Dear Family at Christ Community,

     On Sunday, we will again celebrate Jesus’ covenant faithfulness to us His bride, the church, as signified and sealed in the Lord’s Table. The broken bread and full cup calls us to praise the Bridegroom’s past fidelity to our justification, His present provision for our sanctification, and the future guarantee of our resurrected glorification. Though Hosea 4 will remind us of our failings to be faithful and God’s necessary discipline, we will eat and drink at the Lord’s Table to our spiritual harlotry not having the final say! We will also celebrate the Lord tirelessly pursuing us in our un- loveliness to transform us into something of beauty to display His glory in this fallen world! Martin Luther in his “Treatise on Christian Liberty (1520)” describes these truths beautifully:

By the wedding ring of faith (Jesus) shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are his bride's. As a matter of fact, he makes them his own and acts as if they were his own and as if he himself had sinned; he suffered, died, and descended into hell that he might overcome them all. Now since it was such a one who did all this, and death and hell could not swallow him up, these were necessarily swallowed up by him in a mighty duel; for his righteousness is greater than the sins of all men, his life stronger than death, his salvation more invincible than hell. Thus the believing soul by means of the pledge of its faith is free in Christ, its bridegroom, free from all sins, secure against death and hell, and is endowed with the eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of Christ its bridegroom.

     As you take time this week to examine yourself in preparation for the Table, confess the ways in which you are ignoring and/or violating being wed to Christ in redemption. Confess with a bold expectation that the Lord has already forgiven you in the faithful finished work of Christ that has been applied to your life. Give thanks for the mercy of the completed forgiveness of Christ, and the resurrected grace that grants you the ability to walk in newness of life as His beloved. Forgive those who have been unfaithful to you. Ask the Spirit to help you lay the burden of unforgiveness at the feet of Jesus so that you may be nourished by the bread and cup to pursue freedom in reconciliation. Pray for those who are struggling under the weight of their spiritual harlotry and un-loveliness because of their sin that they would find joy and peace in their salvation as represented by the elements at the Lord’s Table.

In Christ,
Cameron