Dear Family at Christ Community,

     As we hear and experience God’s grace from Romans 11:1-6 on Sunday, we will be invited to the Lord’s Table to be further transformed by His grace. The Holy Spirit will lovingly remind us in the broken bread of Jesus’ body given for us to unburden us from our shameful failures to love and our guilty attempts to earn His love. In the lavish cup, the Holy Spirit will abundantly nourish our faith in Jesus’ redeeming sacrifice to restore us to God, the Father, Son, and Spirit. It is from this unburdening and nourishing in Christ that we can go forward into the world to love our neighbors as we have been so gloriously loved as displays of God’s amazing grace! Timothy Keller in commenting on Romans 11:5-6 in Romans 8-16 for You rightly places the emphasis of those verses on God’s grace and not on our behavior:

Paul means this: what guarantees that there will always be a faithful remnant is not that there will always be a set of good, decent people who will believe, but rather that there is always the grace of God. It is God who preserves a remnant. Those who believe do so entirely because of his grace.

     God’s grace invites us to come to worship expectantly because of the perfect person and faithful work of Christ on our behalf! This means that we can also come honestly given our various struggles and failings because of the preserving grace of God through the ongoing ministry of Jesus as our High Priest. Please pray that we would taste of God’s grace and joyfully celebrate His goodness in worship this coming Sunday. 

In Christ,
Cameron