Opening Prayer
Lord, your Holy Incarnation is more than we can comprehend. In the Incarnation you have done more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to you, oh, Christ our God. We sing your praises and ask that you would strengthen us during this fast and use it to knit our hearts unto holy obedience and reverence for you. Fill us with a spirit of joy, love, and repentance as we think on your Holy Incarnation!
TEXT
Exodus 29:42-46 NIV
“For the generations to come this burnt offering is to be made regularly at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting before the LORD. There I will meet you and speak to you; there also I will meet with the Israelites, and the place will be consecrated by my glory.
“So I will consecrate the Tent of Meeting and the altar and will consecrate Aaron and his sons to serve me as priests. Then I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. They will know that I am the LORD their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the LORD their God.”
John 1:14-18 NASB
And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. John testified about Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’” For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained Him.
Read
He was a man, but God. David’s offspring, but Adam’s Maker. A bearer of flesh, but, even so, beyond all body. From a mother, but she a virgin. Comprehensible, but immeasurable…He got baptized, but he washed sins clean, but he was proclaimed by the Spirit, in a voice of thunder, to be the Son of the One Uncaused. As a man he took rest, and as God he put to rest the sea. His knees were wearied, but he bolstered the strength and knees of the lame…He was the sacrifice, but the high priest: making an offering, but himself God. He dedicated his blood to God, and cleansed the entire world. And a cross carried him up, while the bolts nailed fast sin…He had company with the dead, but he rose from the dead, and the dead, the bygone, he raised up: there a mortal’s poverty, here the incorporeal’s wealth. Don’t you dishonor, then, his divinity on account of his human things, but for the divine’s sake, hold in renown the earthy form into which, thoughtful towards you, he formed himself, the incorruptible Son.
— St. Gregory of Nazianzus, “On God and Man”
Prayer of Response
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy!