Dear Family at Christ Community,

     Too many of us live harried, overcommitted lives. As a result, both our spiritual and physical lives suffer. We prioritize too little time for the health of both and exhaust both trying to keep up. Some imaginary or real Pharoah screams for us to accomplish more from a depleting store.

     Fortunately for us as God’s children, we have a compassionate Shepherd who cares for both our spiritual and physical lives. He hospitably invites us to Himself to be unburdened and find rest for our weary souls (cf. Matthew 11:28-20). In Mark 6:30-44, Jesus welcomes the disciples to rest from their labors and enjoy time with Him in the wilderness. Even though a crowd demands an audience with the disciples who have displayed wonder-working power in Jesus’s name, Jesus Himself serves them as a compassionate Shepherd. He nourishes both their spiritual life with God’s Word and their physical bodies with a miraculous meal. In the Kingdom of God, both spirit and soul matter! In the Kingdom of God, spiritual and physical food are abundantly available! As William L. Lane writes in The Gospel According to Mark:

“The multitudes who pursue Jesus and the disciples are representative of Israel once more in the wilderness. There they experience the compassion of the Messiah, who teaches them “at length” concerning the Kingdom of God. In the carefully constructed twofold introduction to the feeding narrative it is the wilderness motif which exhibits the deeper significance that Mark found in the events he records. The time of rest in the wilderness has come when the Son of God establishes meal-fellowship with his people.”

     Please join us in pursuing Jesus this Sunday in worship. Jesus invites us to feast on God’s Word. He also invites us to come to His table to remind us of His compassion for us in dying so that we might have eternal life and to nourish us in the resurrected newness of life that we currently walk in. These powerful truths signified and sealed in the elements of the Lord’s Table offer us rest in who and Whose we are as well as declaring the defeat of all Pharoahs both real and imagined!

In Christ,
Cameron