Entering Holy Week

We look forward to our inaugural Breakthrough Retreat this weekend. It is significant that we are “retreating” together during the Holy Weekend. In the tradition of the ancient church, this weekend has always been set apart to worship and keep vigil. I pray that this will become a meaningful and enduring discipline in our MPCC calendar.

The Holy Week devotions—available in written, online, and audio formats on Praydos—are designed to help us enter into the significance of these final moments of Jesus’ earthly life. Even if you’re unable to join the retreat, I invite you to journey alongside us spiritually.

Discipleship is following Jesus. Disciple-making is helping someone else do the same. May this weekend be a significant step in deepening our intention in both.

In the coming Services, we will have special opportunities to invite friends to encounter Christ among us. The Easter Combined Celebration will be a grand opportunity for this. On April 27, which is also AGM Sunday, Tony and Ashley will return to continue sharing their remarkable testimony of God’s healing and provision.

Then in May, we will begin a new sermon series focused on family relationships, spiritual friendship, and church community. The theme is: “The Gift of the Other”.

From the moment we emerge from our mother’s womb, the very first thing we see is the face of the other. While the world often teaches that the most fundamental truth is “I am,” others contend—and I believe rightly so—that the more profound truth is “I love.” Christianity leans deeply into this relational reality. Even in solitude, we are never truly alone—for God is always with us.

Much of life is about growing into our place within our families, our wider community, and in relationship with God. Yes, relationships can wound us. And some wounds run so deep, they feel impossible to heal. I do not minimize that pain. But I believe that through forgiveness—both given and received—we can grow into more whole, more mature people, shaped by the Spirit of Christ.

Pain, when offered to God, can deepen our spiritual and character formation, opening up new pathways we would not have otherwise discovered.

Throughout Holy Week, Jesus shows us another way of living. Find time to be how our Lord emptied Himself in self-giving love. What we need is not just a moral shift or a change in mindset. We need the Holy Spirit to fill us deeply, to heal what is wounded, and to make us spiritually alive again.

Let us walk this week with Him. And let Him walk us into the power of the resurrected life.