperation with Mine. There is no other way to enjoy My Presence.

I left Jonah with the same question I now ask you: when your life hits a bump that I could smooth but don't, will you continue to think I should surrender My wisdom to yours and do what you think best?

Lent Day 19
Love Letter Nineteen: Habakkuk

God says, never ignore your struggle with how I do things. Ask every question that rises in your heart as you live in this world. But prepare yourself to struggle even more with My response. You must stumble in confusion before you dance with joy.

Know this: those who live by faith will struggle in ways that those who live to make their lives work will never know. It is that struggle, to believe despite desperate pain and confusion that a good plan is unfolding, that will open your eyes to see Me more clearly. Is that what you want? Will you pay the price?

The price is this: you will tremble in agony as you live in a sinful, self-prioritizing world. You will learn to wait in emptiness and frustrated desire for My plan of love to reveal itself. With confidence in Me and hope in My plan, you will not only feel the pain of living in the valley but also see My glory from the mountaintop of faith.

Only those who struggle in confusion and wait in hope will be strengthened to struggle well and to wait with confidence.

Struggle well! Wait in hope!

Lent Day 20
Love Letter Twenty: Zechariah

God says, if you could see right now what is happening in the unseen world, you would be filled with hope.

You must trust Me for whatever tastes of glory I choose to provide in this life as you continue to build the temple. You have become a prisoner of hope. The hope I provide anchors a weary, empty, troubled soul in My plan.

Beneath difficult feelings, hope encourages by giving you reason to persevere with the joy of anticipation. Happiness depends on present blessing, which I do not guarantee. Joy depends on future hope, which I do guarantee. Do not expect to feel good. You may. You may not. My work of hope reaches into the center of your soul to strengthen your character and deepen your resolve in any circumstance of life.

I gave advance notice that My Son would come, that He would be hated and killed, that what His killers meant for evil I meant for good, that I would then open the eyes of those I invite to the party to realize what they did in killing My Son, that I would meet them in their brokenness with a cleansing fountain, that I would then set My Son on the throne of this world and everything would be as it should be.

Live in hope!

Lent Day 21
Love Letter Twenty-one: Malachi

God says, I have chosen you to be part of My plan to restore this earth to its full beauty and My people to their full beauty. Your calling is to reveal My love.

You show contempt for My name when you treat Me as though I were a vending machine stocked with sweets that temporarily satisfy.

You weary Me with your idea that people enjoying the pleasant life of prosperity and peace are the real winners. Every moment spent in seizing pleasure is a moment with your back to Me.

Turn toward yourself, live for satisfaction and fullness now, and you will lose yourself.

Turn toward Me, sacrifice your pleasure for Mine, and you will find Me. You will find purpose now and joy forever.

I have loved you. I love you still. Beneath your darkness, disillusionment, and doubts, you long to know Me, to serve Me, to honor My name, to wait for Me as My prisoner of hope. That delights Me.

You are My treasure.

Lent Day 22
Love Letter Twenty-two: Matthew

God says, I don't teach history. I am history. I am yesterday. I am today. I am tomorrow. Nothing I say is irrelevant. I have one plan: to bring all My people to the Great Dance, to lead them on the narrow road that moves through suffering to unimaginable joy. You must never set aside or regard as outdated anything I reveal. My later letters continue; they do not dismiss the loving story I began to tell in My earlier ones.

I never change. I always love. I can do nothing less. I AM love.

Know this: no one can pass over My first thirty-nine love letters and expect to accurately grasp and profoundly delight in the story I continue in the last twenty-seven. I want you to be caught up in the eternal story that began before time began, that develops in Genesis through Malachi, continues in Matthew through Revelation, and will continue forever when time ends.

My Son's mission was to change your life, to bring you into My kingdom of love by forgiving your self-worshiping rebellion that keeps you falling short of My way and by empowering you to bring My kingdom near to others. He never intended to keep you visibly good and pleasantly happy until heaven.

He came to reveal My nature for your sake and to change your nature for Mine.

