Praying with a Painting: Good Friday

Many Christians view today as the most wonderful and most awful day—the day we remember the Man who was God who died on the cross that we might live free.

I invite you to spend a few moments pondering and praying, sharing with God your feelings about how his Son came to earth as a baby, lived and healed and loved, and then carried his cross and there was nailed where he breathed his last. Where he welcomed one next to him to life eternal. Where he uttered his last words in a life-giving prayer.

² He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
    and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
    nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
³ He was despised and rejected by mankind,
    a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
    he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

⁴ Surely he took up our pain
    and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
    stricken by him, and afflicted.
⁵ But he was pierced for our transgressions,
    he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
    and by his wounds we are healed.
Isaiah 53:2–5 (NIV)