A Passionate Sacrament
July 1, 2023 2023-07-01 8:02A Passionate Sacrament
Revlee A passionate sacrament
1 Corinthians 11:26
26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. (NIV)
I am not radically passionate about the Super Bowl. I’m sure it’s because my team is never in it…at least not since the ’90s. Yes, I am a Cowboys fan. I watch the Super Bowl. It is entertaining to me. I even choose a team to root for, but my heart is not really in it. I enjoy it, but with dulled devotion.
We can easily slip into the same place with the prescribed sacraments. There are things we do religiously that we appreciate. We know God wants us to participate, but our hearts are not in it. If we are not careful, The Lord’s Supper will become a passionless ritual.
Paul is teaching us in this passage that this sacrament should evoke within us a passion that proclaims the death of Christ. Eating the bread and drinking the wine of Christ must be done in such a way that we burst forth in our spirit with overwhelming thanksgiving because Christ died for us that we might have life.
Do we not know? Do we forget? Are we so satiated with the pleasures of this world that we struggle to enter into a spiritual place when we partake of communion?
If so, perhaps we are not following the command of Christ. It’s possible we are not truly remembering God sending the Holy Spirit to come upon a virgin that He might become flesh. We don’t think to really remember this man, who was God and knew me before I was conceived and my sin, surrendering His body to my deserved castigation.
Have the copious scenes of excoriated flesh on our screens anesthetized us from grasping the love required for Jesus to be repeatedly struck only to stand and wait for another lacerating blow ripping skin from the bone? Are we too far removed from Biblical times to correlate his crucifixion to our sin? Yet that is what He did for us. It was personal for Christ because He has known and loved those He died for since the beginning. In His divinity, He knew every person intimately and He died for each one of us. When we partake of the Lord’s supper, let us remember and passionately proclaim what He did for us personally.
Prayer: Let all my religious movement be done with passion whether it be praise, worship, prayer, fasting, hearing of the Word, baptism, or the Lord’s Supper. Please help me. Amen.
