As we enter into a season of preparation in the weeks ahead of Easter, Ash Wednesday is a time to stop, reflect and place before God those sins and struggles we are burdened by. Join us for a brief evening prayer service that will include receiving ashes, a sign God’s people have participated in since the Old Testament times to express our frailty before God. As we take this time together, we will be reminded of the life He offers us in His Word.
Our prayer service will be both online and in-person, so please make plans to join us in whatever form you are able.
We will be gathering in-person and also live-streaming on February 14 at 7 pm on both YouTube and Facebook Live.
We are located at 335 Droste Road in St. Charles, MO. We look forward to meeting you!
Those little school Valentine cards get handed out to everyone under duress, cute poems that never really meant that much. We desperately want to know we’re truly loved—that our short, passing lives aren’t just another pile of insignificant cards. On Ash Wednesday, Psalm 51 invites us to bring our sin and frailty before God.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Little Hills Church. What a joy it is to be together for this Ash Wednesday service. Now, we have never had the opportunity to have an Ash Wednesday service as a church before, and I’m anxious to share this with you. I know some of you have been to an Ash Wednesday service before, and others of you have not. You might wonder, what am I getting myself into here? What is Ash Wednesday? Is it some kind of attempt to be able to do something that by doing it I am somehow making myself right by God? The answer is no.
What Ash Wednesday is, is an opportunity as we begin this season, this season in which we come and prepare our hearts for Easter, which is 46 days from now, that during that time we take time to bring before God our sin, to bring before God our struggles. As we do that, we know that He is faithful. What an amazing thing it is that our God loves us so much that even though we have no reason for Him to love us, He writes us the ultimate love letter. I know some of you read, I put up a little thing earlier today about this, but with Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday together, it seems a little incongruous, and yet it’s a beautiful, beautiful picture because here we encounter God’s love letter.
As we go through the service tonight, we’re going to take time. It’s not a normal service; we don’t have music in this service. It’s a time of meditation on God’s Word and prayer. But as we come to this service, we’re going to take those times to yes, reflect on our sins, and yes, reflect on the fact that we’re frail, that we’re passing, that our lives are short. But as we do that, what happens? We get to encounter God’s love. We get to be reminded that the God of the universe is the God who makes all things right and who loves us.
And so, as we begin, we turn to Psalm 51. David writes, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me. Against you and you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight, so that you may be justified in your words and blameless in your judgment. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. Behold, you delight in truth, in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice. Wipe your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me with a willing spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you. Deliver me from blood guiltiness, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your righteousness.”
That’s our prayer. It’s not that we’re perfect; it’s not that we can be made perfect in our own doing, in our own being, but rather that God, the God of all the universe, hears that prayer and indeed he makes us able to come before him. He does purge us of our sin, so that’s what we’re going to ask him to do tonight. And do that not so that we leave here without hope, but rather that we leave here with the hope of Easter, where we look ahead. We keep our eyes fixed on that point.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for this evening and for this time to reflect on your word. Lord, we pray as we read your word, as we reflect on it, as we spend time before you in prayer, that indeed, like David, while we come before you as those with imperfect hearts, imperfect actions, imperfect minds, we are people who fail to do what is right and often go willingly, gleefully even, into what is wrong. Lord, would you help us to be those who point people to you and to you alone? We ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
So I was thinking about Valentine’s Day and in particular about a tradition that every school kid, I think, encounters. Which is that you have to get those little Valentine’s Day cards. And so you have a class of 30 students you’re in with and so what do you do? You have to buy 30 Valentine’s Day cards and there may be some friends in there that you’re going to give the card to. There may be some people you can’t stand and you’re going to give the card to them as well. And so what do you do? You get that box of Valentine’s Day cards and they might have a few random different messages in them and you probably don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking, “Well, I want this person to have this message.” And in fact, if you customize it too much, and for example, you had cards that were less friendly to certain people than others, you’d get in trouble. You can’t do that. It’s just supposed to be everyone gets one.
Well, I remember giving them out, I remember getting them, and it struck me, does it really ever mean that much? Because in a way, it’s a very touching thing. Wouldn’t it be nice if we wanted to share our love with everyone around us, to truly be loving? That’s what we’re called to do by God. But as far as giving out these little Valentine’s Day cards and they have some cute little poem or something on them, we’re giving them to people oftentimes only under duress. There’s nothing really behind it. You know that you don’t even talk to half the people you get the card from and you would never give them a card or receive a card from them except for the fact that you don’t want to get in trouble by the teacher. And so you hand out those cards, but they don’t really mean that much.
