A mentor of mine used to compare the Christian life to walking up a down escalator. What happens if you stop walking? You go down. As we prepare for the great season of Lent, now just a week away, let’s ask the Lord what we should focus on, not only so that we can grow in wisdom, but so as to better remain vigilant and keep walking.

In the meantime, however, it is the task of His disciples to get about the work of being both working models of this restoration and active agents in Jesus’ hands, animated by the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, much as we don’t think this way very often today, the proclamation of “the mystery of God” had a most definite political dimension to it. Jesus, Paul teaches and preaches in various ways, didn’t rescue us from the world but for the world.

 True greatness is to constantly acknowledge God, to thank Him and to seek to put all of our gifts at His disposal. True greatness is to ask Him how He wants us to use our gifts, so as to help transform this world He created and loves, until the day He returns and recreates it. True greatness is humility, never boasting as if something is our own. True greatness is to put first things first, always, starting with God.

Jesus’ prayer for the unity of all those who believe in Him is one that I fear many of us — myself very much included — do not usually take anywhere seriously enough. In His farewell discourses in John, the Lord’s motive for this unity is twofold: that the world will believe the Father sent Him and that the world may know that God loves them even as He does His Son (cf. John 17:11-23).