Lent Day 23
Love Letter Twenty-three: Mark

God says, like you, Mark wrongly believed that the good news of following Me into kingdom living included a life blessed with a certain level of comfort and freedom from hassle. Raised in a large home where My followers were always welcomed by Mark's mother, Mary, he—like you—mixed personal comfort with spiritual reality.

But My Son moved him forward. After he repented of choosing comfort over service and suffering, Mark traveled with Peter, who couldn't stop talking about his time with My Son. Mark more fully realized that My Son lived a life of selfless servanthood that led to undeserved suffering.

He realized what kingdom living meant.

The more clearly you see Christ, the more willing you will be to suffer any loss for His sake. Kingdom living consists of radical servanthood and self-denying suffering with the hope of joy forever.

Mark finished well.

You can too.

Lent Day 24
Love Letter Twenty-four: Luke

God says, you seem to want more energy, an upbeat attitude, a fulfilling sense of personal significance. Does that describe My Son when He lived on earth?

In your heart, you rarely find a desire stronger than your wish to be satisfied with life's blessings, to feel both confident in My goodness that they'll continue and excited about life's opportunities. Your desire for spiritual formation lies on top of those self-focused desires like an attractive veneer. It needs to lie beneath them as the controlling foundation of your life.

You are standing at a crossroads that not many reach, a crossroads where the choice between absolute surrender and lukewarm Christianity is clear. You must now determine which you want more: apparent maturity that wins recognition from others or perfect maturity that puts you in touch with desires that will remain unsatisfied until the next life.

The road to perfect maturity will make you vulnerable to severe temptations. It will stir doubts about My reality that you could avoid by choosing the easier path.

But if you want to be formed like My Son, this is the road you must choose, the one less traveled.

Lent Day 25
Love Letter Twenty-five: John

God says, in the world you now inhabit, communion with Me is not defined by an experience of Me. Nor does it depend on blessings from Me.

To really live is to release My Son's life through yours, in any circumstance, no matter what you feel; to relate as He related, giving when no one gives back, loving when no one returns love, forgiving when no one deserves forgiveness, suffering in the place of those who should suffer.

Understand this: to commune with Me in this life is to live like My Son with His life alive in you.

Believe this: communion with Me leads to an eternal experience of Me and unimaginable blessings from Me. You will get a taste of them now—as My Spirit chooses—and you will enjoy the banquet later when you see My Son.

Know this: heaven's reality has invaded yours. Prepare to live a new way.

Real life, the surprising route to joy, is within reach.

Lent Day 26
Love Letter Twenty-six: Acts

God says, what My Son began through His birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, He now continues.

You are not alive in this world in order to experience Me or to enjoy the blessings of a comfortable life. If that were My purpose, I'd have brought you into My Presence in heaven the moment you were forgiven and adopted into My family.

Your purpose until you die is to reveal a new attitude toward suffering and a new agenda in prayer that flows out of your new purpose in life that makes sense only if you claim your new hope of resurrection.

You are now free from slavery to the demands of self: for recognition, for life to go as you want, for good health and prosperity, for freedom from emptiness, and for the experience of fullness.

You are now free to advance the only plan whose promise of joy will be kept.

You are now free to tell people the full message of this new life.

You are now free to really live!

Lent Day 27
Love Letter Twenty-seven: Romans

God says, you still tend to approach My letters the way a chess player comes to his game board. G. K. Chesterton was right when he observed that people who play chess with My truth try to get the heavens into their heads, and it's their heads that crack.

Poets, on the other hand, fill their heads with truths that lift their imaginations into the heavens. They are the grown-ups who hear the music of truth and dance like children. Do you want to discover the truth that sings?

It's time for you to pass through the corridors where truth is carefully outlined on the walls, where people take notes and mistake the truth that is living water for the dry dust of mere facts.
These parched souls endlessly analyze the composition of the water I've provided but never seem to realize it was meant for drinking.