We desperately want to know that we’re truly loved, that there’s some true hope, that it isn’t merely a bunch of rote little cards handed to us in life, that our life isn’t that. And yet, what are we confronted with? That life is short. We say that kind of almost flippantly, but then we are confronted with it. And we see the shortness of life. And as we see the shortness of life, what do we realize? Well, it’s true. We all have loved ones that have passed and we think about those loved ones and how it seems like inevitably, what do we say? “If only they’d lived longer, I just wish they were still here.” Their life, it ended too quickly and it doesn’t matter how long they lived, it still feels like it was too quick.
Well, if we turn back to Genesis 3:19, we find at the very beginning with the curse of sin that God said this: “By the sweat of your face, you shall eat bread till you return to the ground; for out of it you were taken, for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
We think about the life that each of us lives, it’s a perfect summary, because we like to think that we have significance. But sometimes doesn’t it feel like our Valentine’s card we’re handing out? It’s a picture of our life. Here we are in 2024; I’m thankful each of you is here, everyone that’s online is here, that we are here in this moment and it feels significant in this moment. The things that we’re deciding and trying and working on and having fun with and everything else, it feels significant in the moment. Depending on whom you were rooting for on Sunday night, it may have felt very significant in the moment or not, or it might have felt significant in the wrong way, but then it goes on and it goes on.
And can we even remember what happened last year or the year before? And how much more so when we think about that our lives are like the lives of thousands, millions, billions of other people that have lived and they lived for a time and they had those significant moments, the good significant moments, the bad significant moments, and then they return to the earth. From dust you came and from dust you shall return. Our lives, Valentine’s Day cards in the classroom just being handed out, but basically insignificant because everything we held is important, everything we worked hard to earn, the things that we looked forward to, whether they were material blessings, friendships, relationships, vacations, retirement, all the passes.
So what do we do? If that were the end of the story, if Genesis 3 brought the story to an end—God created this beautiful world and then it tragically had sin come into it and people died, the end—can you imagine how hopeless it would be? Without Jesus, that’s exactly what we’re basically saying. We’re saying, “I’m going to try to make good use of this time. I’m going to treasure every one of those Valentine’s Day cards,” but that card is passing. It didn’t really even mean anything because there wasn’t any significance behind it.
What do we find? Even though we should be no more significant than that card in the classroom, that God is willing to encounter us, that we are able to actually approach the God of the universe. We may be dust and we may be passing in this life. Everything that we accomplish is nothing compared to what God did in an instant, and yet we can encounter him and come before him and he listens.
Genesis 18, Abraham answered to God. They’re having a conversation about the coming destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord who, I who am but dust and ashes. Those five of the 50 righteous are lacking, will you destroy the whole city for the lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find 45 there.”
Just to set the stage a little bit, this is a fascinating, fascinating conversation that God has with Abraham. And the first part of the framing of it that’s so important is that Abraham says, “I know I’m not significant. I don’t have any reason why you, God, should want to hear from me,” but he knows that God has determined the judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah, that they are wicked cities and that he’s going to destroy them. And Abraham says, “Well, what if there are some righteous people there? Some people that do love you, Lord?” What if there are a few of them? Maybe 50? And he says, “Well, but what if there’s only 45? We missed the mark by a little bit.”
God, do you view an individual righteous life like one of those Valentine’s cards so that in your big scheme of what you’re planning to do, you’re going to do it anyway, even if there’s a righteous person or two or three or 10 or 20? I don’t think most of us, when we received that pile of different Valentine’s Day cards, had our lives altered particularly. We didn’t do something different because of them, because they were generic. They were just pouring in and you carry them for a little while, maybe put them in your backpack and they get crunched down until the end of the year. They didn’t change life. They didn’t do anything.
God, are those righteous people in Sodom and Gomorrah, are they like that? That’s what Abraham asks. And so we see two interesting things here. One, Abraham’s acknowledging, “I’m not really significant. I don’t really have any standing before you to ask this.” And secondly, what about those people there? Are they significant? God, you’re willing to talk to me in this moment, but where does it go from here?
