Dear Family at Christ Community,

     We will start our new sermon series The Burden of Malachi: God’s Unchanging Love for His Unstable People. As part of our worship, we will celebrate God’s love for us in the death and resurrection of Christ as displayed in the Lord’s Table. Malachi’s burden is to share with God’s people His unchanging love for them. Ultimately, it is God’s burden given that He places it upon Malachi who He has chosen to deliver His message. Jesus bore this burden of God’s love for His people on the cross and in His death so that God’s people would be restored to Him as Father. It will be critical for us to keep this truth ever before us throughout this series as God confronts our all too frequent unloving response to His suffering love. George Hunsinger beautifully articulates God’s burden for His people in Disruptive Grace when he writes,

Christ’s blood is a metaphor that stands primarily for the suffering love of God. It suggests that there is no sorrow God has not known, no grief he has not borne, no price he was unwilling to pay, in order to reconcile the world to himself in Christ…it is a love that has endured the bitterest realities of suffering and death in order that its purposes might prevail…the motif of Christ’s blood signifies primarily the depth of the divine commitment to rescue, protect, and sustain those who would otherwise be lost.

     In preparing for the Lord’s Table, take time to recount the ways in which God has displayed His love to you. Give thanks that this has been an unchanging reality from His standpoint. Repent of the ways in which your love for Him has wavered as reflected in your life. Ask for the Holy Spirit to nourish your faith and cultivate your heart to love God and love your neighbor in tangible ways that reflect His having loved you first. Forgive those who have failed to love you well where there is a need for forgiveness. Come to the table on Sunday with the joy of the beloved in Christ!

In Christ,
Cameron