Now, just as we express our love for Our Lord as God by our worship and as Man by our self-denial; so we express our love for him as our Saviour by our penitence.

Lent, culminating as it does in Passiontide and Good Friday, placards up, in front of our very eyes, the full cost which Jesus paid to gain our salvation – that ghastly Crucifixion.

And each single one of us can truly say, “He did all that for me.  He did all that to lift me out of my sins in this life, and to save me from their eternal consequences in the next.  And were it not for my Crucified Saviour, those consequences would be the outer darkness where I should be a lost and wandering soul, separated for ever from the dazzling glory of the all-holy God by the evil things which I have thought and said and done”.