Now Abraham was correct in his understanding. He was correct to understand that he wasn’t really important in the grand scheme of things. He should have said, “Well, God, you know, you’ve been talking to me for some time now and I know I’m really kind of an important guy. I am kind of a big deal. And so let me have a conversation with you.” Abraham says, “I don’t deserve to come before you, God. I’m thinking about those people down there and I want to ask you a question.”
And we see something really interesting here because God here demonstrates that what we’re talking about is something more than one of those little school Valentine’s Day cards. Because God has said he cares about Abraham. God has said he favors the righteous, but does he really, does it really matter? And they go through this dialogue and they keep going down and down and down on the number and God patiently responds to Abraham. And in that, God is saying, “Yes, Abraham, you may come from dust and yes, you will die. You will return to dust. But Abraham, you matter to me.” To everyone else, it might seem like you’re passing. To those of us today in 2024, it might seem like, “Well, what’s Abraham to me?” But the God of the universe spent time talking to Abraham. And he also said regarding his plan for Sodom and Gomorrah, that each and every person that was righteous in that city mattered to him.
And what do we see ultimately? God brings out Lot and his family. Why? Because they’re the only ones that are left that desire anything approximating righteousness. And if we know them, they weren’t exactly righteous. They weren’t exactly great, but God valued them and he rescued them.
Reminded me years ago, I was working at an organization and a new president came into the organization and he loved to make himself sound accessible. And so what did he do? He met with all kinds of employees, everyone that was over different functions in the organization. And you’d sit down and you’d talk with them and he wouldn’t sit behind his desk. He came over and sat on a couch in his office because he’s making you feel like you’re really important. You’re not coming into the authority. He’s going to just sit down, cross his leg, we’ll just have a nice chat. And what else does he do? Well, he’d take his business card and then he’d scratch his cell phone number on it and say, “If you ever need to talk to me, here’s my cell phone.”
Well, why did he do that? He wanted people to, when they encountered him, think, “Here is someone who cares about the people he’s interacting with.” Not only does he care about me as he’s interacting with me, he’s now giving me his cell phone number saying, “You can reach me.” A number of months passed and there were some problems and they needed to be dealt with. They were serious and so I thought, “Well, he said I could contact him,” and so I tried to take him up on it. And guess what? No matter which way you tried to contact him, whether the official ways or the scrawled out ways, you hit into a gatekeeper and you were not going to reach him. He didn’t really want a relationship with each person he did that with. He wanted them to see the theater of it, assuming that no one would actually do it. And if they did, he didn’t care because he didn’t care what an individual person thought.
I think sometimes that’s how we think that God is, that, yeah, he puts out his business card and says, “You can pray to me anytime.” But then we think, does he really listen? Does he really care? And we’re afraid the answer is no. God lets dust people come and that’s the thing that we need to understand. We may be dust people, people who come from dust and return to dust, but God lets us come before him. He actually wants to hear from us.
We’re going to spend some time in a moment in prayer, confessing our sins, praying for the needs of our world. It’s an appropriate thing to do on Ash Wednesday. And as we do that, as we try to sort of frame up where we’re headed over the next 46 days, as we do that, do we actually do it thinking, and God not only handed me his business card, he always picks up the phone. He always wants to hear from me.
As Abraham and God are continuing to talk, Abraham says, “Oh, let not the Lord be angry and I will speak again, but this once. What if ten are found there?” He answered, “For the sake of ten, I will not destroy it.” And the Lord went his way when he had finished speaking to Abraham and Abraham returned to his place.
Now if you read this whole story, here’s what you see. This is what’s remarkable about it. This goes on for a while and you’d think, you can imagine if someone kept asking you questions, “Well, let me nuance this a little bit more.” We start to get irritated. “Do you have to keep doing this? I have things to do. I have time that is valuable.” And yet the God of the universe continues to talk to Abraham and what happens when they’re finished talking? Well, the Lord goes on his way, it says. The conversation does end at some point, but it’s not where God then smites Abraham for asking too many questions. “Come on, Abraham, have a little faith. Just assume that I’m going to do whatever I want to do and you leave me alone.” God doesn’t do that. No, it ends peaceably because when we come to God, he gives us his peace. When we come to God, he honors the fact that we’re coming to him. He wants us in his presence.
