It Is Finished

This is our hope:

For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day. – John 6:40

As an evangelical, the thing I miss most about my liturgical church is the liturgical calendar. Holy days don’t sneak up on you. When Christmas comes around, you’ve got 4 weeks of preparation under your belt. You are spiritually prepared to celebrate our Savior’s birth.

It’s the same with Easter. In the liturgical church, it’s not a “Don’t blink or you’ll miss it” affair. You’ve got 40 days to reflect on Christ’s sacrifice. If you’re looking for something to prepare your heart for the celebration of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection:

It Is Finished: A 40-Day Pilgrimage Back to the Cross by Charles Martin is a glorious book.

He begins with our need for redemption and inability to save ourselves and brings us to the cross. This is an achingly beautiful devotional written to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Jesus’s redemptive work on the cross.

From the author’s website:

Across forty days of vivid storytelling, It Is Finished offers a unique and vital roadmap to trace the power and necessity of the cross throughout the Bible, from Genesis all the way to your present-day reality.

With every devotion, designed to be the length of about a cup of coffee, Charles Martin weaves vivid word pictures, drawing us close to the heart of God. The lens he uses engages all our senses and all our emotions, evoking in me the only logical response – worship. From Day 2:

God takes as deep a breath as He can, filling His lungs, then presses His lips to our lips and breathes out, filling us with the breath of God. . .our first breath began in His lungs.

If you like the author’s “no holds barred” approach to painful passages, you will love this book. He doesn’t shy away from graphic descriptions of what the Lord endured for our sakes. He describes Jesus’s back after His flogging as shredded. Hamburger. An uncomfortable truth that brings me to my knees.

This book isn’t just a devotional on the work of the cross; it’s a manual on how to pray meaningfully and intimately. Each devotion is filled with Scripture and offers a beautiful, vibrant prayer. My prayers can feel anemic and humdrum – these are powerful. And every prayer is followed by a response grounded again in Scripture.

“I pray throughout this journey that you and I come face-to-face with both the weight of our need and the depth of the problem. I pray that we are undone by the truth of us. And I pray that we simultaneously experience the limitless joy of what Christ accomplished for us.” – p.  XXIII, It is Finished

Charles Martin, mission accomplished.