Dear Family at Christ Community,

     This coming Sunday we have the opportunity to be strengthened in our faith in Christ by the means of grace offered in worship. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesian saints in Ephesians 3:14-21 will serve as the golden thread for our service. Just as he prayed for them to be strengthened by the Holy Spirit in their understanding and practice of the love of Christ, he prayed this for us also as part of all of the saints throughout history. The elements from the Lord’s Table prove to be a means of grace to this end in the power of the Holy Spirit. The broken bread points our hearts and minds to Christ’s costly and loving sacrifice on the cross on our behalf so that we may stand before God in grace. The abundant cup bears witness the New Covenant reality in Christ’s blood that empowers us to love God and our neighbor to His glory in a fallen world. Sinclair B. Ferguson captures our need for the work of Holy Spirit in the means of grace to strengthen us in our inner being to comprehend the love of Christ when he writes in Let’s Study Ephesians: 

But why would we need to be strengthened? Because our hearts are too weak and narrow to contain the treasure that God places in them: that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. His presence, as the Lord of all, is too weighty, too intensely holy and too grand for any of us to bear. If we are amazed that the manger in the stable could have held the Lord of all creation, it should be even more amazing to us that Christ himself comes to dwell in us. Yet it does. 

     Pray for the Holy Spirit to strengthen you in your inner being to be able to comprehend the love of Christ through the means of grace in worship. Ask the Spirit to help you cultivate being rooted and grounded in Christ’s love through prayer, God’s word in its various offerings in devotion and worship, and opportunities to love your neighbors. Ask the Spirit to reveal where forgiveness needs to be pursued or renewed with others because of an offense given or an offense taken. Give thanks for God’s power to do far more abundantly that all that we ask or think!

In Christ,
Cameron