Why does he listen to Abraham? Well, if we think back to Genesis 12, Abraham receives the promise that God is going to use him to bless the nations, to bless the world. And so it is that Abraham becomes that cornerstone in building out a people of God that ultimately will come to the ultimate cornerstone of Jesus. And in Jesus, the nations will indeed be blessed. God forms a relationship with Abraham and his descendants, but it doesn’t end with Abraham and his descendants. And that’s why we’re here tonight.
First Corinthians 15, Paul writes, “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust. The second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of dust. And as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.”
You see, that promise that God gave to Abraham is a promise that comes through Jesus and a promise that, as we read in the New Testament, is provided to all of us. That second man, that second man, the one who is the man of heaven, both truly God and truly man, as we have been discussing in Sunday school and as we think about that, we think about who he is. The promise is, yes, we are of dust, yes, we will die. I’ll die, you’ll die, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Because while we are of dust, we are invited to, as Abraham did, have a relationship with the Lord.
And what are we told by Paul there in First Corinthians 15? That those who do, those who encounter Jesus, it doesn’t stop with the fact that we die and go back into the dust like everyone, including Abraham. But rather, that God remakes us as he did when he rose from the grave. It doesn’t end.
I’ve shared different stories about my plants I like to try to get through the winter: tomato plants this year, I have a few, and pepper plants and some flowers, different things. It’s such a delight when one makes it through, but inevitably every year some of them die. Some of them, maybe they just aren’t meant to live any longer, or the conditions aren’t as favorable to them. I’ve tried adding grow lights, I’ve tried to water them regularly, but they still dry up and they die, and they go back to dust, so to speak.
Well, there was one plant; it was a beautiful plant last summer. It was growing just amazingly well, and about a month ago, its leaves started to shrivel up, even though I’d been trying to take good care of it inside, and it seemed to be a hopeless cause. By a week or two ago, there was nothing left on it that looked like it had life, and so there’s nothing I can do, right? Well, I wasn’t quite ready to give up, kept pouring some water on it. Yesterday, as I was watering the different plants, I looked at that plant and I noticed on the top of its little branches, itty-bitty green leaves starting to come out.
That brought an awful lot of delight to me to think, here’s this plant, I’d given up on it; it looked like it was returning to the dust, and yet there’s new life in it, it’s returning. And I don’t know if it will have a full, another growing season, or exactly where that goes from here, but I can tell you, I felt a great delight in that. But here’s another thing I realized as I saw that. It never died. I can’t bring a plant back to life from death. I was reminded of that last year; I had several plants that were doing really well last year through the winter, and then I got chicken pox about this time last year. In fact, that’s why we didn’t have an Ash Wednesday service last year, and I didn’t water the plants because I was feeling way too sick to be worried about that, and when I finally felt well enough to go down and water them, they shriveled up and died, and I could water them and water them and water them, nothing happened because they were dead.
We can’t bring life from death. And though we may want to take our little Valentine’s cards and make them significant, we can’t take those cards that have been forced into distribution, suddenly make them have significance they don’t have. What does God do as he promises a covenant with Abraham? What does he do as he sent Jesus into the world, that the Son of God, the true God-man came into the world? What does he do? He actually takes dust and he brings it back to life. The one who breathed life into dust to begin with does what I can’t do with the plants. Yes, I can try to aid them along when they’re sick, but when we realize that ultimately we aren’t just sick, but that we are destined for dust, only one can add the breath of life back.
As we find ourselves here on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day together, the fact that he is willing to do that for you and for me is the ultimate Valentine’s card, and it’s not one of those forcible cards. God wasn’t forced to give that to you or to me. When we read his word and we see what he has done for us, he didn’t have to hand this to us. Why do we have it? It’s because he loves us and wants a relationship with us.
When we open up the love letter from God, it’s signed personally, it’s written to us.
So what do we do? We still face pain and death. We still know that our mortal lives here on earth, we will return to dust. What do we do? And why do we take a moment like this to reflect on that? It’s because we need to come before our God and say, “Yes, I know that’s true of me. Yes, I have no hope on my own. Yes, I will return to dust, but God, I’ve read your letter to me. I understand that you offer something different, and I want relationship with you. I want the one who gives life to give life to me.”
