Journey to the Cross: A 40-Day Lenten Devotional

by Paul David Tripp

Prayer is abandoning my righteousness, admitting my need for forgiveness, and resting in the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ.

For prayer to be prayer, God has to be God; without this, prayer is an act of religious futility.

the heart of prayer is worshipful submission to him, which produces gratitude, humility, vision, and willingness in us.

So prayer is spiritual warfare. To pray we need rescuing grace that will free us from the dominion of our own selfish hearts.

It’s counterintuitive to confess that what I need most is not all the things my heart tends to desire. It’s hard to confess that what I need most is redeeming grace. So prayer is a fight. Prayer takes work. Prayer calls us to go to places we don’t often go and give our hearts to do what we do too infrequently.

As a preparation for adoring prayer, study his word again and let your heart be taken up once again with his splendor. Here you let him loom large in your eyes and place the shadow of his glory over your heart. Here you pray his glory back to him in words of praise that you know fall short of capturing his glory even as you pray them. Adoration stimulates the kind of worship that is not just a sacrifice of words, but the offer of your life to this glorious Lord.

Confession follows adoration, because the more you gaze upon God, the more you will see yourself with accuracy and the more you will mourn what you see.

It takes a vision of God to have a true and reliable vision of ourselves. We are so often blinded by our own righteousness that it takes the unblemished righteousness of God to expose to us the true degree of our own unrighteousness.

True spiritual warfare-type prayers require study and meditation. What can you do in this Lenten season to give yourself more fully to these tasks?

The empty tomb stands as an eternal promise to you that God will always finish what he has begun in you and for you.

The empty tomb is a promise that God will never leave his redemptive work half done. He will complete everything that needs to be done for his chosen children to experience the full range of the blessings of his grace.

The gospel offers you something that nothing and no one else can offer: life. But in offering life, the gospel calls you to die. That death is both an event and a process.

We are called to die to our desires for our own comfort, pleasure, and glory and give ourselves to seek the glory of the King and the success of his kingdom.

This death that I have just described is a process of daily scanning our lives to see where things still live in us that should not live, then praying for the strength to die once again.

What areas of your life need to die to make room for greater, more abundant life in Christ?

Lent isn’t for the rich; it is for those who are poor.

Apart from the miracle of intervening, rescuing, forgiving, and transforming grace, there simply are no spiritually rich people out there, none. But self-righteousness is a self-supporting deceit. Every moment of self-assessment just deepens the blindness.

So we all need bankruptcy. This is the first step of God’s work of grace in our lives. In an act of divine mercy, God opens the well-guarded vault of our righteousness to show us that, contrary to what we thought, it is absolutely empty. We then must face the shocking realization of our complete poverty, that rather than being righteous, we are, in fact, unrighteous in every way, and this drives us to cry out for forgiveness and help. In this way the magnificent blessings of the kingdom of God are open and available only to the poor. It is admitting that you have nothing that causes you to reach out for the amazing “something” that is offered to you in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In some way the quest of every fallen human being is to find the easy way out.

The horrible suffering and death of the perfect Messiah, Jesus, on a criminal’s cross, outside of the city on a hill of death, tells us in no uncertain terms that when it comes to humanity’s deepest and inescapable problem, there is no easy way out.

Your emotional life is a window into what is truly important to you and what you are really living for.

But change began to take place when I began to understand that he was not my problem; I was. It was a bit mortifying to confess that I had put this man in a position in my life that only God should be in.

My heart had wandered away from trusting in God and the rest of heart that is found in hooking your identity and security to him.

When the Bible commands you to rejoice, it is calling you to surrender the control of your heart to the one who always gives you reason to rejoice, no matter what is going on in your life.

Often we make the mistake of thinking we have a heart for the Lord, when really we’re just thankful for him because at that moment he seems to be delivering to us what we have truly set our hearts on.

Every piece of Christ’s suffering was suffered for you, and every victory accomplished by that suffering was accomplished so that you can now live in victory too.

Hebrews 7:23–28: The former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office, but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever. Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was indeed fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, unstained, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. He has no need, like those high priests, to offer sacrifices daily, first for his own sins and then for those of the people, since he did this once for all when he offered up himself. For the law appoints men in their weakness as high priests, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever.

In the vast expanse of time, the huge company of people, and the multitude of locations that were the setting for his plan of grace, he was never surprised, never unprepared, and always in control. Christ’s march to the cross reinforces for us that our rest and hope are not in our knowing, but in his ruling.

The God who knows no surprises will surprise us again. But it is okay, because what we don’t know, he knows; what we can’t control, he controls, and because he does, we can live with mystery and surprise and not be afraid.

transgression concerns something deep inside us that makes us susceptible to temptation’s draw and that weakens us in our battle with sin. A transgression is a willful stepping over of God’s boundaries.

Transgression is a spirit of rebellion. It’s putting yourself in God’s place and writing your own rules. It’s wanting your own way more than submitting to God’s way.

Iniquity is moral uncleanness.

confession doesn’t just admit to a moment of wrongdoing and a spirit of rebellion, but it also acknowledges the moral impurity of heart that is the seedbed of that rebellion.

The word sin connotes falling short of God’s wise and righteous standard.

Confession of a specific sin against God and others is an admission of weakness. It is an admission that, when left on our own, even in our best moments we would still fall short of God’s holy requirements of us.

Confession of sin is an admission that this instance of weakness and failure stands as a testament of your ongoing need for God’s grace.

Confession is God’s welcome to enter into a deeper experience of the majesty of his grace.

It is good to silence complaint in your life by sitting down and taking the time to count your blessings.

it is more natural for sinners to complain than to give thanks. If you listen to yourself, you’ll find that this is true. Our tendency to complain is one of the results of the selfishness of sin. Complaint reminds us that we keep sticking ourselves in the center of our worlds and making life all about us.

Lent teaches us that sadness is the only road to deep abiding joy. It confronts us with the reality that hopelessness is the only doorway to sturdy, unshakable hope.

The cross welcomes us to look inside and around us and be dissatisfied. It welcomes us not to the dissatisfaction that leaves us hopeless, but a dissatisfaction that leads us to the foot of the cross where mercy and grace are found.

Jesus was born with a cross in his future, so that there would be such a thing as forgiveness for sin.

What if you knew that you would not just do dirty and uncomfortable work for a season or have a hard labor job for your whole life, but that the ultimate purpose for your existence was to die a cruel and unjust death?

What was in Jesus’s job description as Savior? to be despised and rejected to have a life of sorrow and grief to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows to be stricken, smitten, and afflicted by God to be pierced for our transgressions to be crushed for our iniquities to take our chastisement to be wounded for our spiritual healing to carry our iniquity to be oppressed without defending himself to endure oppression and judgment to be cut off to have a grave with the wicked to experience anguish of soul to pour out his soul to death to be numbered with transgressors

As long as sin still lives inside me, I will still have moments when I want to be great, and when I do, I demonstrate how much I need the grace of this glorious and powerful one, who did not save himself but willingly died to save people like me from myself.

Most of us would be satisfied with temporal human happiness. We’d be satisfied with a good job, a nice house, a reliable car, a good church, a good marriage, successful children, and health and pleasure in our later years. But all of these dreams are not only self-oriented, but they are so dramatically brief when compared to the expansiveness of God’s story. So rather than deliver our small and self-oriented dreams, God did something better: he sent his Son to earth.