Dear Family at CCC,

This Sunday we will have the opportunity to partake of the Lord’s Table as we worship the Lord and hear from His word in Mark 1:14-20. In this passage of Mark’s Gospel, we will encounter Jesus, the Son of God, who uniquely calls people to be His disciples. The Table will be a great help to us as we ponder this continuing call upon our own lives. The broken bread and poured out cup, taken in faith, will signify to our understanding and seal upon our hearts, the reality that Jesus has called us, not to a new ideology or a new law, but to Himself; He has made us His own through His broken body and poured out blood, broken and shed on the cross for our salvation.

Jesus’s simple but profound call, follow me, was as radical in the lifetime of Mark as it is in our own day. Many have been the people who have issued calls to follow this or that way of living, or this or that idea. This was the way of the rabbis of Jesus’s day. But Jesus’s call is different; it is a totalizing call to follow Him. In his commentary on Mark, Robert Stein helpfully emphasizes this crucial distinction:

“Unlike the rabbis, Jesus is the one who initiates the invitation to follow him, not the disciples; and unlike rabbinic disciples, Jesus's followers are not called to follow the study of the law but to follow Him. As a result, Jesus's followers were soon called Christians (Acts 11:26) because they were not so much followers of a particular teaching, sacrament, hermeneutical theory, or ethic but of a person—Jesus Christ. The object of their faith and hope was Jesus Christ, the son of God (1:1).

As you prepare to partake of the Table this Sunday, spend time giving thanks to the Lord that Jesus came to call you to follow Him, gave you grace to respond to that call, and empowers you to daily obey His call upon your life. Ask the Lord to use this means of grace to increase your faith in Jesus as the Son of God who is worthy of your total commitment to Him. Pray that the Spirit would continue to make us people who follow Jesus in the growing knowledge, joy, and love of who and Whose we are.

In Christ,
Robby