Worship for Lent
Scripture
“Jesus Has Risen
After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; He has risen, just as He said. Come and see the place where He lay. Then go quickly and tell His disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
— Matthew 28
The Journey Through Lent: Walking Toward the Empty Tomb
Picture them: two women walking through the pre-dawn darkness, hearts broken, feet heavy with grief. They come expecting death, the cold finality of a sealed tomb. They come to anoint a body that will never speak again.
But then…
Yet we must not rush past the horror that preceded it. Just days earlier, Jesus hung abandoned, betrayed by a friend’s kiss, denied by His closest companion, mocked by the very people He came to save. The Light of the World seemingly extinguished. The Word made flesh, silenced. Hope itself, lay within a tomb. The waiting must have been excruciating. Saturday’s silence stretched unbearably long as those who had left everything to follow Him wondered if they had been catastrophically wrong.
But Matthew 28 shatters that silence with hope of the greatest magnitude. The earthquake isn’t merely physical, it’s the old order cracking apart, death’s stranglehold breaking, the powers of darkness reeling in defeat. The angel sits on the rolled-away stone like a victor on a conquered throne, and those first words are the ones our terrified hearts most need to hear: “Do not be afraid.”
He is not here. He has risen.
As believers, we can never overstate this: we worship a God who does not merely redeem what is broken, He resurrects what is otherwise dead. The resurrection is not resuscitation; it is re-creation. It is God’s decisive “No” to the tyranny of death and His thunderous “Yes” to eternal life. Every tomb we face of broken dreams, shattered relationships, our own failures and shame, stands under the authority of this empty grave. What is hopeless in our hands becomes glorious possibility in His.
And yet, as we enter the Easter season, the Church in her ancient wisdom invites us not to leap immediately to resurrection joy, but to walk the longer road of obedience through Lent.
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday (February 18th this year) and leads us through forty days toward our much celebrated Easter weekend. These forty days echo Jesus’ own wilderness journey: forty days of fasting, temptation, and radical dependence on the Father. It is a season that reminds us that the path to resurrection glory runs directly through the wilderness of surrender.
Lent is the Church’s gift to those of us who live in a culture obsessed with shortcuts. We want Easter without Lent, crowns without crosses, resurrection without death. But Jesus shows us another way, His way. A way that embraces limitation, confronts temptation, and chooses the Father’s will over the ostensible promises of worldly power.
In the wilderness, Jesus faced the same seductions we do: to find our identity in what we consume, to prove ourselves through spectacular displays, to grasp at power through compromise. His resistance wasn’t merely moral willpower, it was a radical reorientation of desire, a choosing of God’s kingdom over every counterfeit the world offers. The triumph of Easter didn’t begin on Calvary; it began in the desert, where Jesus aligned His human will completely with the Father’s purposes.
This is why we practice Lent. Not as empty ritual or legalistic obligation, but as spiritual training. Through fasting, prayer, and self-examination, we learn to recognise the false narratives we’ve believed, the idols we’ve served, and the times we’ve sought shortcuts instead of the Way. Lent strips away our pretences and brings us to face the reality of our human condition.
While many of us are already preparing Easter traditions, services, and set lists, our prayer is that this year you would also be stirred during this period of Lent. Stirred to reflection, to honest repentance, to readiness for the new life that Jesus brings. Not as an afterthought to Easter, but as the essential preparation for truly encountering the Risen Christ.
In his book How God Became King, Tom Wright cautions us not to reduce the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds (that have unified believers for centuries) to theological highlight reels, but to deeply explore the parts in between.
The Apostles’ Creed
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.
These statements are true, unifying and fundamental convictions. But Wright reminds us: between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate” lies the entire ministry of Jesus, His teaching, healing, confronting religious hypocrisy, welcoming outcasts, redefining power, and proclaiming a kingdom that turned the world’s values upside down.
Why is that relevant during Lent? Because it is in those “in between” years that we discover what kind of King Jesus is and what kind of kingdom He came to establish. We learn that He is a King who washes feet, who feeds multitudes, who touches lepers, who forgives prostitutes, who denounces the religious elite, and who ultimately defeats evil not through dominating power but through self-giving love; whose greatest moment of triumph was formed in the desert.
Lent invites us into this deeper exploration. Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness reveal that His obedience in facing the authorities of church and state; and the glorious redemption of Easter Sunday; began with humility, with resisting temptation, with denying the powers of this world their claim on Him. He chose weakness over strength, service over domination, trust over control. And in doing so, He revealed the true nature of divine power: love that descends and dies before it rises.
Join Us This Lent
This Lent, we invite you to join us in reading Walter Brueggemann’s “A Way Other Than Our Own”. There’s a reading for each day of the Lenten journey, and we’ll be highlighting excerpts daily to help us walk this path together, learning to trust the way of Jesus even when it contradicts our culture’s wisdom, our own instincts, our desperate desire for control.
We’ve also created a playlist of 40 worship songs to sing throughout Lent as we journey toward Easter. These aren’t necessarily the triumphalist anthems of Easter Sunday. They’re songs of longing, lament, surrender, and hope. Songs that help us sit with our need, confess our failures, and lift our eyes toward the God who makes all things new.
May this Lent be for you what it was meant to be: not a burden, but a gift. Not empty discipline, but heart-transforming preparation. Not merely giving something up, but being opened up to receive the One who gave everything.
