Dear Family at Christ Community,

    As we conclude the Advent series in Luke and begin a New Year, we have the blessed opportunity to celebrate the Lord’s Table together as family. The broken bread and cup overflowing remind us of the death and resurrection of Christ as well as granting us hope for the future. Our hope is born of our ability to walk in newness of life in the New Covenant between the now and the not yet. We also find our hope in the return of Christ when all things will be made new. In all of this, we are reminded of our inability to bring any of it to pass without union with Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
    In preparing for the Lord’s Table, contemplate this quote from R. Kent Hughes in Luke, Volume 1: That You May Know the Truth:

God did not and does not come to the self-sufficient. This is a truth that we must remind ourselves of again and again. Christianity wrongly understood gives some an illusive sense of personal spiritual adequacy. Even the born again can wrongly turn spiritual advances into prideful self-sufficiency—a sense that one has arrived. We must continually guard against this within ourselves. Our only adequacy is in Christ (cf. 2 Corinthians 3:5)!

The elements of the table declare to us our total inadequacy in bearing the weight of our shame and guilt due the full justice of God’s wrath. The bread and the cup also proclaim the full adequacy of Christ to take on the burden of sin and death so that we would be delivered to newness of life!

    Take time to ask the Holy Spirit to expose the places where you self-sufficient and think yourself spiritually adequate in and of yourself. Repent of taking credit for your spiritual advances and being prideful about your righteousness. Give thanks for the adequacy of Christ to broker the fullness of your salvation through his death, resurrection, intercession, and eventual return. Pray for those who don’t yet take joy in the person and work of Jesus as their Savior.

In Christ,
Cameron