Keep moving, not beyond truth but into truth. The corridor opens onto fields where flowers bloom and birds sing. If you listen, you can catch the scent and hear the music while you're still in the corridor.

Let the fragrance and the melody awaken your desire to drink from cool springs and stir your longing to swim in refreshing lakes. Let your time in the corridor achieve its purpose, to increase your capacity to drink more and to strengthen you to swim further, further away from shore, in sight of home.

Lent Day 28
Love Letter Twenty-eight: 1 Corinthians

God says, the change I bring about comes slowly.

The more you attempt to hold onto your confidence in the goodness of the story I am telling while at the same time acknowledging all that is disappointing in this life, the more you will be confronted with the ongoing moment of decision: to trust or not to trust.

Only in dark nights will hope burn bright enough to sustain your faith and release your love.

Let what you see drive you to the precipice of unbelief. Let what you feel bring you to the brink of despair.

If I exist, if I am good, if My story is loving and My plan on course, My Spirit will speak into the deep place in your heart that only terrifying doubt renders accessible.

And in that place, I will anchor you in hope.

Lent Day 29
Love Letter Twenty-nine: 2 Corinthians

God says, My Spirit is telling My story to your psychological culture, a culture that actually believes woundedness—how others treat you—is a more serious problem than selfishness—how you treat others.

Understand this: no one who fails to see their selfishness as their absolutely worst problem, no one who continues to believe that their feelings of emptiness and pain and loneliness deserve priority attention from a grandfather-like God who simply wants all His little ones to feel good, will ever know the kind of hope that energized and sustained Paul through all his disappointments and discouragement.

Paul was wonderfully encouraged when the Corinthians responded well to his earlier instructions and rebukes, but his unwavering hope remained in Me.

Live for your relational comfort, and your joy will be shallow and temporary. It will not free you to love.

Live to know the truth of My story of forgiving love, and you will be deeply unsettled by how profoundly you need forgiveness.

You will discover, slowly but surely, the power of My ongoing forgiveness and Presence to change you into a person who loves.

Lent Day 30
Love Letter Thirty: Galatians

God says, your preoccupation with satisfaction is the corruption beneath your compulsions. Your expectation of feeling everything you want to feel in this fallen world renders you vulnerable to false teachers who, in the name of My Son, offer you a strategy that promises to let you feel as complete now as you will feel forever in heaven.

Like My followers in the province of Galatia, you're drawn to a perversion of My story. And your freedom to love no matter how you feel is replaced by slavery to a compulsive need to feel good about yourself before you feel able to love another.

Gospel freedom means neither to indulge your whims nor keep My rules. Whim-indulgers and rule-keepers are slaves to the corruption within them that demands a kind of satisfaction My Son will not provide for you in this life.

My Son has set you free to love, to believe I am good and that the good story I am telling is unfolding under His control. Faith in Me and hope for tomorrow frees you to love today.

And loving with divine power releases a kind of joy into your soul that nothing else can bring.

Lent Day 31
Love Letter Thirty-one: Ephesians

God says, My enemy will stand against you at every turn. You are no match for him. But My Spirit is in you and the enemy is no match for Him.

Wear the belt of truth. What My Spirit tells you will help you oppose your opposer.

Put on the breastplate of righteousness. Resolve to fight every trace of self-centeredness within you.

Identify the peace the gospel provides. Think of that peace as a pair of shoes you can wear to keep running the race in the face of all opposition.

Hold on to the shield of faith. Know that I am who I AM, that My plan is on course, that you are My child, and that one day you will be fully formed like My Son.

Keep the helmet of salvation on your head. No matter what happens, no matter how you fail, all shall be well.

Never stop reading My letters. My word is My Spirit's sword. Use it to fight evil, first in you, then around you.

Learn to pray. Pray in My Spirit, on all occasions.

Celebrate the joy you can know when you live to complete My Son, to reveal Him to the world, and to delight Him with your response to His love.

Lent Day 32
Love Letter Thirty-two: Philippians

God says, never assume, as many do, that the sorrows of this life, even the severest ones, are incompatible with the joy I give.

