Dear Family at Christ Community,

   This Sunday we will have the opportunity to celebrate the most amazing of gifts: our redemption, forever accomplished by the finished work of Christ. Compared to so much of the glam and glitter that deck the halls at this time of year, the bread and the cup are remarkably simple. Like Mary, they are humble and ordinary. And yet, also like Mary, the bread and the cup are used by God in a most amazing way! They remind us of the humiliation that Christ endured in having his body broken and his blood spilled on our behalf.

   Our sermon text this week will be Luke 1:46-56, Mary’s song of praise in response to God’s plan for her life. Commonly known as the Magnificat, this song highlights the upside down nature of God’s Kingdom and it celebrates God’s steadfast love for His people. Moreover, Philip Graham Ryken reminds us that, as poetry, Mary’s song “forces us to slow down. And when we slow down, we are able to savor and celebrate the salvation we have in Christ.”

   And yet slowing down so often seems impossible during the holiday season. There are cookies to bake, trees to decorate, lights to hang, road trips to endure, gifts to buy—the list goes on! Even so, as God’s people we are reminded that this is more than the holiday season. It is the Advent Season, a time when we ponder the wondrous story of the amazing grace of our God. The Lord’s Table in particular offers us a wonderful opportunity to slow down—if even for only a few minutes—and wonder at God’s goodness to us.

   When we slow down, so often it is then that we realize how spiritually hungry we truly are. So often we miss out on the blessings of worship because we fight the tyranny of the urgent. We strive under the business of everyday life that threatens to reduce Communion to a kind of ‘holy drive-thru’—a hasty religious exercise instead of a satisfying means of grace.

   Yet what is offered to us in the Lord’s Table is so much more wonderful than the fast food of cheap grace or religious duty. The Table reminds us that in Christ we are free to examine our hearts before the Lord our God. We are free to confess our deepest needs, struggles, and worries, because we know that in Christ we will be satisfied by God’s grace alone.

   Take time this week to slow down and feel your spiritual hunger and need for Christ. Ask that God would prepare your heart for worship and that the Table would remind you of the satisfaction and joy you have in the finished work of Christ. Ask the Spirit to stir your heart so that we might sing with Mary, “He has filled the hungry with good things!” (Luke 1:53).

In Christ,
Matt