Dear Family at Christ Community,

     As we conclude our series in Malachi this Sunday, we will again partake of the Lord’s Table.  The Table is a means of God’s grace and through it He helps us to cling to Jesus. Clinging to Jesus is sometimes the best way to describe our Christian experience.  We may be going through difficulties that tempt us to question, as the Israelites of Malachi’s day questioned, whether following the Lord is worth it. Again and again, however, God invites us to cling to Him; to remember who and whose we are, and to know that He loves us.  

    In the bread and cup, Jesus vividly reminds us of His love.  His body was broken so that we would not be finally broken by our sin.  His blood was spilled so that we might have new life in Him, full of joy and peace.  At the Table we come back to this reality to nourish and grow strong in our faith. We cling to Jesus through the bread and the cup, knowing that He promises to hold fast to us.  

    As you prepare to participate in communion this Sunday, consider how it invites you to turn your attention away from yourself and to the Lord.  In his sermon, Sovereignty and Salvation, Charles Spurgeon reminds us that looking to God is one way to describe the Christian life:

“The hardest thing in the world is to turn a man’s eye off himself; as long as he lives he always has a predilection to turn his eyes inside, and look at himself; whereas God says, ‘Look unto me.’…It is not a consideration of what you are, but a consideration of what God is, and what Christ is, that can save you.  It is looking from yourself to Jesus.”

How good the Lord is to give us the bread and cup as a further means to look away from ourselves, our circumstances, and our difficulties, and to see that He loves us and has given us an inheritance of glory with His Son.  May the Spirit help us to use these means to further fix our gaze upon the Savior.

In Christ,

Robby