March 12, 2010
No Forgiveness
During last week’s communion I took the emblems and then passed the tray on down the row. It came to an older gentleman, one who is having a few memory issues. He took the bread and ate it, then he took the cup and drank it saying, “There’s nothing in there…it’s empty.” Obviously, he mistakenly picked up a cup that had already been consumed by someone else. His wife then helped him get an untouched cup from the tray. I thought about the emblems; the bread represent’s the Lord’s body and the juice His shed blood. Imagine what it would mean for us today if the Lord’s cup truly was empty. “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” (Heb 9:22 ESV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----When this world fell into the effects of sin, even the degradation of the most basic principle of life wound up hinting at the Gospel. The body needs nourishment. Without God and His righteousness directly operating in this need, everything alive must thrive upon the death of something else, plant or animal. Something must die for something else to live. We see it in the animal world. We see it on our dinner tables. What dies was attacked and killed by what must live, just as Christ was. But it is only a hint, for the gazelle does not give itself willingly to the leopard as Christ gave Himself to us.
-----Although the beef in our burgers bemoan this degraded principle of survival, the blood in our communion cup proclaims the new life of our spirits. The spirit needs not to attack and consume to survive. It’s survival needs the same nature that brought the blood into the cup: humility and sacrifice. The new life thrives upon the laying down of the old self. It dies at the beating down of others. For the laying down of the old self occurs at the point of contact with another. When that contact is a searching for the other’s needs and interests, the spirit is nourished and the old self impoverished. The flow of this world’s natural order is then reversed. Instead of attack and kill, there is humbled concern and sacrificial giving.
-----How naturally do you see this well up from the spirits of God’s children? The mosaic we see of church history is one abundantly sprinkled with strife, terror, and war. God’s Holy Word has been for twenty centuries fashioned into theological weapons to castigate and cast out one another. Many precious children in your church have experienced the pain of such weapons. Everyone has seen it somewhere. The human spirit does not itself generate the nourishing force of humility and sacrifice. Even while commingled with God’s Holy Spirit, the human spirit continues struggling to replicate the degraded nature of physical survival, straining to have its neighbor’s spirit as a well dressed burger. But God’s Spirit continues in the nourishing humility and sacrifice of Christ to concern Himself with applying forgiveness from the cup and feeding encouragement from the truth to our spirits. Anything good coming from our spirits is merely a replication of that. It is what we should replicate, forgiveness and feeding.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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