Sharing Love, Seeking Justice: Ash Wednesday Devotional
March 3, 2025
Welcome to our 2025 series of weekly Lenten devotionals, a gift from New Brunswick Theological seminary. At the beginning of each week, the Theological Writing Center will post a devotion or a story of a local congregational ministry, along with a prayer and a few psalms on which to meditate during the week. During Holy Week, there will be eight days of devotions from NBTS faculty members.
Ash Wednesday
Joel 2:12-14; Psalm 51:10
Heart Work
Today is Ash Wednesday, marking the beginning of the journey in the season of Lent on our way to the culminating salvific work of the promised Messiah. It is a day of prayer and fasting to ready ourselves for this sacred time.
It is also a time of decisions. Will this season be like all the others? Will our focus remain on rituals and traditions, or will we do the heart work suggested in the texts?
The Old Testament prophet Joel suggests that this can be a time that goes beyond rending our clothing, the outward expression of grief and repentance. Instead, it can be a time for the inward rending of our hearts, the tearing away of anything that is negative, cold, unloving and unkind to make space for God. It can be a time of fasting from old habits, destructive behaviors and deceitful ways, replaced, as the Psalmist suggests, with prayer that our hearts may be pure, renewed, and void of anything that is not like God.
It is heart work that will make this season of Lent significant. It is the genuine heart work that moves God to relent and bless us. May this season be transformative.
Prayer:
Gracious, loving and kind God,
travel with us in this season,
be present with us, and pour out your blessings upon us.
We desire to be more like you.
As ceremonial ashes are affixed to our foreheads,
may they remind us to do our heart work.
Amen.
Faye Taylor
Assistant Professor of Spiritual Formation & Field Education
Reflection for the rest of the week: Psalm 51
Prayer:
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.
from Psalm 51:10-12