August 20, 2007
By His Blood...
My adult Sunday school teacher is one of our older preachers. He recently told the class that 45 or 50 years ago Standard Publishing produced a hymnal in which they had removed all the ‘blood’ songs. “The brotherhood raised questions. Churches either didn’t purchase the books or returned the ones they had purchased. The company was close to bankruptcy - and I’m glad they almost lost it all. Without the blood there is no forgiveness. ” Maybe it’s time we started asking today’s worship leaders, ‘Where’s the blood?
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Gail;
-----Maybe there are more important things to celebrate than blood. Maybe there are things more comfortable to relate to than blood. Maybe the good people of the world are tired of all the blood. Maybe the blood of Christ was just a cultural invention of our generation, stuffiness of the past.
-----I did not realize the diversity of emphasis among churches until I started reading a book titled, Christianity for the Rest of Us, by Diane Butler-Bass. She traveled the country and surveyed many of the non-evangelical churches of America. Each church she writes about has a focus on some different element of the spiritual life. There was peace, communion, healing, hospitality, justice -- each stocked full of philosophical underpinnings. She tells the story of someone from each church, and how that church’s aspect of spiritual life was just what that person was needing.
-----The wonder of the new life keeps slipping back to its benefit offered for the old life. There are the needs for the family, the societal need for tolerance, the political need for whatever defines justice at the moment, bread for the hungry, and blessings stated towards the homeless. All of these are well and good. Jesus not only performed random acts of kindness, He instructed us to do the same. But in the humility He taught, in the confession of the tax collector standing at a distance crying out, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” there was a call to reflection upon the door through which we entered into these elements of the new life.
-----If we forget that door, we forget that we did not bring ourselves into fellowship with God or the desires that please Him. If we forget, it is only natural that we begin to look at the production of the peace, the communion, the healing, the hospitality, the justice as the product of our noble efforts. We may well enough know it isn’t, but we will feel and see like it is. Just because we have passed through the door does not mean the doorway is no longer important. The acknowledgment of our inadequacy is as important inside the room as it was on the doorstep. The setting aside of our own yardsticks to take up His was not an event that merely brought us through the door. And remaining true to the measures of His Word must continue to happen within the room. Two things were determined before the foundation of this Earth. The good works in which His purchased were to walk, and the blood of the Lamb being the price for them.
-----If it were not for the blood on the lintel of that door, there would be no reality in the room. Our reverence for and celebration of the blood Christ spilt, although constructive to godly attitudes, serves as the light beside the door. If we can not hold His blood in high regard, how can those who need to realize and accept the truth about His death and resurrection ever take such things seriously? How can we promote what we hide? The new life is not our coming to new behaviors and attitudes. It is our coming to a new Lord, proven by His sacrifice, Who, then, can make in us a new life sustaining new behaviors and attitudes. Seeing the activity in the room, it may all look similar enough, but when the hearts there are measured by the Word, it becomes apparent whether the light is off or on.
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