Will you take the path that Christ has already opened for you? Will you begin by admitting that you do sin? You have made mistakes as Adam and Eve made mistakes. Will you ask Christ to help you resist temptation because he beat temptation in the wilderness? And then will you follow the path that he laid for you? Yes, a difficult path, but one which leads to the joy of complete freedom.

Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters explains that Lent is not about misery, but rather freedom. Because although we know these temptations and although we fall to them time and again, in fact, they have already been beaten in Jesus. And Lent is our opportunity to realise the victory, to realise the freedom that is already ours in him.

The practices of Lent aren't rules for their own sake. They are a path into the joyous freedom that Jesus won in the wilderness, into relationship with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Do you often hear preaching about loosing the bonds of injustice, undoing the thongs of the yoke, letting the oppressed go free or breaking every yoke?

In this episode Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters invites us to ponder on the question for us today is, will our fasting, our prayers, our rituals do anything to us? Will they shape us into people who have stones in their hands, ready to judge? Or will they strip us of our self-righteousness and make us people of grace? Because let me be clear, if you're fasting, and the ashes that you're about to receive don't change your heart, if you're not willing to change, then you might as well leave. This has nothing for you.

To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke.

Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Where to you, when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets. The Beatitudes, the list in which Jesus declares that those who are poor, hungry, weeping and hated for his sake makes for challenging reading.

Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters encourages us to trust that the one who is God will bring about the future he said he would, no matter how impossible that future seems, because God is God and you are not. If you don't trust that Jesus was who he said he was, then the question is, "How surely?" because the Beatitudes place across roads in front of each one of us. They say, there is a hard road and it will lead to God. And there's an easy route and it will lead nowhere. One way or another you've got to decide.