And if you haven’t done that before, if you came on to our service online tonight, perhaps because you grew up going to an Ash Wednesday service, and you thought, “I don’t really know what any of this stuff is about, but I’ll watch something, it’s Ash Wednesday.” Here’s God’s challenge to you, and it’s specifically to you, it’s specifically to me. He cares about each and every one of us. He says, “Follow me, trust in me. Take all of your sin, take all of your struggles, lay them down before me. Return to me as your Lord, and I will give you life.”
For those of us that have done that, it challenges us too. Because even as we pick up that Bible, even as we pick up his word, that letter to us, and we say, “Okay, this is for me, and Jesus, yes, I want you to be my Lord,” what do we do so often? We still end up treating it like it’s some generic thing floating out there that doesn’t really apply to us. He calls us to further repentance, to further say, “God, shape me as you would have me.” So that we don’t stop, we don’t just let the Valentine’s cards get pushed down into the backpack. We say, “God, pull me, I’m rumpled, I’m the one that needs to be pulled out of the backpack. Pull me out and start to reshape me the way I’m supposed to be.”
I have these little cards here, speaking of Valentine’s cards. I’m going to give you a card, but here is the thing. Actually, Kayla, would you mind handing these out? Thank you. Here’s the thing, as you look at this, you might say, “Well, this is the opposite, Tim, of what you’re talking about. It not only isn’t personalized, it doesn’t have anything on it at all.” Well, this is actually for you to keep.
What we’re going to do tonight is I want you to grab the pen in front of you in the chair and write something down on it. Because what we’re going to do, God has numbered every hair on our heads. God has personally called each and every person that turns to him, and we’re going to write a little note to God. And it can just be a word, it can be a sentence, it can be whatever. But think of something that as you think about your life, something that you’re praying that he will release you from, something that he has rescued you from, something that you’re thankful for to him.
And as we prepare to come before him and confess our sin, let’s just take a moment to write down something we see God doing in our lives. Then we’re going to collect those. Don’t put your name on it. And we’re going to hang them up on those bare branches that are starting to emerge in our winter forest. And over the next 40 days, as we think about preparing for Easter, as you come to church, I hope what you’ll do is that you’ll look at the cards hanging there and you’ll realize that each one of these personal notes that speaks of how God is working in someone’s life reminds us how personal God’s call is, that it really is for each and every one of us.
For those of you that are online in our online church family, you can go ahead, you can put it in the chat, or if you want to private message me, you don’t want to put it out there publicly, just send me what you would like on one of these cards. I’ll fill it out and add it to the tree as well so that we can just have all of those little cards there floating, blowing in the breeze of our heating and air conditioning system, reminding us that as they flutter, that God’s spirit is working and he’s working personally, not generically, with each and every one of us.
Let’s just take a moment and write that down.
When you leave tonight, if you’re here in person, you can just go ahead—actually, maybe we’ll collect them. Kayla, when everyone’s done, would you mind just grabbing them from everybody? That way we don’t walk out without them, or walk out with them. Because we want to leave these cards here as a way to honor our God.
And take as long as you need to write it down. But as we do that, let’s not forget, yes, we are returning to dust, but while in generations to come we may be totally forgotten. No one will remember our name. No one would even think of us. God will not forget us, and he will not leave us like that. Rather, as we look to death, we know that we are called into his presence, just like the thief on the cross, whom Jesus looked at and said, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” And if you trust in Jesus tonight, even if this is the first time you’ve ever thought about doing it, if you trust in Jesus tonight, you can know that this is significant to God, that this won’t pass away. And whatever burdens us, whatever we fail with, God will make us new. He cares enough about us to do that. What a beautiful thing that is.
Let’s go ahead and pray before our God as we reflect on this.
Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for your truth. Lord, we know that we are those who came from dust and will return to dust, but Lord, we know there is more. For we are told in your word that just as the man of dust returned to dust, so too the man from heaven, the very Son of God, Jesus, that what he achieved, the life that he brings, is given to us so that we aren’t those who merely pass away into dust, but rather that you personally bring life to us. Would you help us to trust in you? As we now turn to a time of repentance, as we confess our sin, would you help us to let go of it and place it before you that we would know that it matters to you and that you are willing to help us and you won’t leave us in the dust? Amen.
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