The Daily Word

Today we shall be meeting together to remember the Lord Jesus Christ, His Person, His Deity, His Humanity, His Sacrifice all symbolised in the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup. There will probably be less than 20 of us at that Service, but we are only a small fraction of the total number of Christians who will likewise be remembering Him, in different symbolic fashion maybe, but hopefully expressing thanks and worship from their hearts for His incarnation which has had the most dramatic effect on their lives.

There would really be little point in attending a so-called Communion service unless Jesus Christ has saved us. It would be a meaningless exercise and could even be dishonouring to God, yet even at the initiation of this Service, by the Lord Himself, in that Upper Room, before He went to Calvary, there was one there who did not want to recognise Jesus as a spiritual Saviour but wanted some form of political and physical revolution. Also even for those of us who have experienced God’s salvation from sin, may we be led to focus only on Him. May our hearts and minds be cleared of any other concerns and for that little hour may we pour out our praise and worship from our hearts to glorify God’s only begotten Son, our Saviour.

I wish I knew what I know now about Jesus and my salvation BUT could have been on earth when Jesus was on earth. The words that are recorded in the Bible of the Lord Jesus are perhaps just a fraction of the words He spoke but what is recorded is so profound and inspiring that there was no wonder He drew crowds to follow Him.

The fourth Beatitude leads us on in our Christian life and is an ambition we should surely follow. “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled”. The words ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst’ are very strong in meaning. They are used when someone is literally dying of hunger and thirst. They hark back to David’s psalm when he could say, ‘As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God’.

Worldly ambition is for wealth, power and prosperity, but Jesus knows, and we now know, that the only thing that satisfies our soul’s deepest longing is Jesus Himself, who IS our righteousness! He could say, “I am the bread of life” and when He met the woman of Samaria at the well He could talk to her and say that the Living Water he could bring would mean that that we would never thirst again, that we would never want anything else but Jesus.

We sing, ‘Knowing you, Jesus, …. there is no greater thing’ How true is that in each of our lives?

Article written by Brian Preston, Elder @SFGH Church