This meal serves to order our piety rightly. It is like a wise guide, leading you along mountain passes that are unknown to you. In an age where unbridled emotions are exalted, it might seem that blazing your own path up the mountainside is more holy, or noble, or “spirit-led”. But trying to hack a path through the brush is just a speed run to frustration, discouragement, and disillusionment.
So look upon this bread and wine and consider that God serves up piping hot grace to you each and every week. He knows what sufferings await you. In fact, He has lovingly hand-selected your future trials. He has good works for you to do, and often those good works are in the midst of profound difficulty, sorrow, and even suffering. But rather than leaving you to fend for yourself in trackless forests and marshlands, He brings you here to His table each Lord’s Day. Here is a waypoint where regular nourishment and refreshment is given to you.
Nourishment to remain faithful when compromise is all around you. Nourishment to fend off wild beasts of temptation. Nourishment to be strengthened to be like the Good Shepherd and deliver prey from the mouth of the lion. In the course of your life you will be tempted to despair, fear, lust, envy, self-exaltation, and self-deprecation. But each week the Father feeds you with Christ. Soon there will be some peculiar providence that you must face, and while you may never have ventured through it before, your Heavenly Father assures you that here, as displayed in this sacrament, is grace upon grace for you.
In all of this, God has taken a kindly care to guide and guard your piety. He feeds you, in order to supply you with all you need to honor Him.
So come in faith and welcome to Jesus Christ
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