From a heart relentlessly thirsty and filled with gratitude, Paul sang four messages of joy to the Christians at Philippi. My Spirit is singing them now to you. If you hear the music, you will be able to pour the literal life of My Son into the hearts of others.

To be content does not mean to feel content but rather to know that in My Son you have everything you need to live in rhythm with My Spirit in any circumstance of life. In emptiness and brokenness changed by My Spirit into thirst and gratitude, you are able to complete, reveal, and delight My Son.

It is empty and broken people who at the same time are thirsty and grateful who discover the power to live in ways they never thought possible.

Lent Day 33
Love Letter Thirty-three: Colossians

God says, place no hope in the experience of satisfaction now. If you do, you are shifting away from the hope held out in the gospel of My Son. You will then disfigure the Christian life and blur and discount what My Son accomplished in His death and resurrection.

Right now, My Son is in you as your hope of glory, not as your opportunity to experience glory now.

That hope, when grasped, will fill you with gratitude for forgiveness. Only then will you realize that what My Son offers you now, what He is doing in you now, is far greater than the satisfying, trouble-free, always fulfilling life that you think would be best, the life that too many counselors, pastors, spiritual warfare warriors, spiritual directors, and Christian friends tell you is available now.

Consider the relationship with Me that you now possess: once alienated, now beloved; once enemies, now friends; once separated, now reconciled; once under wrath, now forgiven; once dead in selfishness, now alive in selflessness. Fully seen and fully wanted by an inflexibly holy God who in Christ has given you the gift of absolute, secure righteousness.

That's what you have now.

Believe it. Trust it. Enjoy it.

Lent Day 34
Love Letter Thirty-four: 1 Thessalonians

God says, only in unplanned, unarranged, unwelcomed, unmanageable, and thoroughly unenjoyable dark nights will My plan for your maturity unfold.

Listen to what an offbeat follower of Mine, Tim Farrington, wrote in A Hell of Mercy:

"You will be graced with the disaster your soul requires to find its way home."

John of the Cross put it this way:

"No matter how much an individual does through his own efforts, he cannot actively purify himself enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love."

Your frustration with everything, including yourself, makes it possible to turn in deeper dependence to Me. Your weariness requires the strength of supernatural love to continue serving Me. Your haunting sense of futility shuts you up to a kind of endurance that can be sustained only with hope in My Son's return.

You are in a good place.

Lent Day 35
Love Letter Thirty-five: 2 Timothy

God says, the life I want you to live now is a life both to endure and to enjoy.

At times, such strong endurance will be required that joy will seem a far-off hope, a lost experience. But without endurance, you will know little of the very real joy I provide.

With endurance, a joy will develop that frees you to appreciate the pleasures of life's blessings without requiring from them a satisfaction they cannot provide.

And that same joy, more deeply felt as a longing whose complete satisfaction is guaranteed, frees you to endure whatever hardships lie ahead.

Lent Day 36
Love Letter Thirty-six: Titus

God says, you are living between two epiphanies. You have no higher calling in this life than to reveal the beauty of My grace until the beauty of My glory fills you with joy forever.

My high calling, the vision I am about to set before you, corresponds perfectly to your deepest desire. And My community, to the degree it functions according to the design I make known in this letter, will release the power you need to live into My calling, to live the way you most want to live.

Sociably pleasant Christianity is no Christianity at all. It aims too low. It fails to reveal the beauty of grace.

Aim yourself and your friends toward becoming a community where men and women who long to live well between the two epiphanies. The way you live reveals the beauty of grace-energized relating until the beauty of glory-filled community can be enjoyed forever.

Lent Day 37
Love Letter Thirty-seven: Hebrews

God says, see Jesus, still incarnate as a human but no longer on earth, still the crucified One with nail-scarred hands and feet but no longer on the cross, still resurrected but no longer visible among you, and still ascended but no longer ascending through the devil-filled heavens.

See Jesus where He is right now.

Where He is when you awake in a cold sweat at two in the morning.

