Dear Family at Christ Community,

     
     This coming Sunday we will hear of God’s free grace in salvation and the terrible cost of demanding to earn it instead from Romans 9:27-33. As part of our worship, the Lord’s Table will help make visible God’s free offer of salvation in Christ alone by faith alone through His grace alone. The broken bread will once again declare our sinful debt and God’s just wrath paid in full through Christ’s sacrifice alone. The bountiful cup will offer us afresh another taste of life more abundant in Christ’s resurrection and the pouring out of the Spirit. What wondrous love is this that God would demand nothing of us to save us, that He would call us to receive eternal life through the giving up of all our efforts and supposed righteousness?! Consider how John R.W. Stott describes this overwhelming reality in The Message of Romans: God’s Good News for the World:

…if we could gain a righteous standing before God by our own obedience to his law, the cross would be superfluous. If we could save ourselves, why should Christ have bothered to die? His death would have been redundant. The fact that Christ died for our sins is proof positive that we cannot save ourselves. But to make this humiliating confession is an intolerable offense to our pride. So instead of humbling ourselves, we ‘stumble over the stumbling-stone.’

     Join us in giving thanks for God’s gift of salvation in Christ alone by faith alone through His grace alone. Please pray that this would also serve to humble us to each mortify further the ways in which we seek to earn God’s love or distinguish ourselves as more beloved than others. Ask the Spirit to bring those to worship who desperately need to hear of God’s free grace and bear eternal fruit in union with Christ. Come prepared to celebrate who and Whose we are in Christ!

In Christ,
Cameron