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Seasons. An Advent and Lent Podcast By Willow Park Church

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by Willow Park Church

83 episodes

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Podcast Overview

Join us for seasonal devotionals and stories from our church family at special times of the year, including Lent, Advent and 21 Days of Prayer in January.

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3/2/2022

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Recent Episodes

April 9, 2023

Easter Sunday. The 8th Day.

The Great Gardener. John 20:11-18 And so on Easter Sunday, our Holy Week Journey with Jesus has come to an end. Today, we begin with the first day of the new creation! The day that Jesus rose from the grave! Our journey ended yesterday with Jesus laid to rest in a new tomb within the walled garden of Joseph of Arimathea near Golgotha. History and archeology suggest to us that in the time of Jesus, Golgotha was an abandoned quarry used as a garbage dump. So we could say it this way: Jesus, the stone rejected by the builders, was crucified in a quarry-turned-garbage dump, but he was buried as a seed within a verdant garden. When Jesus is first seen alive in that garden on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene mistakes him for the gardener. But, in fact, it’s no mistake at all. Jesus is the gardener who turns garbage dumps into gardens! Jesus is not a conductor punching tickets for a train ride to heaven. Christian hope is not about getting from earth to heaven; it’s about getting heaven to earth. Jesus is not a lawyer to get us out of a legal jam with an angry judge. God is not mad at sinners. Jesus told Mary to tell his disciples that his Father was their Father too! Jesus is not a banker making loans from his surplus righteousness. Jesus is a gardener! A gardener cultivating resurrection life in all who will come to him. The conductor, lawyer, banker metaphors are mostly false, giving a distorted view of salvation. The gardener metaphor is beautiful as it faithfully depicts the process of salvation in our lives. A gardener’s work is earthy and intimate. Gardeners have their hands in the humus. (We are humans from the humus.) Conductors, lawyers and bankers are concerned with abstract and impersonal things like tickets, laws, and money. But gardeners handle living things with living hands. Jesus is not afraid to get his hands dirty in the humus of humanity. I promise you that your life is not so shattered that Jesus can’t nurture you into something beautiful. The empty tomb is the open door that leads us away from the ugly world and back into the Garden as God intened. Not many have captured the idea of Easter as the inauguration of a new world with Christ as the gardener better than G.K. Chesterton “On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of a gardener God walked again in the garden, not in the cool of the evening, but in the dawn.” –G.K. Chesterton Music by, Allswell, Simon Wester.

April 8, 2023

Silent Saturday

Holy Saturday And so on Holy Saturday, our Holy week comes to an end. Our journey ends with Jesus laid to rest in a new tomb within the walled garden of Joseph of Arimathea near Golgotha. As we begin today, I want to reflect on the work of Paul Zach as he writes about Holy Saturday. After the cross has been carried After the weight is laid down After the body is buried Down where the darkness surrounds After the end of the violence After the sky has gone dark Now there is nothing but silence Broken by the beat of our hearts He's gone After the last words are spoken We lay him down in the grave After our hearts have been broken Have all our hopes been betrayed? He's gone Here at the tomb with our spices Love from our hearts is not gone Watch 'til the breaking sun rises What will we see in the dawn? Paul Zach As we listen to Luke Parker, sing Sweet Surrender, let us take a moment to appreciate the freedom that comes on the death and resurrection of our Lord. The full presence that we have from the sweet surrender that Jesus gave on the cross. Todays reading comes from John 19:31-42 31 Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. 32 The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. 33 But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. 35 The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36 These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,”[<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2019&version=NIV#fen-NIV-26862c">c</a>] 37 and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.”[<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2019&version=NIV#fen-NIV-26863d">d</a>] The Burial of Jesus 38 Later, Joseph of Arimathea asked Pilate for the body of Jesus. Now Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. With Pilate’s permission, he came and took the body away. 39 He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.[<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2019&version=NIV#fen-NIV-26865e">e</a>] 40 Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs. 41 At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. 42 Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. Holy Saturday is a time of both absence and presence. Still your body and mind as you invite Jesus to be with you in this midway place. Asking for the courage to stay in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’. how have you been able to sense God’s presence during this challenging week? What thoughts, desires or feelings have arisen within you as you prayed with this week’s Scripture passages? Many Christians bypass Holy Saturday, leaping from the sorrow of Jesus’ death to the triumphant celebration of his resurrection. The church's ancient creeds invite us not to do that, but to stay with a sense of his absence, as his disciples felt it. Why do you think that is? How does the story of Jesus’ suffering and death leave you feeling? Lord Jesus, on this holy day of quiet rest, we await your resurrection, but we don’t want to rush by; we want to wait beside you in that sweet surrender. Music by Luke Parker, Salt of The Sound, Dear Gravity, Simon Wester.

April 7, 2023

Good Friday

Today is good Friday. As we gather together today we stop to remember the darkest of days on the Christian calendar. As we enter this moment and listen to Salt of the sound Sing nearer Jesus Keep me near the cross, let us place ourselves at the foot of the cross, close to our saviour and near his sacrificial love even in this darkest of moments. On Good Friday, we think about one thing: the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. This is the epicentre of the Christian faith. At the core of Christianity, we don’t find perennial religion, meditation techniques, or a course in ethics, but a crucifixion. The gospel is not motivational talks about happy marriages, being debt free, and achieving your destiny. That all belongs to the broader world of proverbial wisdom, and it’s fine as far as it goes, but it has little or nothing to do with the gospel. The gospel is about the cross, and the cross is a scandal. When the Apostle Paul told the Corinthians that he had determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him crucified, he admitted that the cross was often viewed as a scandal and folly. So be it. Any attempt to make Christianity less offensive and more palatable by de-emphasizing the cross is a betrayal of Jesus Christ himself. So today, above all days, we look unflinchingly at Christ crucified. To enter deep into the mystery of the cross is to encounter the greatest revelation of who God is. as we listen to the traditional reading of the crucifixion of Christ from John 19:16-30 let us ask the spirit to show us what we need to see. The Cross is the death by which Christ conquers Death. It’s the abolition of war and violence. It’s the supreme demonstration of the love of God. It’s the re-founding of the world around an axis of love. It’s the enduring model of co-suffering love we are to follow. It’s the eternal moment in which the sin of the world is forgiven. The cross is where Jesus reveals God as saviour. The cross is what God in Christ endures as he forgives. The cross is where the sin of the world coalesced into a hideous singularity so that it might be forgiven en masse. The cross is where the world violently sinned its sins in the body of the Son of God, and where he absorbed it all, praying, “Father, forgive them.” The cross is both ugly and beautiful. It’s as ugly as human sin and as beautiful as divine love—but in the end, love and beauty win. Lord Jesus, as we look at you on the cross, with your arms outstretched in an offered embrace, we pray, forgive us, Lord, for we know not what we do. Amen. Music by Salt of The Sound, Simon Wester, Dear Gravity and Luke Parker.

83 total episodes available

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What is Seasons. An Advent and Lent Podcast By Willow Park Church?: Join us for seasonal devotionals and stories from our church family at special times of the year, including Lent, Advent and 21 Days of Prayer in January.
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates daily.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 4 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: No, this podcast does not typically feature guests.

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