Where He is when you're alone in a hotel room and tempted to watch what should never cross your eyes.

Where He is when you've been devastated by loss or rejection.

Where He is when your failure has brought you into the depths of despair.

My Son energizes you to reveal My goodness by the way you relate during difficult times.

He nourishes you, generating strength for you to believe, wait, and love.

Lent Day 38
Love Letter Thirty-eight: James

God says, by faith you are already saved from an eternity without Me. You are justified before Me by faith in My Son, not by living well.

As My child, you will inherit a place in the kingdom, a seat at My table, a dance card for the party. That's My gift to you. It's guaranteed.

When you were justified before Me by faith and guaranteed heaven as My gift, My Spirit made you alive to Me with the life of My Son. He regenerated you. He gave you a new heart, a new and potentially consuming desire to love Me and others at any cost to yourself.

Justification makes you My child.

Regeneration provides the power to live like My child.

And because justification is always accompanied by regeneration, every justified person's way of relating will evidence the presence of divine life though that evidence may be visible only to Me.

When your faith leads to a consuming desire to love Me and others at any cost, when your faith is accompanied by a consistent pattern of good works, your life in this world will not be wasted, and your life in the next world will be uniquely blessed.

Lent Day 39
Love Letter Thirty-nine: 1 John

God says, you're on the journey. You're My little child, walking the narrow road that My Son promised leads to life. You're about to learn what you've dimly known before, that when the narrow road gets especially narrow, My Spirit has a unique opportunity to do important work.

You may laugh with joy.

You may cry in hope.

You are Mine.

The life that defines My Son now defines you. You are alive in Me, to Me, and with Me.

Inexpressible joy is yours for the asking . . . on My Spirit's timetable. Never deny My Spirit's sovereignty. The divine wind of joy blows as He chooses.

And never deny your responsibility. You exist in My light. You don't always walk in My light. To walk in My light requires that you pay more attention to your failure to love than to the pain
you feel when others fail to love you.

The dance of love, the life of joy that My Son and My Spirit celebrate with Me has appeared to you. My Son died to forgive you for how far short you fall of perfect love and to share the life of perfect love with you. When He returned to Me, He sent Our Spirit to pour that life into
you.

And that has happened: The power to love is always in you.

Lent Day 40
Love Letter Forty: Jude

God says, My power is sufficient to keep you from falling off the narrow road. But on that road you will feel, more acutely sometimes than others, the unbearable ache of repeated failure to love, of always falling short of My glory.

Don't be surprised by your failure. Instead, be surprised, staggered by My response.

Only in worship will you keep yourself in My love.

Only in brokenness will you know My power to keep you from falling.

As you feel the unbearable ache of failing and being failed, I am able—if in brokenness you worship—to keep you persevering on the only road that will bring you into My Presence, full of joy and ready to dance.

Your failure provides you the opportunity to, once again, celebrate the love you taste from others but fully enjoy only from Me.

That's the gospel.

That's My story.

Contend for it with all your might.

Easter
Easter Love Letter: Revelation

God says, when My Son's kingdom breaks into yours, expect a collision. When His way of relating confronts the world's way of relating, all heaven and hell break loose. The battle is on, a battle to the death and to life.

The side that appears to be losing is winning and will soon win, visibly and decisively. And the side that seems now to have the edge loses forever.

You have been seeking Me for many years. You have heard Me speak to you and you are ready to read My final love letter to you.

Prepare to look at the reality of My kingdom as it's coming right now into your life and into this world.

Prepare to see My Son as you've never seen Him before.

Prepare to listen as the story I tell reveals the movement of history that continually brings you to a crossroad where life-altering choices are required.

I want you to do more than understand My story. I want you to be caught up in it, My truth taken up into your life. Picturing reality in graphic images penetrates through, not around, your mind and into your imagination where true facts become living truth, experienced doctrine. Only then will My truth be taken up into your life.

There is more to reality than meets the naked eye. Only when you are gripped by what is happening in the invisible world will you live well in the visible world.