Lent is a time of preparation to more fruitfully live the new life Jesus made possible through His passion and resurrection. We do that through increased focus on God and what He would have us know about Him or do for Him.
In order to help us do that, and in keeping with our focus on bearing good fruit, we have prepared a Lenten Bible study based on Isaiah 5:1-2. That passage describes the steps God took to make his people fruitful in Old Testament times, using the metaphor of creating a garden. It reads as follows:
1 Let me sing my beloved the song of my friend for his vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hillside.2 He dug it, cleared it of stones, and planted it with red grapes. In the middle he built a tower, he hewed a press there too. He expected it to yield fine grapes...(New Jerusalem Bible).
What better way to increase our fruitfulness than concerted prayer and meditation on the steps that God—the source of all fruitfulness—takes to increase His people’s fruitfulness?
To help in that inquiry, we have prepared six sets of scripture readings on key phrases in Isaiah 5:1-2, one for each of the six weeks of lent. Each set will start with a short exposition on the principle the phrase in the Isaiah passage speaks to, and then set out six or seven other scripture passages that deal with the same principle. The idea is to make that principle the focus of the week by praying and meditating on scripture addressing the principle.
Our hope is that those mediations will make us each more fruitful in the same way that amendments make a garden’s soil more fruitful.
The scripture sets will be posted every Wednesday, starting on Ash Wednesday (Feb. 13).
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